Early Modern Architecture and Art
Course canceled for Fall 2026.
Advanced Study in Critical Theory of Architecture
Advanced seminar. Looks at architecture and planning doctrines in what has come to be known as the “development decades,” the high period of state intervention into so-called Third World economies under the aegis of the Bretton Woods exchange system (c. 1945-1971), followed by its aftermath in the dismantlement and restructuring of state power to aid so-called “privatization” and austerity doctrines. The course will take up various components that intersected with architectural and urban thinking in this era of development: land and tenure, infrastructure, housing, finance, administration, and cultural forms relating them to influential economic doctrines of the time as well as the ideological tendencies of governments in the Third World. Particular attention will be paid to the circuit of technocratic “experts” patronized by the Bretton Woods organizations, and later global consultancies (McKinsey’s) as well as the neocolonial politics of foreign aid. Particular attention will be paid to how architects and related experts on questions of space responded to the bureaucratic and institutional frameworks of international and national development, and the sundry “clubs (Paris, Rome), think-tanks, consultancy mechanisms, as well as elite university-based forms of expertise that were entangled in these circuits. Also of interest is the intersection, in the course of these engagements, of the latter history of architectural modernism with the social sciences, from anthropology, econometrics to systems theory, etc. Comparisons with American and European (“Northern”) examples of space and city planning and mechanisms (instruments such as location theory, zoning, etc.), as also cultural forms (cinema, theater) will be elicited to highlight key structures of comparison, contrast, or influence.
Requires original research and presentation of oral and written report.
Art Since 1940
UG register for 4.651 | Grad register for 4.s62
Critical examination of major developments in European, Asian, and American art from 1940 to the present. Surveys the mainstream of art production but also examines marginal phenomena (feminism, identity politics, AIDS activism, net art) that come to change the terms of art's engagements with civic culture. Visits to area art museums and writing assignments develop skills for visual analysis and critical writing.
Thinking About Architecture: In History and At Present
Studies the interrelationship of theory, history, and practice. Looks at theory not as specialized discourse relating only to architecture, but as touching on many issues, whether they be cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, or professional. Topics and examples are chosen from a wide range of materials, from classical antiquity to today.
The Architecture of Water
Course canceled for Fall 2026.
Advanced Study in the History of Art: Dutch Art in the World — in the Seventeenth Century and Now
This research-intensive graduate seminar will pair engagement with the most recent scholarship on seventeenth-century Dutch art in its economic, environmental, and global contexts with hands-on experience in curatorial practice, ranging from training in provenance research to exhibition development to writing for museum audiences.
A primary focus of the class will be our collective investigation of the MIT Museum's significant, but little-known holdings of seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and works on paper. Together we will conceptualize a framework for how best to present these works and our findings to a 21st-century audience. The format for our public-facing work will take the form of a digital and pop-up exhibition of selected artworks combined with a public workshop or a public study day.
The class will strike a balance between investigations of the MIT Museum’s collection at the museum’s offsite storage facility and discussions of recent interpretations of Dutch art: its visual theorizations of nature and artifice, the anxieties and pleasures of consumption in a capitalist economy, and the role of sight in ordering the world in an era of global commerce, enslavement, and colonial empire.
The seminar will meet periodically at the MFA Boston’s Center for Netherlandish Art (CNA) together with the seminar “A World Art: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art in Global and Material Perspectives” co-taught by Professor Michael Zell, Boston University, and Dr. Christopher Atkins, the CNA’s director, where we will have further opportunities for direct exchanges with curators and the close examination of works of art.
Because of our work in the MIT Museum’s offsite storage facility and visits to study rooms and conservation labs at the MFA Boston and the Harvard Art Museums, enrollment is strictly limited to 10.
Dwelling & Building: Cities in the Global South
Class canceled for the Fall 2026 term. It will be offered in the Spring 2027 term instead.
Topics in Islamic Urbanism
The city is never merely an accumulation of buildings, streets, markets, and inhabitants. It is a dense human artifact: a spatial form in which power is staged, social relations are ordered, memory is inscribed, wealth circulates, worship is organized, and difference is negotiated. Following Henri Lefebvre, the city may be understood as the most intense arena in which space is socially produced: not a neutral container, but the materialization of relations, practices, representations, and struggles. It is also a juridical, economic, and political association, defined by market exchange, corporate life, forms of autonomy, and the institutions that regulate communal order. To Paul Wheatley, the city is a ceremonial, administrative, and symbolic center, a place where collective meaning is spatially concentrated and where society represents to itself the order of the cosmos, the polity, and the sacred.
This course examines the city from an Islamic perspective by moving beyond the modern, often essentialist notion of “the Islamic City” as a fixed urban type. Instead, it asks how pre-modern Muslim jurists, theologians, historians, geographers, philosophers, and administrators understood the city as a coherent form of legal, political, social, and moral life. It treats the city as a paradigmatic field in which revelation, community, law, authority, worship, exchange, and memory acquired spatial form.
Legal sources will be read as theories of property, privacy, public right, roads, markets, water, waqf, nuisance, neighborhood, and Friday prayer. Theological and philosophical writings will illuminate the moral grounds of association and the ideal ordering of collective life. Geographers and historians will be approached as analysts of region, prosperity, foundation, transformation, and ruin. Ibn Khaldun’s ʿilm al-ʿumrān and al-Maqrizi’s Khitat will occupy central places as two of the most sophisticated pre-modern attempts to theorize the relation between city, state, civilization, decay, and memory.
The course moves from Medina and the early garrison towns—Kufa, Basra, Fustat, and Qayrawan—to Damascus, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Samarra, Cairo, Isfahan, Cordoba and Granada. It emphasizes hybridity, adaptation, and continuity rather than a single religious morphology. Its central argument is that Islamic urbanism generated a coherent vocabulary of urban intelligibility: jamāʿa, sulṭa, sūq, ḥisba, waqf, ḥaḍāra, ʿumrān, and kharāb. The course thus seeks a definition of the city that preserves historical diversity while recognizing conceptual integrity.
Research paper required.
Note for MArch students: Serves as an Urbanism elective