Postwar Modern Architecture and Theory

Catalog description

This architectural history lecture course surveys the modern buildings and architectural theory of the post-World War II period. It begins with the cataclysm of WWII and the fundamental shifts it caused on the conception of modernism, technology, cities, and geo-politics. It proceeds to investigate themes such as rebuilding and reconstruction, grand modern masters such as Mies, Kahn, and Le Corbusier, the fascination with technology, megastructures and utopian thought, the need for monumentality, meaning, and regional identity, and the dissemination of modernism from corporate America to the third world. It ends with the rupture in modernism associated with the social revolutions and the rise of a post-modern architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The course includes lectures, readings, and discussions to define the unique character of the postwar period, as modernism both reigned supreme, and began to be questioned. Emphasis will be placed on the relationship of buildings to the more general cultural, intellectual, and historical circumstances in which they were created. Special attention will be devoted throughout the course to the important manifestoes, theoretical and critical writings that so determined the project of modern architecture. Work for the course involves extensive reading, preparing for class discussions, and a major research paper. Prerequisites: 48-240 or 48-241