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Recent Graduate Level Subjects
In some cases, a second course number is listed. If it does not have a J, that second number is used for the undergraduate level of the same subject.
This class will be constructed as a lecture-discussion, the purpose being to engage important theoretical issues while simultaneously studying their continuing historical significance. To enhance discussion, there will be three debates to be held in class. Each student will be required to participate in three. Each student will also be required to write three short papers. Class participation is essential and will be factored into the final grade. The sequence of topics that will be introduced cannot be absolutely predetermined, but some of the primary issues that will be addressed are, as they relate to architecture, the role of pedagogy as the discipline of teaching, the profession as the discipline of practice, and the role of history as the discipline of knowledge. The discussions and debates are intended to demonstrate differences of opinion and enhance awareness of the consequences that these differences had in specific historical contexts. Other issues that will be most probably be discussed are theories of beauty, social criticism, light, memory, and landscape. The course will portray the history of theory neither as the history of architectural theory exclusively, nor as a series of prepackaged static pronouncements, but as part of a broader set of issues that with an active history must be continually probed and queried. Required for M.Arch. students.
Studies select examples of palatial, residential, commercial, and landscape architecture in the Islamic World. Examines the formation and developments of architectural traditions, their possible models, their survival, their regional transformations, and the various influences at different historical junctions, all within the framework of the general Islamic culture. Open to both graduates and undergraduates.
"From remotest antiquity, during six thousand years of the world's history from the time of the earliest pagoda to that of the Cathedral of Cologne, the human race has employed architecture as its chief means of writing," proclaimed Victor Hugo in his Notre Dame de Paris, "until it was overthrown by printing." The issue of meaning in architecture has occupied many architects, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists and has produced a whole range of opinions from architecture as an meaning-free enterprise to architecture as both the arena and product of the interplay of cultural, social, and historical constraints. This course is an exercise in evaluating the historical and sociocultural roles of architecture as the carrier of meanings: intentional and contrived, individual and multi-layered, conscious and unconscious, as well as contested and even contradictory meanings. It uses a number of important examples from the repertoire of architecture past and present (with a focus on Islamic architecture) to explore traditions, transformations, and inventions in architecture as a conveyer of messages that transcend the stylistic, formal, and iconographic domains and reflect some of the political, ideological, social, and cultural concerns of the builders, patrons, and users both synchronically and diachronically. The examples range from architectural motifs to single monuments to types of buildings to entire cities. The seminar is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students with some knowledge of Islamic architecture. Each session will be divided into two parts: a lecture and a discussion period. The range of themes considered will depend on the class dynamics and students interests. The course includes weekly reading and writing assignments and requires active participation in discussions. A research paper is to be first presented in class and then submitted at the end of the term. Topics should be decided in consultation with the instructors.
The city is a major agent in the evolution of Islamic concepts of polity and society. Islam was originally formulated in an urban environment, the city of Yathrib renamed The City, al-Madina, by the Prophet Muhammad. This initial archetype was modified or superseded over time by a series of models that were either adopted from the various cultures with which Muslims came in contact or developed in response to new conditions. Thus we have early cities that took up a military camp layout, Umayyad, Fatimid, and Andalusian cities that preserved the Greco-Roman model, and Abbasid cities that evolved out of an Asian ideal type of a con centrically arranged city. But the notion of madina seems never to have lost its paradigmatic prerogative, particularly in the writing of utopian jurists and philosophers of the medieval period. Historians and geographers, on the other hand, described actual cities and recorded the changes they witnessed in them, although they seldom attempted to contextualize these changes. When they did, they offered historical, sociological, and ecological interpretations, and very rarely religious or idealist ones.
This seminar focuses on urbanism in the classical age (7th – 13th century), when the dominant polity in the Islamic world, the caliphate, was still ecumenical in its outlook and aspiration. Through the examination of primary texts and architectural/archaeological data, we will study the formation and evolution of various prototypical cities. We will uncover their heterogeneous genealogies and hybrid qualities and analyze how diverse cultural alignments and various urban traditions have shaped their forms and structures over time. We will probe how Muslims scholars conceptualized, understood, and represented these cities in their geographic, philosophical, and religious texts both as historical phenomena and as theoretical and legal constructs.
We will also reconstruct the history of the concept of the Islamic City from the first remarks of nineteenth-century Orientalists and Muslim reformers to the contemporary academic and polemical formulations. We will critically review the literature on the Islamic City and evaluate its two general abstractions, the structural, informed by a Weberian notion of the ideal-type, and the formal. Finally, we will consider how a rather essentialist concept based on a set of unchanging morphological and legal criteria attributed to Islam tout court came to dominate the study of cities in Islamic history.
The course is open to qualified undergraduates. Students are required to report orally and in writing on the weekly readings and to develop a research paper to be presented in class at the end of the term.
