Modern Architecture

Catalog description

This course offers a historical survey of the built environment from 1800 to the present. Starting with the intensification of global interconnectivity in the 19th century, we will explore the role of architecture and urbanism since 1800 through themes such as industrialization, colonialism, orientalism, nationalism, fascism, post-colonialism, imperialism, and war. Rather than a Eurocentric reading of the past two centuries, which offers a narrative of modernity as an invention of the West that was then adopted by the rest of the world, we will recognize modernity as a global condition and a way of understanding the human condition and the built environment of the past two centuries. Global in scope, the course provides a chronological and thematic account of the technologies, socio-economic forces, aesthetic impulses and collective desires that have shaped the built environment. Particular attention will be given to the fraught relationship between modernity and imperialism; the rise and fall of ‘modernism’ as a specific set of design methods and discursive strategies; non-Western modernisms; and interfaces between architecture and other artistic disciplines. Furthermore, this course traces the interactions and exchanges of architectural styles and ideas in a highly connected modern world, in order to understand the ways in which diverse societies translated ideas, appropriated forms and styles from distant geographies and cultures, and used architecture and design to respond to socio-political changes.