A new course has been added to the Fall 2001 curriculum. This course will be open to all students at the GSAP.
A 4683 ARCHITECTURE AND SOCIAL POLICY
Making the Case for the 20th Century
This seminar addresses the connection between architecture and social policy, notably, the way social policy both determines and reveals itself in architectural expression. Its object is to explore the importance that connection in turn gives architecture as an instrument of social leadership and a vivid and enduring form of public disclosure.
Students will study and "read" works like the Karl Marx Hof, the Viceroy's Palace, the League of Nations, UNAM, Pruitt-Igoe, Battery Park City, Experience Music and the Reichstag for the case each of them seeks to make for the policies that brought them into being. The study will be intended to bring out the full range of interests - social, political, financial and artistic - reconciled in their expression and to understand the role of architecture in making sense of these undertakings in the light of then-current understandings of the demands of the human condition. The object will be to understand the larger public relevance of architecture and provide a basis for the exploitation of this aspect of its importance in the public argument in favor of significant new architecture and for the protection of the old.
The seminar will focus on and test a thesis about the architecture of the 20th Century and the efforts of that architecture to make sense of the century?s social evolution, as it worked through and then abandoned arguments for the use of public power as a route to social improvement. Before the beginning of class in the Fall, students will be expected to read Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes and Eve Blau's The Architecture of Red Vienna. Students will report critically in class and in writing on assigned works of architecture, bringing out the relationship of each building?s expression to the over-all "argument" of the 20th century. The list of works to be examined and assignments to students or teams will be developed on the basis of an initial exploration of the thesis of the seminar, an inventory of possible examples and the interests of students.
Paul Spencer Byard
Justin Martin, Teaching Assistant
Fall Term 2001
Thursday: 9:00 to 11:00 Room 412 Avery
(First Meeting: Thursday September 6, 2001)
September 6 Social Policy and Architectural Form
1. Architecture and the "Committee" that Builds ( the role of architecture in building (making it work and making it say something: the attribution of meaning); the uses of meaning; architecture as the art that tries to make sense of allocations of capital to building: what are we prepared to invest in, where will the investment take us and how do we argue for our choice as an improvement of the human condition?); 2. The Point of View: Architecture as Public Explanation and Argument (making sense: given the then-current range of expressive choices, what attributes of the then-current human condition does the architecture emphasize (atrocity/benignity; novelty/sameness; choice/determination; simplicity/complexity; power/impotence; engagement /distraction)? what does it suggest we do about it?(more of the same/something new) Attributing Meaning to New Conditions; Laying It On Us (Inescapability, Power and Endurance of Architecture)); 3.This View of Architecture (Virtues of a Non-Hermetic View): Architecture as an Instrument of Leadership, Disclosure and Learning (Design) The Contributions of Architecture to a Public History of Social Choice (Preservation))
Villa Emo
U.S. Capitol
Experience Music
September 13 The Architectural Argument for the "Shorter" 20th Century: A Case Study
1. Social Policy and 20th Century Building (Public Power, Public Wealth and Public Action: Pursuing the Big Idea); 2. Choices across the 20th Century
( the Imperial Paradigm ( Projections of Capitalism): The Radical Alternative (Social Ownership); The Liberal/Conservative Middle: Modernism and the Evolution of Liberal Reform); 3. The Choice in Expression (Abstraction /Representation; Old/ New); 4. The Big Events: The Great War; The Russian Revolution; The Twenties; The Depression; The New Deal; The War Continues; The Ultimate Big Idea; Stalemate; Vietnam and the Unraveling of the Big Idea; the Public Destroys Itself; The Great War ends; Escape and Entertainment; What to Do?); 5. Architecture and the Case for the 20th Century (how did architecture present and argue for social policies of the 20th Century as they evolved across these events? What can we learn from its surviving manifestations?)
The Chicago Exposition Post-War British Schools
Reichstag (Part I) Urban Renewal
Thiepval Public Housing
Karl Marx Hof Seagram
League of Nations ` UNAM
Tribune Tower National Theater
Viceroy's Palace Boston City Hall
TVA Pompidou
Cite Radieuse Twin Parks
Nuremburg VenturiPortland
Reichstag (Part II) Reichstag (Part III)
September 20 The First Imperial Holocaust (ca. 1914-18)
Architecture and Authority (Representation/Old)
September 27 Emerging Progressive Alternatives (ca. 1918-25)
Architecture and Reform (Abstraction/New)
October 4 The Collapse of the Middle (ca. 1925-1933)
Architecture and the Market
October 11 The Ways Out (ca. 1933-1939)
The Architecture of Democratic Action
October 18 The "Good" War and Its Products (ca. 1939-1950)
Establishing Modernism
October 25 The Ultimate Big Idea (ca. 1945-1961)
New Brutalisms
November 1 The Big Idea and Big-Time Doubt (ca. 1955-1970)
Anxious Modernisms
November 8 The Public Self-Destructs (ca. 1968-1984)
The Great Architectural Implosion
November 15 The End of the Big Idea: Escape and Denial (ca.1978-1991)
The Architecture of Unknowing
(November 22)
November 29 The Age of Entertainment (ca. 1990-2000)
Indulgence and Responsibility: What to do?
December 6 Final Exam