Cairo is the quintessential Islamic city. Founded in 634 at the strategic head of the Nile Delta, the city evolved from a military outpost to the seat of the ambitious Fatimid caliphate, which flourished between the 10th and 12th century. Its most spectacular age, however, was the Mamluk period (1250-1517), when it became the uncontested center of a resurgent Islam and acquired an architectural character that symbolized the image of the Islamic city for centuries to come. Between the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth century, Cairo was reduced to an Ottoman provincial capital. Then, it witnessed a short yet ebullient renaissance under the reformist Muhammad ‘Ali Pasha (1805-48) followed by an extended stretch of oscillation between neglect and modernization projects that is still with us today. The resulting urban and architectural chaos was exacerbated in the twentieth century by acute problems of rapid expansion, population explosion, and underdevelopment.
Cairo, however, still shines as a cultural and political center in its three spheres of influence: the Arab world, Africa, and the Islamic world. Moreover, many of its monuments (456 registered by the 1951 Survey of the Islamic Monuments of Cairo) still stand, although they remain largely unknown to the world’s architectural community and their numbers are dwindling at an exceedingly alarming pace.
In this course we will recount the history of Cairo. We will review its urban and architectural developments and interpret them in light of the cultural, political, and social history of the country, the region, and the world. We will also examine its architectural types and urban patterns to see how they relate to their wider Islamic and Mediterranean contexts.
A number of discussions are scheduled to further address critical architectural and urban issues. Students are encouraged to contribute to these sessions as part of their requirements. Three short essays (7-10 pages each) will be assigned. Graduate students may substitute a research paper for one or more of the essays.
This seminar presents a critical review of literature on Islamic architecture in the last two centuries and analyzes its historical and theoretical frameworks. It challenges the tacit assumptions and biases of standard studies of Islamic architecture and addresses historiographic and critical questions concerning how knowledge of a field is defined, produced, and reproduced.
The seminar focuses on a number of issues that have emerged recently both in academe and in the architectural profession. First is the relationship between architecture and culture, a crucial query that has become one of the most debated issues in architectural and art historical circles. Second is the definition of Islamic architecture, a discursive category embraced by a devout audience but skeptically accepted by academics, which has never had a forum where it can be scholarly and critically examined without proscribed historical or ideological limits. This is especially true in the case of its presumed temporal boundaries: the polemical discontinuity from late antique to Islamic architecture, and the forced rupture between modern architecture in the Islamic world and its historical genealogy. The course aims to rectify the situation by expanding its purview to include both moments. But it definitely does not aim to essentialize Islamic architecture. Instead it emphasizes the cultural diversity within the Islamic context, which produced the various architectural traditions that dot the historical and geographic map of the Islamic world.
The course includes weekly reading and writing assignments and requires active participation in discussions. A research paper is to be first presented in class and then submitted at the end of the term. Topics are limited to in-depth studies of architects’ careers, professional developments, texts, representations, and scholarly traditions in the Islamic context. They should be decided in consultation with the instructor by the end of the third week of the semester. A short abstract and preliminary bibliography should be submitted by the fourth week. The required texts are available at the Coop and area bookshops. All other readings will be available on reserve in Rotch.
This seminar will look at how Heritage has been constructed in the debates of the architectural cultures in the modern and contemporary Islamic world. Why and how has heritage come to name a cluster of issues and values that galvanizes such strong positions and is invoked in such decisive actions, including the reshaping of cities, the dislocation of populations, and large investments of capital. What is the object of heritage? How does heritage relate to the historical imagination, the visible past, the construction of identity, and modernization? How does heritage intervene in such practices as museum building, archaeology, and preservation? What is its relationship to colonial regimes, nation states, and the global tourism industry? When is it “authentic” and when is it contested? What is its relationship to memory and spectacularization? When and how are aspects of "heritage" erased? The course will combine theoretical readings on the construction and exhibition of heritage with the critical examination of specific case studies of projects, sites and ideas. Required for S.M.Arch.S. students of the Aga Khan Program.
With a specific focus on orientalist traditions in architecture, art, and scholarship, this seminar examines how politics and ideology inform the construction and reproduction of knowledge. During the semester we will explore selected historical cases of cross-cultural encounters between Europe and the "Orient" from Antiquity to the present. We will analyze particular events, texts, projects, and images, which have been influential in shaping European representations of the "Orient." We will also investigate how opposing and revisionist "Orientals" similarly appropriate culture and history in the making of national identities.
The discussions will be informed by the recent literature in cultural criticism and the growing interest in hybrid identities and multiculturalism, which challenge both the traditional orientalist and the nationalist counter-orientalist narratives. The objective of the seminar is to help the participants gain a historically grounded awareness of the complexities of cultural identities, always contesting the representations that claim to define them.
The course includes weekly reading and writing assignments and requires active participation in discussions. A research paper is to be first presented in class and then submitted at the end of the term. Topics should be decided in consultation with the instructors by the end of the third week of the semester. A short abstract and preliminary bibliography should be submitted by the fourth week.
