A4539 Historical paradigms of Western Domestic Architecture
History/Theory SeminarGwendolyn Wright
INTRODUCTION
Residential architecture represents both a restrained domain of nostalgia and a favored terrain for experimentation. This paradox typically leads architects, like other groups, to idealize certain typologies and disdain others. We then promote our favored paradigms as expressions of a universal truth, whether it concerns the nature of the family or meaning of modernist design.
What happens if we instead juxtapose houses and housing, builders and architects, technologies and traditions, prosaic standards and radical innovations? This class is organized as a series of lectures that will trace both the most familiar and the most radical examples of western domestic architecture in the 19 th and 20 th centuries: the tropes espoused by architects, as well as those favored by housing officials, builders or decorators, and those preferred by various cultural or socio-economic groups.
Such an amalgam prompts some intriguing questions. How, in fact, do these various groups decode architectural elements such as plan or ornament? How do symbolic associations, and even physical constraints, come to be associated with architectural forms? What have been the effects of major architects, their work and their ideas, both within architecture and in the larger domain of cultural production? Finally, how do we today, as historians and designers, draw from this history not imitating forms, but rather using the earlier efforts, with their strengths and their limits, to clarify our own goals, collectively and individually? A critical historical overview of domestic architecture, both as form and as ideology, is therefore more than a series of precedents; it should chall enge the conventional notions including our own professional and cultural assumptions that derive from this legacy.
REQUIREMENTS
Students are expected to write three short historical analyses. A final paper (with drawings) will then suggest possible modifications of or adaptations to one of these typologies, based upon a specific contemporary consideration (e.g. Gender roles or the body, new technologies, individual privacy or collective identity).
TOPICS
1. Decoding the domicile
2. Victorian self-expression and the house as fetish
3. Class norms and corporate identities in early housing reform
4. Urban hybrids: apartments, hotels, and communal living
5. Espousing simplicity and the natural house
6. The villa as a machine for living
7. Social democracy through modernist housing reform
8. Neighborhood planning in cities and suburbs
9. The Good Life and Post-War American comfort
10. Modernisms of sensual pleasures and cultural expression
11. The return of the repressed Nostalgic visions and prosaic desires
12. Space, Infill, and Pluralism: Housing reform since 1980
13. Vagabonds, Cyborgs, and Consumers: Contemporary images of domestic architecture