A

This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. By continuing to use this website, you consent to Columbia University's usage of cookies and similar technologies, in accordance with the Columbia University Website Cookie Notice

courses

ARCH4334-1 / Spring 2022

Jorge Otero-Pailos

Modern American Architecture

Canvas

Bulletin

This course is a survey of American Modern Architecture since the country’s first centennial. As America ascended to its current position of hegemony during the late 19th and 20th centuries, its architects helped refashion the built environment to serve the needs of a growing and ever-diverse population. Hand in hand with the satisfaction of pragmatic requirements, American architects were called upon to fulfill deeper psychological wants, such as the country’s desire to have a national History. The American complex about the brevity, artificiality, and exterior dependency of its history, structured, with varying degrees of intensity, the evolution of the architectural discipline. Out of this deep-seated, and by no means exhausted, anxiety about producing, preserving, and identifying American history, came a sophisticated architectural culture; one capable of foiling, exploiting, subverting, and manipulating the various contradictions of modernity.

From the standpoint of this relationship between history and modernity, we will analyze the American architectural struggle to be progressive and accepted, exceptional and customary, and to simultaneously capture the future and the past. Each lecture will analyze the production and reception of built (and written) works by renowned figures and anonymous builders. The question of History will help us discern the terms of engagement between architecture and other disciplines over time, such as: preservation, planning, real estate development, politics, health, ecology, sociology, and philosophy. By considering American architecture’s successes and failures in relation to these multidisciplinary realities, we will gain a richer sense of the historical characteristics that have informed its evolving nature.

Location & Time

300 BUELL SOUTH/300 BUELL NORTH

M + TH 11 AM - 1 PM

Session & Points

SES A

3 Points

Sequence

HP Required

Call Number

15510

Programs

M.S. Real Estate Development

Master of Architecture

M.S. Advanced Architectural Design

New York / Paris

M.S. Architecture and Urban Design

M.S. Urban Planning

M.S. Computational Design Practices

M.S. Historic Preservation

Other Semesters & Sections

Course	Semester	Title	Instructor	Requirements & Sequence	Location & Time	Session & Points	Call No.
ARCH4334‑1	Spring 2026	Modern American Architecture	Jorge Otero-Pailos	HP Required	300 Buell South W 3 PM - 5 PM	Full Semester 3 Points	12459
ARCH4334‑1	Spring 2025	Modern American Architecture	Jonah Rowen	HP Required	200 BUELL NORTH M 9AM-11AM	FULL SEMESTER 3 Points	11397
ARCH4334‑1	Spring 2024	Modern American Architecture	Jorge Otero-Pailos	HP Required	WARE LOUNGE, 600 AVERY M 11 AM - 1 PM	FULL SEMESTER 3 Points	11320
ARCH4334‑1	Spring 2023	Modern American Architecture	Jorge Otero-Pailos	HP Required	WARE LOUNGE M 11 AM - 1 PM	FULL SEMESTER 1.5 Points	11506