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.

4.645 Syllabus (MIT certificate protected)

Note: the schedule for this class has changed from M 2-5 in room 5-216 to W 2-5 in room 9-450.

Seminar on a selected topic in critical theory. Requires original research and presentation of oral and written report.

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, 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” and modernization/transitions theory patronized by the Bretton Woods organizations 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.) will be elicited to highlight key structures of comparison, contrast, or influence.  

4.640 Syllabus (MIT certificate protected)

 

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.

4.616 Syllabus (MIT Certificate Protected)

4.605 Undergraduate | 4.650 Graduate

Provides an outline of the history of architecture and urbanism from ancient times to the early modern period. Analyzes buildings as the products of culture and in relation to the special problems of architectural design. Stresses the geopolitical context of buildings and in the process familiarizes students with buildings, sites and cities from around the world.

Additional work required of graduate students.

4.605/4.650 Syllabus (MIT certificate protected)

This course will study the creation of art from Paleolithic times through to the mid-twentieth century, with a non-exclusive focus on European and American practices. Along the way, it will seek to challenge traditional narratives—especially default assumptions about gender and male artistic genius—and question our inherited approaches, while integrating the work of artists and cultures that have long been sidelined owing to modern biases rather than historical fact.

4.601 Syllabus (MIT Certificate protected)