This graduate seminar addresses the critical issues involved in the practice of preserving architectural forms from the past. Concepts such as "Tradition," "Heritage," "Patrimony" and "Monument" are examined in the context of debates on memory, the historical imagination, the variable meaning of the visible past, imperial and national identities. We will also consider the institutions and professionalization of the practice of preservation. Case studies from the West, as well as the non-West, range from interventions into urban areas to abandoned settlements, to archeaological sites, to museological and exhibitionary spaces. These issues are considered in the pre-modern and modern periods, as well as in relation to the contemporary global tourist industry and its implications for the conceptualization and the commodification of "traditional" environments and architectural "masterpieces."
This course discusses the evolution of architecture in the eastern Arab world (also known as the Arab Mashriq) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its geographic scope emphasizes Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Fertile Crescent.
The course examines the production of certain works of architecture in the region as creative undertakings that address specific functional programs and physical givens ranging from technological conditions to climatic factors. It also presents the architecture of the region within the context of prevailing social, cultural, economic, and political forces. It therefore links that architecture to the volatile conditions that have defined the evolution of the region during the period under consideration, and that have given the region considerable (and some would argue disproportionate) weight within the context of international politics. The course consequently connects the architecture of the region to various interrelated issues such as Westernization, modernization, and the relationship between the architect and the state.
Although the course is partly thematic in its emphasis, it also is a survey course that provides an overview of the development of architecture in the region during the modern period. A major challenge in putting together such a survey is that the amount of published documentation available regarding this subject is incomplete, sporadic, and very often disseminated only locally. In contrast to more established chronologically and geographically defined fields of architectural history, where taxonomic systems are more or less established, and a corpus of works of architecture representing each field generally is agreed upon, we do not have any common ground from which to begin an inquiry addressing the architecture of the Arab Mashriq during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This course therefore presents points of reference that help develop an autonomous field of study out of the works of architecture it examines.
Finally, this course emphasizes on one level bringing together the local knowledge on architecture available for the various geographic components of the Arab Mashriq and developing that knowledge into a regional history. The course also shows that the architecture of the region is more intimately connected to international architectural developments than generally is perceived. Over the past century, various internationally acclaimed architects have carried out designs (both built and un-built) in the region. These include, among others, Auguste Perret, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer, Alvar Aalto, Gordon Bunshaft, Paul Rudolph, Kenzo Tange, Robert Venturi, Ricardo Bofill, Michael Graves, Jean Nouvel, Stephen Holl, and Zaha Hadid.
This courses places issues of gender at the center of explorations of space and architecture. We will work with theoretical and multi-disciplinary texts to consider gender in relation to particular architectural sites, projects and ideas. The core debates on women and gender in art and architectural history are introduced. In-depth analyses of selected works of art and architecture from various historical contexts highlight issues including gendered practices of space, vision and power, masculinity, and cyberspace. Special emphasis is placed on the experience of women and men in Third World contexts. No background in art or architectural history required.
The architecture of Italy of the 15th and 16th centuries served a society in transition, one that clung obstinately to tradition at the same time as institutions of all kinds, and particularly the state, were reorgranized at a fundamental level. Designers created the forms to fit the new situation by looking back beyond the immediate past to a fabled Italian prehistory in Classical Antiquity. The two centuries under discussion in the class are a period of discovery. What the founder of the modern classical style, Filippo Brunelleschi, thought to be Classical was the Romanesque architecture of the Tuscan 12th century. In succeeding generations architects partnered with scholars to unravel the unending mystery of Roman architecture. Advances in knowledge could quickly become new architecture for the present. Yet the present could never reproduce that imperial, and pagan past. The relationship between ancient model and modern invention had many layers of transformation.
Renaissance architecture was an urban phenomenon. Built for a cultural elite centered in cities, its larger role was to give a face to social distinctions within the crowded urban environment. It was so successful that the visual display came to dominate all other forms of representation, establishing a hierarchy that has been revived in our own time. Architecture's success as a medium of information was only possible because of the potential for nuance that distinguishes the classical style as developed in the Renaissance from all other traditions of European architecture. The speaking architecture of the eighteenth century had its origin in the buildings and design theory of the Renaissance.
While known most for its development of the rhetorical potential of architecture, the Renaissance was also an age of engineers. The biggest domes since antiquity and the invention military defenses to counter the newly invented gunpowder weapons are a few its achievements. In the realm of practice the Renaissance created the profession of architect, distinct from the day laborer and master craftsman. It also transformed the practice of architectural drawing, turning an exercise in geometry into a medium of expression and invention.
These are some of the topics that this lecture and discussion class will address. Students will take a mid term and final and write a paper of medium length.
4.638
Advanced Study in Renaissance Architecture--Drawings and Numbers: Five Centuries of Digital Design
Precision in building was pursued and achieved, both in theory and in practice, well before the rise of modern science and technology. This applies to the classical tradition as well as to medieval architecture, and even more so to architectural drawings and design from the Renaissance on. This seminar will focus on the role of geometry as the primary tool for quantification in classical architecture, and on the shift from geometry to numeracy that characterizes Renaissance architectural theory.
