Examines themes in the history of design, with emphasis on Euro-American theory and practice in their global contexts. Addresses the historical design of communications, objects, and environments as meaningful processes of decision-making, adaptation, and innovation. Critically assesses the dynamic interaction of design with politics, economics, technology, and culture in the past and at present. 

Seminar on how culture interacts with architecture. Analyzes architecture as a conveyor of messages that transcend stylistic, formal, and iconographic concerns to include an assessment of disciplinary, political, ideological, social, and cultural factors. Critically reviews methodologies and theoretical premises of studies on culture and meaning. Focuses on examples from Islamic history and establishes historical and theoretical frameworks for investigation.

‘Islam resembles what was later to be called “the Western tradition” in so many ways—the intellectual efforts to fuse Judeo-Christian scripture with the categories of Greek philosophy, the literary emphasis on courtly love, the scientific rationalism, the legalism, puritanical monotheism, missionary impulse, the expansionist mercantile capitalism—even the periodic waves of fascination with “Eastern mysticism”—that only the deepest historical prejudice could have blinded European historians to the conclusion that, in fact, this is the Western tradition.’

David Graeber, “There Never Was a West. Or, Democracy Emerges From the Spaces In Between,” 2007

شمس العداوة حتى يستقاد لهم ... وأعظم الناس أحلاماً إذا قدروا

الأخطل في قصيدة يمدح بها عبد الملك بن مروان من كتاب الأغاني                               

In Empire to Commonwealth: Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Garth Fowden says, “There are roads out of Antiquity that do not lead to the Renaissance.”  This statement challenges the dominant historical narrative, which posits the West as the only heir to the classical tradition, and opens the door for the Islamic culture to reclaim it. 

Following Fowden, this seminar offers a revision of the concept of Late-Antiquity through an in-depth study of the early Islamic artistic and architectural culture.  It examines the sequence of well-known Umayyad and early Abbasid monuments and artifacts (7th-8th c), which engaged in a vibrant and dynamic cross-cultural creative process. They treated Late Antiquity as a heritage to synthesize and build upon, or, sometimes, modify, deconstruct, or combine with other cultures with which the Islamic world came into contact.  The patterns of appropriation, modification, and transposition are interpreted as a conscious attempt to chart a new, or, perhaps more accurately, a Post-Post-Classical art and architecture, which ultimately bypassed all ethnic, linguistic, and cultural boundaries within the Islamic world despite its political fragmentation and crossed over to inform and invigorate the emergent European awakening in the late Middle Ages.  In other words, the seminar challenges the exclusive historiography of art history that posits the Western Renaissance as the sole heir of Antiquity and proposes another scenario with a more hybrid genealogy that invites us to rethink the impact of periodization on our conception of art history itself.

General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.

Introduction to theories of modernism and postmodernism and their related forms (roughly 18th century to present) in art and design. Focuses on how artists use the tension between fine art and mass culture to critique both. Examines visual art in a range of genres, from painting to design objects and "relational aesthetics." Works of art are viewed in their interaction with advertising, caricature, comics, graffiti, television, fashion, "primitive" art, propaganda, and networks on the internet.

Additional work required of students taking graduate version.

Beginning in the 1980s, the critique of Eurocentrism opened up an increasingly large domain for historical analysis and reassessment in both architectural and art history. . We will try to make sense of this shift and its embodied critiques as well as their on-going transformations, potentials, and problematics. Since secondary literature and analysis of this phenomenon is practically non-existent, we will study the phenomenon by trying to assemble different takes and perspectives.

4.606 Undergraduate | 4.656 Graduate

Drawing on case studies from the ancient world to the present day, considers how the creation of architecture has involved the modification of natural environments and climates and the exploitation of resources across the globe. Investigates the metabolic processes of raw material extraction, transportation, and manipulation that make the creation of buildings, infrastructures, and designed landscapes possible. Explores how material and climatic considerations have played into the design and aesthetics of buildings at various points in time and promotes an awareness of the largely invisible, increasingly far-flung networks of environmental management and labor that underpin our built environment. Students taking graduate version complete additional assignments. Limited to 25 for versions meeting together; preference to undergraduates.

Examines themes in the history of design, with emphasis on Euro-American theory and practice in their global contexts. Addresses the historical design of communications, objects, and environments as meaningful processes of decision-making, adaptation, and innovation. Critically assesses the dynamic interaction of design with politics, economics, technology, and culture in the past and at present. 

EPHEMERAL HISTORIES (ARCHITECTURE & THE CONSTRUCTION SITE)

What is the history of the construction site? The paradox of the construction site lies in the fact that, although the construction site is inescapably essential to the realization of architecture, it must be ephemeral, superseded by the durable forms of the completed building. Such traces that remain, in documents, photographs, or physical marks upon the building, have been of passing interest to architectural history for the information they reveal about the realized object, but the construction site itself—as a place, as an event, as a design—has largely been ignored by an architectural history and theory not inclined toward ephemerality.

This seminar will address the construction site with rigorous historical interpretation and methodological experimentation. Readings and discussions will develop a knowledge of the construction site as a point of organization, material transformation, and intellectual and physical work. These approaches will pursue questions such as the valuation of tools and techniques, the legal armature of contracts and regulations, the social conventions of race, class, and gender, and the cultural appraisal of work and craft. The goal of the seminar will be to develop prototypical approaches to the history of the construction site that explore the possibilities of ephemeral history. Students will carry out detailed and speculative research into selected construction sites; and will use that research in digital mediums of text, sound, and image to model ephemeral histories that expand the historical accounting of a construction site to include information extending from wages to weather reports.

The class is open to doctoral and masters degree students. Enrollment will be limited to 12.

General study of modern architecture as a response to important technological, cultural, environmental, aesthetic, and theoretical challenges after the European Enlightenment. Focus on the theoretical, historiographic, and design approaches to architectural problems encountered in the age of industrial and post-industrial expansion across the globe, with specific attention to the dominance of European modernism in setting the agenda for the discourse of a global modernity at large. Explores modern architectural history through thematic exposition rather than as simple chronological succession of ideas.