Modern Architecture, from the Enlightenment to the Present

Catalog description

In this introductory course, we will contextualize modern architecture beyond the 20th-century Western canon of modern architecture to examine the social, intellectual, and material life of buildings and movements from around the globe. Starting with the Enlightenment, this class’s weekly themes are structured chronologically around major historical events and across different geographies. Rather than a conventional survey, this class aims to offer students a global literacy regarding modern architecture and an understanding of the intertwined nature of architectural practice and historiography globally. That is, as opposed to trying to cover all architectural movements and theories, the course focuses on providing students with the tools to find and critically assess architecture’s multiple layers, including but limited to the actions of peoples, ideas, objects, technologies, images, and other forces, and how they have interacted in specific locations. Challenging architecture’s Western and male gaze and production, the lectures include less conventional spatial actors, especially those often marginalized by ideals of racial difference, gender and sexuality, class, and religion, among other factors. Informed by critical theory, ecology, gender, postcolonial, and critical race studies, the course will examine the political ground on which architecture stands and interferes, including land, property, capital, and patronage. We will establish architecture, therefore, as a contested and disputed practice, never neutral and constantly adapting to socio-political and environmental constraints. Focused on a capacious understanding of modern architecture, we will explore global connections and situated knowledge production methods that have shaped and disputed the logic of capital, fossilization, and colonialism.