The precocious rise of computing and algorism in Italian sixteenth-century architectural design was followed by a more conservative adherence to traditional geometry in most European countries, and the battle between geometry and numeracy continued unabated throughout most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, generating much controversy and some odd and little known architectural whimsicalities (including machines for automatic drawing). This survey of the increasing complementarity of drawing and algorism in early-modern architectural theory and practice retraces the archaeology of contemporary digital imaging and computer-based design.
4.638
Advanced Study in Renaissance Architecture —
Historic Cities in the Modern Age
The purpose of this seminar is to examine the processes that characterize the transformation of historic cities into modern ones. We will focus on Rome where the vestiges of the past and its reuses, the fragmentation (in areas subject to conflicting religious and secular authorities), and even the topography coalesced to magnify the issues arising in the process of modernization and rendered them easier to observe. In this city in particular, urban history provides a unique tool to understand the structure and development of factions of power.
We will trace the development of the city from the early modern period – when the formation of centralized states fostered sophisticated ideological uses of architecture and urbanism – to the transformations that occurred when the city became the capital of the newly formed Italian State in 1870. We will conclude with an examination of the interventions that characterized the Fascist regime. Topics to be explored will include, among others, the ceremonial uses of urban locations; the systems of representation of the city; the preservation and adaptation of historic sites to the requirements of a capital city; the influence of topography on defensive and supply requirements; and the influence of the symbolic value of sites on the construction of buildings.
Parallel to understanding the development of this city, the seminar will seek to explore the methods of urban history and outline broad comparisons with other capital cities. Students are encouraged to propose topics of research that might be more closely linked to their own interests. The 17th-century transformations of Amsterdam or London, for example, or the 19th-century interventions in Paris, or those in Jerusalem after the 1967 war, are all equally acceptable topics of research.
The course includes weekly reading assignments and requires active participation in discussions. A research paper is to be presented in class and submitted at the end of the term. Topics should be decided in consultation with the instructor by the end of the third week of the semester. A short abstract and preliminary bibliography should be submitted by the fifth week
Cambridge University Press will publish late this year, or early in 2004, a volume devoted to St. Peter’s in Rome. Professor William Tronzo, Tulane University, the general editor, has assembled a group of scholars to write chapters on various potions and periods of the history of St. Peter’s from its foundation by Emperor Constantine to the recent past. Those contributing to the volume include, among others, Glen Bowersock, Antonio Iacobini, dale Kinney, Christof Thoenes, Irving Lavin and Richard Etlin. The volume contains much on the late antique and medieval periods including references to restorations of the site prior to the construction of the 4th century structure, but relatively little original visual documentation. Drawings made of the Constantinian Basilica in the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries provide some indications of the architecture, monuments and decoration—sculpture, mosaics and paintings.
Students will be expected to read the entire volume, select an aspect of the architecture of St. Peter’s that appears to be sufficiently challenging and interesting, assess the chapter or section covering that aspect relative to the bibliography cited by the author and possibly to more recent publications (the volume has had an extended gestation period). Three or four weeks into the term participants will have focused on a moment in the history of the building, a drawing or significant group of drawings, some aspect of the relationship between Old St. Peter’s and New St. Peter’s as it was being constructed over the 16th century, an as yet unexplained or unnoticed anomaly, or other topic capable of absorbing the student’s interest and time for the remainder of the term. Short presentations of work in progress will be followed by a searching paper due at the end of the term.
The explosive growth of urban and metropolitan centers during the nineteenth century alternately fueled and was fueled by fundamental transformations in social, cultural and industrial organization. Corresponding innovations in transportation and communication facilitated the extreme changes in the scale, complexity and tempo of modern urban life, which was marked by the successive icons of technological organization (the railroad, telegraph and telephone), social organization (the crowd, the mass, and the figures of the flâneur and flâneuse as well as the detective) and visual organization (the panorama, photograph and cinema).
Of all the icons of modernity, cinema has arguably proven to be the most comprehensive, versatile and long-lived with contemporary assessments emphasizing the importance attached to cinema and the cinematic experience (whether in positive or negative terms) by early modern critics and theorists. Our interest in this discourse is to identify the points of intersection with architectural and urban discourse, examining the fundamental interrelationship of cinema and the metropolis. More than the simple association of film sets with utopian or dystopian visions of modernity, the emphasis of this seminar will be in understanding cinematic representations as not merely presenting and documenting conditions of modernity, but in their role as centrally active agents in the construction of modern vision and, ultimately, modernity itself.
Beginning with an overview of developments in the late nineteenth century, we will concentrate on the years of 1915-1950; a period spanning the representational idioms of the early serials, expressionism, the Weimar “street” and “cross-section’ films associated with the New Objectivity, early Hollywood spectaculars, neo-realism and film noir. This period witnessed important technological developments enabling the »unbound camera« (entfesselte Camera) to extend the “unbinding of vision,” interjecting itself directly into the modern urban milieu. This period also encompasses the profound change from silent films to sound, the rise and fall of the great movie palaces as sites of modern spectacle and consumption and, resulting from the political and social upheavals of 1930's Europe, the dissemination of European modes of representation to America where earlier celebrations of modernity were transformed into often harsh critiques of modernity's impact on the life of the modern metropolis and its inhabitants. We will close the semester with a reflection on the role of contemporary modes of architectural representation, which, in their reliance on three-dimensional animations, increasingly parallel other forms of cinematic representation.
