Lectures
Perceiving architecture involves the interpretation of optical imagery into a conception of space, which is subject to a perpetual reading of abstract meanings related to the city, nature, technology and culture. This is to say that the “perception of architecture” is more complex than simply seeing built form or the drawings used to represent building production; it involves a critical examination of human experience through prevailing modes of architectural convention. Together these conditions constitute a responsive body of knowledge that operates as the context for the perceiving subject, and as a constant basis for interpretive analysis and verbal discussion. By concentrating on modern buildings of high sensory and intellectual impact, studied along with a sequence of critical texts written by a range of architects, historians, philosophers and socio-cultural theorists, this class will explore the development of the discipline of architecture during the twentieth century and beyond.
Syllabus available upon request.
The survey course is composed of two weekly lectures that trace the idea of modernity from the Enlightenment to the present. It examines modernity as an aesthetic imperative in architecture, the visual arts and urban culture, and as a set of cultural transformations affecting society at every level: social mores and beliefs, philosophical inquiry, scientific impulse and technological innovation. The course is focused on the Modern Movement in the pre-war period (The Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, Le Corbusier, etc.) and post-war period (CIAM, Brutalism, Metabolism, International Style, etc. ), although we will also examine pivotal developments in the 19th century and postmodernism.
Syllabus available upon request.
City, Landscape, Ecology is a thematically driven course that examines issues and polemics related to urbanization, land settlement and ecology over the past two centuries. The course is made up of discussion sessions and lectures. The purpose is to better understand the role urban, territorial and ecological organization plays in the construction of social practices, human subjectivities, and technologies of power.
Syllabus available upon request.
This course examines colonialism and humanitarianism as objects of architectural history. We will use architecture and its histories as a set of tools with which to rethink colonialism and humanitarianism in relation to each other. We will also use the linked problems of humanitarianism and colonialism to rethink architectural history. In this course, we will study perspectives from Africa and Asia, refugee camps and detainment centers, colonial expositions and museums, and United Nations administrative headquarters and field sites.
Syllabus available upon request.
This class offers a critical platform for the discussion of housing in the modern and contemporary periods. It will explore the definition of housing at different scales, ranging from domestic objects and spatial arrangements to urban proposals and territorial organizations. Housing plays a central role in the formation of subjectivity, the definition of cultural norms, and the consolidation of social relations. This course will analyze the development of housing in relation to changing technologies, cultural shifts, and political transformations. It will focus on the relationship of diverse processes of modernization and traditions of housing around the world, ultimately reaching to housing paradigms in the contemporary world characterized by global processes and accelerating transformations. A series of workshops interspersed throughout the semester will introduce students to different modes of research, speculation, and argumentation coordinated with the development of a semester-long writing assignment.
Syllabus available upon request.
Through a history of institutional and informal practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, this course interrogates modern architecture of the South Asian subcontinent and its diasporas. The course considers building, landscape, material culture, territorial construction, design, art, photography, writing, pedagogy, and related cultural activity. We study celebrated as well as understudied figures and institutions: Begum Samrū, Sris Chandra Chatterjee, Otto Koenigsberger, Minnette de Silva, and Habib Rehman; the Archaeological Survey of India, the Dhaka Urban Study Group, the Asia Art Archive. We explore writings by James Fergusson, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Sir Banister Fletcher, which founded a discipline, and journals such as MARG, Mimar, and Design, which represented its discourse.
Syllabus available upon request.
This course investigates the dramatic urban transformation that has taken place in mainland China over the last four decades. The speed and scale of this transformation have produced emergent new lifeways, settlement patterns, and land uses that increasingly blur the distinction between urban and rural areas. At the same time, Chinese society is still characterized by rigid, administrative divisions between the nation's urban and rural sectors, with profound consequences for people's lives and livelihoods. The course therefore examines the intersection between the rapid transformation of China's built environment and the glacial transformation of its administrative categories. We will take an interdisciplinary approach to this investigation, using perspectives from architecture, history, geography, political science, anthropology, urban planning, and cultural studies, among other disciplines. This year, the course is being offered in an immersive, online format with an introduction and five thematic modules, each of which focuses on a particular dimension of urban-rural relations in contemporary China: land and planning, housing and demolition, citizenship and personhood, agriculture and food, and nationality and identity.
Syllabus available upon request.
Life Beyond Emergency examines constructed environments and spatial practices in contexts of displacement, within the connected histories of colonialism and humanitarianism. People migrating under duress, seeking refuge, practicing mutual aid, and sheltering in governmental or nongovernmental settings invest in the built environment as a holder of knowledge, critical heritage, and imaginaries of life beyond emergency. The course considers a politics and poetics of architectures and infrastructures of partitions, borders, and camps: territories and domesticities of concern to authorities and inhabited by ordinary people forging solidarities and futures. We will investigate the connected histories and theories of humanitarianism and colonialism, which have not only shaped lives as people inhabit spaces of emergency, but produced rationales for the construction of landscapes and domesticities of refuge, enacted spatial violence and territorial contestations, and structured architectural knowledge. The course examines iconic forms such as refugee camps in relation to colonial institutions such as archives. From Somalia to Palestine to Bangladesh and beyond, our inquiry into contested territories where people have been forced to migrate invites students to interrogate the normalized discourses and spaces, for example, of ‘borderlands,’ or ‘refugees,’ in order to imagine and analyze emergency environments as constructions that people have resisted, endured, transcended, theorized, and inhabited.