Architecture and the Arts

Catalog description

This interdisciplinary course explores the entangled relationship between architecture and the arts, and their struggle between autonomy and engagement. It will be structured around a series of themes, drawings, and writings that reveal architecture's constantly changing involvement with art, culture, society, and related disciplines The course functions both an introduction to Architecture as Art for a general audience, as well as a critical introduction to architectural thinking and theory for architecture majors. The course will include slide lectures, readings, reading reports, discussions, and a series of research exercises to engage architecture and art more critically, and an exam. We'll examine the common roots, disparate characters, and inter-twined histories of architecture and the arts. We'll investigate not just buildings and art works, but ideas, drawings, images and other representations involved in the construction and reception of architecture that often relate closely to the arts. We'll look at shared terms like composition, rhythm, studio, and form. We'll define architecture in relation to categories such as fine and applied arts, high and low arts, visual and performing arts, and relate these to broad categories such as design, visual culture, and the liberal arts. We'll ask "why" we make architecture and art, rather than "how," and discuss how the human need for expression and meaning can augment the technical and constructed value of mere making or building. We'll debate how the discipline of architecture has been, and can continue to be framed as a fine art, but also act as a service profession, a political tool, a technical expertise, a research endeavor, or as a mode of cultural discourse.