Readings for this seminar will be diverse and extensive and you will be expected to purchase 4-5 books that will be listed as required reading on the syllabus. Other readings will be on reserve in the library or will be sent to you as PDF files. We will also be viewing films or excerpts of films in class and these, along with a selection of other films, will also be placed on reserve for you.
This seminar will investigate the enormous significance of photography in post WW II art and culture. A single example of photography's force in shaping both the form and critical discourse of art is evident in conceptual art and its legacy. Roland Barthes, whose essays on photography, advertising, and the "real" are seminal, is among those critics whose works we will study in-depth. In the course of the seminar, we will also analyze how artists, including Diane Arbus, Richard Prince, Carrie Mae Weems, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman and others, as well as selected graphic designers and video artists, have deployed photography either to produce the real (the "reality effect") or to dismantle it.
This course is devised as a survey of major artists and aesthetic movements from Neoclassicism to Post-impressionism with an emphasis on painting and the emergence of the avant-garde in 19th century France. Lectures and readings will strike a balance between visual analysis, critical debates, and issues of class, gender, and national identity in order to assess the connection of works of art to shifting historical contexts.
Our starting point will be the eclipse of the Enlightenment and the rise of Romanticism. We will consider how the creative ambitions of artists like David, Goya, and Géricault were transformed by a growing awareness of public reception, its impact on artistic reputations, and the possible critiques of politics and society that might be mounted through painting. From there we will turn to modernism and modernity, and the ways in which capitalism, industrialization, and big city life offered up new subject matter for avant-garde artists like Courbet, Manet, and the Impressionists. Topics include: art and the revolutionary public; mythologies of the romantic artist; colonialism and its image; the demise of history painting; the salon, the museum and the art critic; eroticism and the female nude; and the spectacle of modern life.
General study of modern architecture as responses to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Begins with the archaeological digs into a classical past (Rome, Greece, Egypt) as well as exploratory travels into the “others” of Europe to examine the modern origins of architectural history itself within the profession. Ends with the contemporary era of “globalization” and the politics of “development” in North and South and its relevance to self-titled trans-national practitioners such as Rem Koolhaas. The course will subsequently reprise the history of architecture through its use of contemporary ideologies, such as organicism and technology, its provenance within administrative and legal structures, the changing conditions of the practice in response to economic conditions and structures of production, and their role in shaping and understanding social and aesthetic processes at large. Topics cover a wide range of debates on colour, drawing, ornament, structure, construction, material, inhabitation, gender, class, race, nationalism, etc. in architecture. In setting up these constraints, the course will also focus on aspects of architectural theory, historiography, and design in their complicity and resistance with texts of power, specifically with regard to the immense transformations wrought in different cultural contexts by colonial, industrial and post-industrial expansions, and the complicity of the ideas of European modernism in securing these arenas. The course therefore seeks to establish new conceptual relationships between canonical themes of modernity framed within a certain ”Europe” in relation to the emergence of a global modernity in the world at large. Explores modern architectural history and buildings through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas. Required for M.Arch. students.
This subject interrogates the specular regimes invoked in exhibition: world's fairs, trade shows, imperial expositions, contemporary installation art and the infusion of the cinematic into 'art' and display. Course readings will focus on display practices from the 18th century to the present, and will use various theoretical tools (Marxist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic) to understand how modes of presentation transform visual conventions and produce viewing subjects.
The study of "Visual Culture" draws on art, architecture, and mass culture; it utilizes interdisciplinary tools from art and architectural history, literary studies, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and political theory (among other disciplinary domains). This subject will employ these theoretical tools to examine specific areas of visual culture, engaging both built and imaginary worlds as people construct and represent them.
At some point during the 17th- and 18th- centuries, land became landscape. This happened in the same movement by which natural philosophy transmutated into political economy. The course will look theories of agricultural cultivation and landscape from the 17th century onwards, beginning with the rediscovery of Longinus and the English literature on the sublime surrounding Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, especially in the passage of notions of gardening from the French “classical” garden to the English country estate. These aesthetic tracts will be compared with economic theories propounded by the Mercantilists and Physiocrats, and their eventual subsumption by the theories of Adam Smith. The course will concentrate on different case studies, from the picturesque movements in the English country estates of the 18th century (Kent, Bridgeman, Walpole, Brown, Payne Knight, Repton, Loudon), the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 in Bengal and the Survey of India, the 1785 Land Tenure Survey in the United States, and their enduring effects in the understanding of land and nature in the next two centuries. In the last case, the United States, it has been commonly noted that aesthetic notions came to characterize the very direction of technological advances in the nineteenth century. The course will thus look at the critical ways in which aesthetic notions of the “sublime” came to characterize an entire perceptive matrix whose effects were felt in the spheres of political economy, administration, land tenure, and mapping. Readings will include both primary and secondary texts.
