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The multifarious architecture of the United States has sometimes been daringly innovative; at other times, banal and reductive. Likewise it is, even now, the product of exceptional individuals (Louis Sullivan, Louis Kahn, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Gehry, as well as many lesser-known architects) and more anonymous members of political administrations, financial institutions, the construction and real estate industries in addition to various clients and community groups. How do they work, together and in opposition, to create American architecture, in both its exceptional structures and its overall landscape? After all, the 20th century has seen many indigenous building-types become pervasive (the skyscraper, suburban house, shopping mall, movie theatre, and corporate scientific lab, to name just a few), not only across the continent but throughout the world.
Such an undertaking requires multiple strategies of analysis, critical and appreciative, rather than a single point-of-view. In addition, the country's conspicuous diversity encourages a variety of perspectives and even multiple intellectual frameworks. Thus the class will juxtapose cultural, architectonic, phenomenological, economic, stylistic, political, and other kinds of readings.
This wide-ranging approach must, of course, be tempered with a coherent structure. Chronologically the class will move from the aftermath of the Civil War up to the present, though we'll continually explore the ramifications of the past on our own times. We'll include alternatives and oppositions to dominant trends; both "ordinary" buildings and exceptional architecture. Finally, the sequence of lectures will concentrate on three architectural/cultural typologies: domestic space, work space and public space.
Students will write a series of 1-page papers. A final research paper (c. 15 pp. of text plus illustrations and reference citations) should analyze an American building or architectural phenomenon of the recent or distant past. A statement about the topic is due Feb. 21; a first draft, on March 28; and the final paper, by May 9. There will also be a short exam.
Prof Wright's office hours, 203 Buell, 2-4 Tuesdays, 854-1587, gw8@columbia.edu.
LECTURE TOPICS AND ASSIGNMENTS
WEEK 1: ANALYTIC TEMPLATES AND FORMAL PATTERNS
The power of agency and the seductions of biography; the narrative structures of architecture; cultural appropriation and hegemony; "American exceptionalism."
WEEK 2: PRODUCING THE VICTORIAN HOME
Intricacies of the Queen Anne and the "Shingle Style"; American suburbia; industrial standards and human comforts; multi-family living in apartment-hotels and tenements.
WEEK 3: URBAN SKYSCRAPERS AND COMMERCIAL CAPITALISM
Inventing the skyscraper; restructuring construction and office-work inside; consolidating the skyscraper's facade, skyline, and its location in the central business district.
WEEK 4: COSMOPOLITAN SPACES FOR DEMOCRATIC PUBLICS
Americanization and the progressive movement; entertaining bourgeois and working-class crowds; palaces for travel and learning; the sequential emergence of the American design professions.
WEEK 5: THE CRUSADE FOR SIMPLIFIED DWELLINGS
Frank Lloyd Wright and his California contemporaries; emigré and indigenous reformers; household science and the women's movement; regional modernisms.
WEEK 6: CONSTRUCTING SUCCESSIVE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS
Factories, grain elevators, and the American industrial aesthetic; Ford and Kahn's Detroit assembly line; the International Style and the machine ideal.
WEEK 7. ARCHITECTURES OF PLEASURE
Consumer culture from department stores to shopping malls; fantasy spaces, spectatorship, and hyperreality; questions of excess and kitsch.
WEEK 8: CIVIC ASPIRATIONS AND GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACIES
Government agencies (federal, state, and municipal) as clients; representation and regulation; public space, public buildings and the public sector; bureaucracy and democratic participation.
WEEK 9: VACATION
WEEK 10: RATIONAL ARCHITECTURE FOR MODERN SCIENCE
Atomic physics and microbiology as new frontiers for functionalism; forms of control in the research
laboratory; scientific knowledge and the modern mdeical complex; space and cybernetics.
WEEK 11: "THE GOOD LIFE" AND MODERN AMERICAN HOUSES
A suburban triumph of modernism; mass-production and custom-building; model houses in museum exhibits; the Cast Study House xperiment; architect-builder collaborations.
WEEK 12: CORPORATE AMERICA AND POST-WWII ARCHITECTURE
The Miesian purity of towers and slabs; SOM and the rise of corporate America; the architecture of urban renewal; the Cold War and "the American Way."
WEEK 13: THE SPECTACLES OF NEO-TRADITION & THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE
From museums to cultural centers; postmodernism's assertion of public opinion; historic preservation and adaptive reuse; marketing identity including that of the modern consumer.
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