Questions in Architectural History I

This two-semester introductory course is organized around selected questions and problems that have, over the course of the past two centuries, helped to define architecture’s modernity. The course treats the history of architectural modernity as a contested, geographically and culturally uncertain category, for which periodization is both necessary and contingent. It begins with the apotheosis of the European Enlightenment and the early phases of the industrial revolution in the late 18th century. From there, it proceeds in a rough chronology through the “long” 19th century. Developments in Europe and North America are situated in relation to worldwide processes including trade, imperialism, nationalism, and industrialization. Sequentially, the course considers specific questions and problems that form around differences that are also connections, antitheses that are also interdependencies, and conflicts that are also alliances. The resulting tensions animated architectural discourse and practice throughout the period, and continue to shape our present. Each week, objects, ideas, and events move in and out of the European, North American, and colonial non-West frame, with a strong emphasis on relational thinking and contextualization. This includes a historical, relational understanding of architecture itself. Although the Western tradition had recognized diverse building practices as “architecture” for some time, an understanding of architecture as an academic discipline and as a profession, which still prevails today, was only institutionalized in the European 19th century. Thus, what we now call architecture was born not long ago, as a discourse and a practice conceived in relation to others variously described as ancient, vernacular, native, or pre-modern. The course also treats categories like modernity, modernization, and modernism in a relational manner. Rather than presuppose the equation of modernity with rationality, for example, the course asks: How did such an equation arise? Where? Under what conditions? In response to what? Why? To what end? Similar questions pertain to the idea of a “national” architecture, or even a “modern” one. To explore these and other questions, the course stresses contact with primary sources. In addition to weekly readings, the syllabus lists key buildings, projects, and documents, along with at least one primary text, through which such questions may be posed. Many of these buildings, projects, and texts have long been incorporated into well-developed historical narratives, mostly centered on Europe. Others have not. The aim, however, is not to replace those narratives with a more inclusive, “global” one. It is to explore questions that arise, at certain times and in certain places, when architecture is said to possess a history.