This subject focuses on the theory and criticism of 20th-century Western art, through a close analysis of the American art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg was the most influential art writer in the United States, active from the late 1930s until his death in 1994. His career thus spanned most of the 20th century, claiming dominance for abstraction, and achieving the global success of American abstract painting (in part due to his own proselytizing efforts) for much of that time. Primary source materials will be the critical texts of Greenberg, but we will be also looking at his sources (avowed and unacknowledged), as well as artworks, artists, curators, and art historians affected by his work. One major research paper on a topic of the student’s choice; class presentations, looking assignments, no exam.
This seminar will examine the relationship between architecture, consumerism, and popular culture in the United States and Europe in the middle decades of the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the development of new building types and the growth of suburbs. Focus on critical readings of texts, and on case studies. Discussion topics include: shopping, store design, and merchandising; representations of modernity in photography and film; urban amusements; leisure and travel; mass-production and new technologies; the modern interior; gender, sexuality, and fashion.
‘Cinema has always been closer to architecture than to theatre’ -- in his philosophy of film, Gilles Deleuze elaborates this principle in an original way beyond an analysis of medium or media or the issues of set design and documenting ‘modernity’. He explores how introducing duration into images changes the whole problem of how to think with images, what is to have an idea in cinema, initiating a long series of encounters with architecture and the arts as well as sciences, which, undergoing a mutation after World War II, would confront new problems of information and control. The recent popularity of film and video installation in global exhibition-spaces allows us to put these ideas to the test. Do they offer new possibilities for time and movement in ‘thinking with images’; and what are their implications for architecture today?
Seminar on the history and the theory of cities as through the lens of destruction and rebuilding. Discussion seminar that especially addresses problems in architectural and urban history research.
Studies theoretical and historiographical works pertaining to the fields of architecture and art. Members of seminar pursue work designed to examine their own presuppositions and methods. Required of HTC Ph.D. and S.M.Arch.S. students.
The techniques of topographic survey are an invention of the Renaissance. Alberti wrote about them in the middle of the 15th century and Leonardo made a plan that seems to be based on them in 1502. It took longer for geometric survey to be widely understood and even longer for the drawings based on them to become part of either design practice or the administration of the environment. By the mid-seventeenth century something like modern practice can be observed in the surviving drawings for urban design projects. This seminar examines the character of early surveys, they way they are used for design and the way design changed as a result. It will look at some medieval cities where planning interventions are recorded only in textual documents and at Renaissance and Baroque cities, particularly Rome, where graphic evidence is plentiful. It will also touch on these topics: Medieval and Renaissance architectural drawing, the invention of survey, early maps of cities, practical geometry and military design, city agencies responsible for the physical fabric of cities, and, finally, the graphic documents connected to the planning of new projects.
Students will prepare presentations (M.Arch.) and a paper (S.M.Arch.S. and PhD that may address topics from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance or urban planning of later periods, including the 19th and 20th centuries, that are well documented by surviving surveys and drawings.
This subject examines selected topics in the formation of the physical environment of cities in Europe, and particularly Italy, from the Roman Empire through the nineteenth century. It treats a wide range of interventions from the planning by government of entire cities to the direction given by traditional building practice in otherwise loosely regulated environments. It pays attention to individual buildings but views them within the broad context of their urban setting and institutional base. It examines the legislation that defines and protects public interest and the professions that specialize in the design of the physical city. It analyzes the form of cities in relation to the social and political forces that contend within the communities that inhabit them. It pays special attention to the ways in which design articulates and enriches urban life.
Lectures and discussion of reading assignments. Graduate students taking the subject for 9 units of credit and undergraduates (12 units of undergraduate credit) will write two short papers, one discussing reading, the other on the relationship of a building chosen by the student to the city of which it is part. There will also be a mid-term quiz and a final. Graduate students taking the subject for 12 units of credit will take the exams and write a more substantial term paper.
Course looks at key shifts and debates in architectural theory and practice over the last four decades. Students are expected to develop critical skills regarding the language, form, social implications, theoretical provenances and ramifications, issues of cultural politics. Required for M.Arch. students.
This seminar explores building and its meanings. It approaches 19th- and 20th-century builders, strategies, structures, and materials from a range of perspectives. More broadly, the seminar examines arguments about the ways in which society shapes and views technological processes and how these processes shape society. The seminar is organized around three themes:
Building Constructions: How do participants and observers interpret and portray building? Topics include the relationship between the construction of physical and conceptual bridges and boundaries; the building of infrastructure and nations; and scholarly and popular portrayals of construction, including symbols such as the Eiffel Tower and MIT Beaver.
Inventing Building: How and why do technologists develop building methods and materials? The creation of building processes, the industrialization of construction, and the professionalization of designers will be explored via structures and materials such as bridges, fences, aqueducts, houses, skyscrapers, lumber, and concrete.
