(Re)thinking Modernity & Modern Architecture
(Re)thinking Modernity & Modern Architecture
Encounters, Exchanges, and Expropriations of and within the Built Environment in a Period of Presumed Progress, 1600s–2000s
Professors: Dr. Germán Pallares-Avitia
Malcolm Rio
Course Description:
This course will examine the advent of modernism and its relationship with the built environment through multiple lenses, including nationhood, race, economics, technology, environmentalism, gender and sexuality, colonialism, and art history. Through these lenses, this course explores how the formation of Enlightenment epistemologies paralleled the formation of architecture as a discipline and profession in the West, both of which depended on categories of cultural exclusion and thus this course treats the history of architectural modernity as a contested, geographically and culturally uncertain category, for which periodization is both necessary and contingent. This course asks not only what it means for architecture to be modern, but further looks to use changes to the definition and character of architecture as a means of exploring what modernity itself might be and how our present and future worlds have been both materially and conceptually constituted. 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?
To support these inquiries, the course will engage with the buildings, drawings, and writings of architects and architectural historians, as well as those of historians and critics of modernity, who have both constructed and challenged sometimes competing notions of both architecture and modernity. In doing so this course will also address how the built environment shapes and is shaped by the intersections of changing cultural, economic, political, artistic, and technical conditions over the course of the long nineteenth century and the twentieth century in a format that hybridizes chronology with major thematics, including imperialism and independence, industry and environment, along with expression and function. Each of these themes will be addressed multiple times and in multiple ways through lectures, discussions, readings, and the final assignments as a means of examining architecture’s interconnectedness with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, imperialism, technology, hygiene, management, culture, nature, etc. while also denaturalizing existing and inherited singular or wholly linear narratives of the built environment. Students will gain practice in analyzing images, spaces, and texts through practices of close and contrapuntal readings, debates with their colleagues, and reflective writing, archiving, and analysis that will culminate in the final project; the construction of an “documentary,” produced within small groups, that critically traces an aspect or narrative of the built environment within the history and historiography of modern architecture and which poses some challenging questions about the past, present, and future of architecture and the design of the built environment.
