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Recent Undergraduate Level Subjects

The visual arts have a distinct history that is approached through concepts like style, medium, and tradition. They also participate in other histories—histories of religion, of the state and its institutions, of public and private life. As the essential introduction to the history of art from the Renaissance to the present, this course has the following objectives: first, to explore the wide range of works constituting the canonical core of Western painting, sculpture, and architecture (from Giotto to Pollock); second, to engage diverse methodological positions for interpreting the meaning and function of those works for those who encountered them as practitioners, patrons, worshippers, collectors, critics, and modern viewers; and finally to consider what the production and reception of art tells us about culture’s place in the social world.

Primarily covering European and American art from the 19th century to the present day, this subject investigates intersections between objects of visual culture termed "fine art" (painting, sculpture, architecture, and eventually photography and video) and those visual forms designed by anonymous artists for mass distribution and consumption (advertising, caricature, comic books, graffiti, television, and fashion as well as "folk art," "primitive art," and other imagery taken from domains held to be outside "culture"). Theories of modernism and postmodernism will guide our discussion. Among the artists analyzed are Courbet, Manet, Gauguin, Picasso, Duchamp, Warhol, and postmodernists such as Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney. Although historical in scope, the course will focus on the way artists have used the tension between fine art and mass culture to mobilize a critique of both. The course will consist of lectures, recitation discussions of readings, and museum visits. In keeping with HASS-D and CI guidelines, analytical papers and oral presentations are required.

A survey of the history of architecture from the Stone Age to the present. The course treats buildings and environments (especially cities) in the dual context of the history of contemporary life and the history of architecture as an autonomous discipline. It offers an introduction to the fundamental elements of architectural form, to methods of criticism, and to problems of historical analysis. The subject is taught in two one and a half hour lectures and one hour long recitation meetings per week, with four short papers, a mid-term quiz and a final exam.

Visual perception from neurological, cultural, and artistic vantage points. Students examine aspects of visual culture ranging from body adornment to public spaces, and from logotypes to moving images. Lectures, oral presentations, field trips, and written essays develop tools of visual analysis and interpretation. Topics range from ritual space to forensics to machine-aided vision (cameras, radar devices, robotic scanners). Enrollment limited.

The avant-garde has considered itself as the intellectual vanguard of progress and modernity, against power and tradition. Subject considers whether, in an age of popular consumer culture, the avant-garde is under threat. Students view the history and cultural politics of avant-garde movements in the cinema and literature of contemporary Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe. 4.609/(4.696)Seminar in the History of Art and Architecture—Cosmopolitan Cities of the Mediterranean in the Early Modern EraBuilding 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.

Beginning with the fin-de-siecle in Europe, feminine figures have come to symbolize Paris, London, and Berlin, both the structures of the city and their teeming masses. Subject engages key moments in modern literary and visual culture to investigate the modes by which politics, psychology, and aesthetic practices have charged mass culture with a feminine gender.

This course proposes to study how Islamic architecture and urban planning coped with environmental constraints in various areas and different climates and turned them into constructive design tools. It examines the environmental strategies behind the design of selected examples ranging in scale from the region, to the city, the house, the garden, and the single architectural element. It explores the social, cultural, symbolic, and psychological dimensions of environmental design as they developed over time to enrich, modify, or even obscure their functional origins.The course is open to graduate and undergraduate students. It is structured as a pro-seminar. One session each week will be devoted to a lecture on a specific topic. The second session will be a class discussion on the same topic with designated students' presentations on various aspects of the topic. The course will have a mid-term open-book exam, and a final take-home exam.

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.

This course introduces the history of Islamic cultures through their most vibrant material and spatial signs: their religious architecture that spans fourteen centuries and three continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe. It reviews a number of representative examples (mosques, madrasas, mausolea, etc.) from various periods and locations and discusses their architectural, urban, and stylistic characteristics in conjunction with their historical, political, and intellectual environments. In addition, the course analyzes the development of the sacred, commemorative, pious, and educational architecture in the Islamic world in light of a changing Islam from a religious revolution in 7th-century Arabia to a global power straddling three continents in the medieval period to a world religion professed by one-sixth of humanity in the present. Films and discussions are used to elucidate the artistic/cultural varieties and historical developments of this architectural vision within both the Islamic and the larger, universal, and cross-cultural contexts. Throughout the course, a number of critical issues will be considered: How do we define and/or qualify architecture? What is the relationship between architecture and culture? Architecture and the sacred? Architecture and society? How do we study an architectural tradition that covers several regions and encompasses a variety of cultures and national and ethnic identities? And, what, if anything, is Islamic about this architecture, and how do we understand and describe Islamic architecture vis-à-vis the global history of architecture? Class web site: http://web.mit.edu/4.614/www/ Requirements: 4 short papers (6 pp. each) and a final exam.

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.

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 course 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 reorganized 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.

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.

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.

This course presents objects, histories, and social and critical contexts for art since 1940. Because of the burgeoning increase in art production during this period, the course is necessarily selective. With a strong focus on art of the U.S., lectures will also cover postwar developments in Europe and parts of Asia, up to the present moment of globalism, new media, and '93 biennial culture. '94 we will trace major movements in art, but we will also be looking at art '93 on the margins '94 -- art that has been overlooked by the mainstream critical press, but may have a broad cultural base in its own community. We will ask what function art serves in its various cultures of origin, and why, in recent years, art has been such a lightning rod for political issues here in the USA and elsewhere in an ever-more visual world.

Seminar on a selected topic from American art, theory, and criticism since 1900. Requires original research and presentation of oral and written reports. For specific current topic of this seminar, consult department.

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.

History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art is part of the Department of Architecture, within the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.