Building Lives: What is the role of building in the lives of individuals and in society? Topics include building, blocks, and learning; the construction of urban highways and race; construction, labor, and capitalism.
Each structure is evidence of a process and context that has disappeared. This seminar therefore will engage us in capturing a history of construction. We will explore the choices that shaped the development of building and the local and international effects of these choices. Our construction of building history will lead us to probe cultural/technological myths relating to invention, evolution, revolution, progress, material hierarchies, physical size, and national character. Through specific building processes, we will examine opposing classifications such as process vs. product, practice vs. theory, craft vs. industry, and pre-industrial vs. industrial vs. post-industrial.
We will employ concepts from humanities- and technologies-based disciplines, including history, engineering, architecture, sociology, art, economics. Students will be encouraged to research in areas related to their own interests.
Modern art emerged in an age of unprecedented nationalism and imperial expansion. Students study how international modernism interacted with the concept of "nation" and how contemporary discourse concerning globalism changes that dynamic. Seminar attendance, visits to art museums, and a research paper required.
Subject focuses on a genre that has dominated contemporary art for the last decade. "Installation art" produces environments rather than portable "art objects;" we will study this genre from a historical perspective, as a rejection of the modernist aesthetic of purity and a willful complication of the neutral white gallery space. This site-specific art is also seen to develop previous exhibition models such as natural history displays or merchandising conventions, and to attempt synaesthetic or alternative sensory models in an age of body fragmentation. Subject meets with 4.672, but graduate students are expected to complete additional work.
This course will study the question of Global Architecture from the point of view of producing a textbook on that subject. This is no theoretical enterprise, but an actual project to be published. The book aims to replace the textbooks of Kostoff and Trachtenberg, which are clearly outdated in their approaches. In this seminar we will closely at the question of modernity and at the time frame 1600 to present.
Members of the class will participate in framing the topic, but they will also hopefully produce actual pieces of research and writing. All such work will be acknowledged in the book. Students will thus gain invaluable experience in various domains of architecture and architectural history.
The course will be run in the form of a writing seminar. Students will present their work at each session. The final product will be “piece” or “chapter” in the textbook. It should demonstrate all the components that will be necessary for integration into the project. Bibliography, Research Folder, Text, Images and Image Sources.
Learning Objectives: Students will learn to work through macro and micro issues about writing a textbook as complex as this. They will also have the opportunity to provide "real time" input in a book project. Exposure to a range of different architectural cultures will enrich their understanding of architecture. They will get a deeper appreciation for the difficulties of envisioning a "global" perspective.
Completion Requirements: Student work will be tailored to the skill level. They will be expected to produce, sketch out, or research one part of a chapter. They will be expected to share their work in the construction of the larger whole.
This course will study the interrelationship of urban history with narratives of trauma not so much as a phenomenon of post-September 11, but as a phenomenon of modernity itself. By urban history I mean to include the question of the representation-of-cities, through various media including the arts and architecture. Ultimately, we will ask, In what way are modernity and trauma positioned in relationship to the other in scientific studies, political discourse and especially in popular imagination of architecture and urbanism? The course will feature several visitors including a noted psychotherapist who works with trauma victims. We will study the different definitions of what is or is not a “trauma” and study recent literature on trauma and aesthetics. We will also discuss related questions about memory and national identity.
This seminar will focus on the work of the architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). A selective approach to relevant aspects of the engraved corpus (from the archaeological views of Rome to the architectural fantasy of the prison etchings) will set the stage for contemplating the ways in which the Piranesian image can be understood to represent the epistemological break between the early modern and modern periods. Topics include: perspective and scenography; the visual components of the capriccio, the veduta, the pianta and the frammento; the image of Rome; architectural typologies (from bridges, arches, temples, mausolea, amphitheatres, and streets to foundations, columns, capitals, sculptural fragments, antique vases, and ornamental fireplaces); antiquarian culture; Piranesi's own polemical writings; the context provided by Vico's philosophy of history; and the modern intellectual response (Eisenstein, Huxley, Tafuri, Yourcenar).
This course examines how the question of the "nation" in Latin America is consistently posed in relation to a set of interlinked issues, key among them being "modernity," indigenism and various attitudes towards anti-imperialism. It seeks to delineate the conditions in which visual cultures in Latin America took up particular forms of nationalism in order to gain a global historical identity. Visual representation was seen as a particularly crucial area in the battle for interpretive power during this period, as various artistic and cultural movements struggled to claim symbolic representation of modern nations fundamentally different from their former colonizers.
We will look at theories of nationalism as formative as those of Gramsci, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Gellner and Bhabha, in order to situate them vis-à-vis a Latin American context. We will move from the formative moment of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) and Mexican Muralism, through the post-1968 period in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Cuba. This will allow us to examine a variety of key responses to the issue of cultural nationalism on the part of the avant-garde, the popular sphere, the state, and political factions from extreme left to extreme right.
