| |
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
color, 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 through thematic exposition rather than
as simple chronological succession of ideas.
|
|