A4336 Architecture Culture 1943-1968
History/Theory SeminarJoan Ockman
The subject of study is a twenty-five year period crucial to an understanding of the present day. From the reconstruction of the built environment after the Second World War to the events of May 1968 when the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris was closed down after 150 years, architecture underwent major revisions and searching self-examination. The passage from high to late modernism took place against a background of global sociopolitical and technological changes, producing complexly interwoven reactions and strategies for postwar architecture and urbanism. This drama unfolded not only in Europe and the United States, but also outside the usual centers of Western culture.
The specific content of the course will be determined by the seminar members on the basis of the topics chosen for class presentations, but among the varied themes to be addressed are the following: issues of postwar reconstruction; the institutionalization of the International Style; its critique; the new monumentality, the new empiricism, regionalism; the impact of the Cold War and East-West cultural relations; tensions between the new suburbs and historic cores; changing relations between architecture, popular culture, and industrial design; CIAM's postwar development and dissolution, the Italian recovery of history; transformations in design education; the impact of ideas of mobility and growth, of systems approaches, semiotics, typology; the emergence of a neo-avant-garde; new political strategies for architectural change in the 1990s; and so on.
More generally, the course will explore the question of how architecture culture is produced and reproduced in the second half of the twentieth century. Focus will be placed on the relationship of historical events to the conceptual framework modernism/postmodernism.
SAMPLE TOPICS (from the last seminar)
Introduction
Impact of World War II; perspectives on reconstruction
Presentations: The years 1943-1945
The debate in Italy after the war
Monumentality: state representation and collective symbolism
Presentations: The situation in Spain
The situation in Brazil
Americanism; regionalism; cultural colonialism
Presentations: On Robert Moses; the contradictions of technocracy and democracy
American embassy buildings and American government policy
Postwar design education
Presentations: The Bauhaus legacy
CIAM after World War II and its dissolution
Presentations: The emergence of Team 10 and the Dutch school
Technological prospects
Presentations: Buckminster Fuller and his influence
Problems of prefabrication
Impact of the Cold War, consumerism, popular culture
Presentations: Mobility and American domestic policy during the Cold War
Abstraction versus representation in the 1950s
Resurgence of radicalism; politics
Presentations: The Situationist critique: unitary urbanism
Advocacy and grass-roots alternatives
Conclusion