Using the Art Deco exhibition at the MFA as pretext, this course will work through the extraordinary and intense debates about art, architecture, the applied arts, and industrialization in England, Germany, and France from the Crystal Palace exhibition in London through the Paris Exposition des arts décoratifs of 1925. The latter exhibition, of course, coincided with Le Corbusier’s book The Decorative Art of Today and its dictum, indebted to Loos, that “Modern decorative art is not decorated.” Numerous recent studies have given us a complicated and skeptical view of these polemics and their variations upon established nineteenth century discourses. The terms “ornament”, “decoration” and “style”, in particular, were called upon to do a great deal of work in this period, and they offer a mechanism through which we can track an extended conversation among figures as diverse but connected in their preoccupations as Ruskin, Semper, Baudelaire, the neo-Impressionists, the Nabis, the Cubists, Benjamin, Simmel, Riegl, Wöllflin, Loos and Corbu.
The course will operate across the artificial divide between art and architectural histories and look instead towards their overlapping concerns during this period. In some cases the international and cross disciplinary crosscurrents have been mapped (for example, the impact of English Arts and Crafts in France and Germany), and in other cases not (the divergent evaluations of “decoration” by painters and architects around the turn of the century). Members of the seminar will be expected to select one of the figures or episodes covered in the course and to create an intellectual and artistic profile of their role in these arguments.
In order to profit from the seminar and contribute to it, students should be willing to explore the general theoretical confusion in the period under study, to discuss a substantial body of reading in detail in class, and to examine works not packaged in stable categories of knowledge.
The issue of aesthetics, long submerged in the history of art and architecture, has returned. This course not only will investigate the nineteenth and twentieth century background that led to this resurrection but also will try to imagine the future of the discipline now that both art and its history have so often been pronounced “dead.” With assigned readings, we will first chart the universalizing theories on which art history was founded and then review the power of these ideas in the context of the discipline’s objective pretensions. Art history’s postwar desire to model historical interpretation on scientific models could only have been achieved on the basis of aesthetic systems that were unspoken and unchallenged.
The collapse of a coherent understanding of history in the wake of poststructuralism’s “death of art” has complicated the idea of scholarship as well as insured the return of aesthetics as the unresolved problem that continues to haunt art history’s conception of its self. The rise of identity politics, the development of gender politics, the turn towards post-colonialism, the interest in deconstruction and issues of globalization, have all challenged the “master narratives” on which the writing of history traditionally depended. If history can now be mapped from different perspectives and temporalities, so can aesthetics.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of the current “chaos” in the field? How can disciplinary identity be reconfigured in the context of new ideas? To what extent are the master narratives still a necessary backdrop against which the new approaches of the twenty-first century must find their place? This seminar is intended for students of art history, visual studies, and architecture who are interested in the philosophical assumptions that underlie historical writing in their disciplines.
Building on the recent scholarly debate on reintegrating the Mediterranean and reconsidering the interconnectedness of its shores, this seminar focuses on the study of Mediterranean cities in the early modern era, adopting a cross-cultural approach. The structure of the course is thematic, and seeks to explore questions of cosmopolitanism from the 15th to the 19th century. Key themes include: The politics of urban design, civic institutions, representations of power, the spatial dimensions of the social construction of difference (including gender, ethnicity, race and religion), and spaces of sociability (taverns, coffeehouses, places of entertainment). In addition we will consider issues of mapping, the representations of cities, and their imageability. Case studies will include Istanbul, Cairo and Aleppo under Ottoman rule (in Turkey, Egypt and Syria of today), Paris (France), Rome, Florence and Venice (Italy), Granada (Spain). The course will conclude by addressing the resonance of the architecture of the past for urban form and design practice today. The seminar will offer ample opportunity for a comparative approach to the study of cities as it will be jointly led by an expert on Islamic urbanism, and a scholar of western urbanism, of the early modern period. The course is open to graduate students and qualified undergraduates. No background in specialized architectural history is required.
This class will examine socialist realism in Russia and other parts of the world as a multi-disciplinary phenomenon and a "method", focusing on the visual arts, literature, film, and architecture, and spaning the period between the early 1930s, when socialist realism became the official aesthetic doctrine in the Soviet Union, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s, which marked a symbolic ending of the Cold War. The class will look at socialist realism as a critique of modernism viewed as both an aesthetic and an ideology. Departing from the writings about utopias that reach back to Sir Thomas More's Socratic dialogue "The Utopia", the class will examine the meaning of "the truthful representation of life" and "vanishing of reality"--to concepts related to the doctrine of socialist realism that remain of interest also from the postmodern viewpoint. The class will also analyze the place of ideology, censorship, and irony in art and architecture, placing them in a broader context that includes the current situation in the U.S. Additional attention will be paid to the place of Other viewed as a challenge to the political, ethnic and cultural heterogenity desired by the ideologues in the Soviet Union but also other parts of the world. In class discussions will be framed around readings of both primary sources and critical texts dealing with the topics covered by the course.
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