4.603 UG / 4.604 G

Examines modern architecture, art, and design in the context of the political, economic, aesthetic, and cultural changes that occurred in the twentieth century. Presents foundational debates about social and technological aspects of modern architecture and the continuation of those debates into contemporary architecture. Incorporates varied techniques of historical and theoretical analysis to interpret exemplary objects, buildings, and cities of modernity.

Additional work required of students taking the graduate version.

4.603/4.604 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

Introduction to the history and interpretation of western art in a global context that explores painting, graphic arts and sculpture from the 15th century to the present. Engages diverse methodological perspectives to examine changing conceptions of art and the artist, and to investigate the plural meaning of artworks within the larger contexts of culture and history.

4.601 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)

Required for doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. Prior to candidacy, doctoral students are required to write and orally defend a proposal laying out the scope of their thesis, its significance, a survey of existing research and literature, the methods of research to be adopted, a bibliography and plan of work. Work is done in consultation with HTC Faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program guidelines.

Preliminary study in preparation for the thesis for the SMArchS degree in History, Theory and Criticism. Topics include literature search, precedents examination, thesis structure and typologies, and short writing exercise.

Required of doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. The Minor Exam focuses on a specific area of specialization through which the student might develop their particular zone of expertise. Work is done in consultation with HTC faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program Guidelines.

Required of doctoral students in HTC as a prerequisite for work on the doctoral dissertation. The Major Exam covers a historically broad area of interest and includes components of history, historiography, and theory. Preparation for the exam will focus on four or five themes agreed upon in advance by the student and the examiner, and are defined by their area of teaching interest. Work is done in consultation with HTC faculty, in accordance with the HTC PhD Degree Program Guidelines.

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.

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.

Karl Marx is arguably the most influential writer of the modern era. Over the twentieth century, his texts moved millions, defining the course of history itself as states, governments and popular movements oriented themselves to take measure of—for or against—his thinking. His unfinished magnum opus Das Kapital rivals the Bible and the Quran in terms of its sheer ability to move political movements and fields of knowledge alike. In the liberal universe, Marx’s writing has been (not) read as advocating radically opposed political outlooks, as both prescribing pervasive state controls and radical, anti-political anarchism. Within the ex-socialist world, the ardor for “scientific socialism” left most of its adherents with little appreciation of the considerable imaginativeness, wit and intellectual agility with which Marx addressed the pressing issues of his time: the rise of modern industry and the corresponding labor movements, the nascent complexities of electoral democracies, international affairs and state power, international flows of capital and colonialism. In the process, Marx’s thought would leave an imprint on almost every field that he touched, and then some: postKantian philosophy, political economy, sociology, historiography, and the history of science. Marx’s readings of Shakespeare in itself makes up a subfield of literary criticism. This course will comprise a close reading of the principal Marx texts placed in their nineteenth-century context: from his early critique of postKantian philosophy (the neo-Hegelians), to his turn towards political economy (the Political and Economic Manuscripts), to his collaborative studies, with Engels, of English mill towns (Condition of the Working Classes in England), to the political upheavals of his time (Eighteenth Brumaire, the 1871 Communards and the French Civil War), his critiques of other utopian-socialist movements (The German Ideology), to his involvement with workers’ movements (The Communist Manifesto), to the great unfinished masterwork of his career, Capital/Grundrisse. The course will conclude with a study of Marx’s early confrontation with “underdevelopment” on the “Russian road.”

Supporting texts by the Althusser circle, Lucio Colletti, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Derrida, David Harvey, Ernesto Laclau, Teodor Shanin, Prabhat Patnaik, etc.

Requirements: attendance, presentations, keeping up with readings, final term paper. Term paper has to be drawn out of subject matter covered in class.

This seminar examines episodes in the history of art and design from the perspective of the materials used in their production. Engaging a variety of material substances and examining selected case studies of their manipulation across diverse geographies from the ancient world to the mid twentieth century, the class asks how materials have historically conditioned the conception and meanings of artworks and how a focus on matter can bring into view the environmental impacts and the human costs of design. What meanings, for example, did metals or minerals mined from the earth or imported from distant parts of the world hold for early modern viewers? How can the study of furniture inlaid with ivory from Southeast Asia or made from mahogany sourced in the eighteenth-century Caribbean expose the blindspots attending the global systems of labor and transportation that moved such materials? Conversely, how might the uses of wood veneer reveal historical ideologies and/or period imaginaries of nature, time, and a nascent ecological awareness? What can the material attractions of porcelain or of plate glass and mirror glass reveal about cultural imaginaries in Asia and in Europe? And what does clay have to do with the styling and planned obsolescence for which the twentieth-century American automobile industry was renowned?