The Other History of Modern Architecture

Catalog description

This lecture course presents modern architecture as the product of the cultural, technological, political, and intellectual developments associated with capitalist expansion across the globe. By exploring the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its effects on Western industrialization, European Jesuit gardeners in China, modernization efforts in 19th century Turkey and Japan, and tropical climate and colonial policy in India, Nigeria, and other global sites; the course will expose students to the “99 percent” who are frequently excluded from discussions about modern architecture, but whose labor and cultural traditions were crucial to the heroic modernism of the West.