Course Syllabus

Wed 11am-1pm 115 Avery

Faculty: Mabel O. Wilson  mow6@columbia.edu office hours: 1 - 2p Tuesdays & by appointment https://calendly.com/mabelowilson office: 758 Schermerhorn Ext.

Teaching Assistants:  Nur Jabarin jn2758@columbia.edu – Section: Fridays, 10 – 11am Avery 408

Lasse Rau lr3172@columbia.edu – Section: Thursdays, 11a – 12p, Buell 300 N

Artist: Kara Walker, no world, from An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters, 2010, collection of MoMA.

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. The fall semester begins with the apotheosis of the European Enlightenment and the early phases of the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century. From there, it proceeds in a rough chronology through the “long” nineteenth 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 will move in and out of the European and North American 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 nineteenth 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. Our 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.

The course therefore prioritizes discussion and critical reflection. Students will be assigned to one of three seminar-style classes, each led by a different faculty member in collaboration with a teaching assistant. In addition, PhD Teaching Assistants (TAs) will conduct smaller weekly sessions intended to support and elaborate upon the main class. All three course sections will discuss the same primary texts and background reading (from Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World), but with different secondary readings to be assigned at the discretion of individual faculty. Faculty members may present examples of relevant buildings and projects from among those listed at their discretion. 

Overall, the aim is a semester-long dialogue, with active student participation, that unfolds, explores, and contextualizes questions and problems that inform and challenge the historical imagination and ultimately, enhance historical consciousness.

 

Course Requirements

In addition to completing the required readings for each week and participating actively in class discussions, at three points during the semester students will be required to complete analysis and writing assignments:

Option A: Submit three short essays as follows:

Essay 1: A visual analysis of one architectural illustration from designated historical sources at Avery Classics (12-pt font, 500-600 words)

Essay 2: A close reading and a contextualization of a primary source text (from syllabus or lectures) (12-pt font, approx. 1000-1250 words)

Essay 3: Compare and contrast two key projects (including text and image) discussed in class or in the readings (12-pot font, approx. 1750-2000 words)

 

Option B (instructor’s approval required)

Submit a full-length research paper on a topic related to one or more of those covered in the course, in consultation with your discussion section TA, as follows:

Part 1: One-paragraph abstract describing the paper topic and a one-page working bibliography

Part 2: Three-page annotated outline of the paper, with bibliography

Part 3: Final paper, 15 pages minimum, double-spaced in 12 pt font (about 3,500-4,000 words); plus illustrations and proper citations.

 

Due Dates:

Essay 1 / Part 1: week of 6 October 2025

Essay 2 / Part 2: 12 November 2025

Essay 3 / Part 3: 10 December 2025

All assignments should be uploaded as MSWord-compatible files. 

The Chicago Manual of Style should be consulted for detailed guidelines on citation.

 

Students with limited experience in writing research papers or writing in academic English are STRONGLY encouraged to seek support at the Columbia College Writing Center: https://www.college.columbia.edu/core-curriculum/undergraduate-writing-program/writing-center

Students should adhere to standard guidelines regarding academic honesty, such as those described in the GSAPP Statement on Plagiarism, available at: https://www.arch.columbia.edu/plagiarism-policy

 

Generative AI

Students may not use generative AI to author any writing submitted for this class. Generally, this includes brainstorming, analyzing text and other evidence, outlining, drafting, and organizing/structuring one’s writing. The use of AI-assisted tools like Grammarly for help with copy editing in the final stages of writing is permitted but requires the inclusion of a disclosure at the end of the submitted document identifying which tools were used and explaining precisely how they were used (Generative AI should not be used to write this). If in doubt, students should err on the side of disclosure.

 

Grading

Grades for the class will be determined as follows:

Option A

Class participation                 25%

Essay 1                                    25%

Essay 2                                    25%

Essay 3                                    25%

 

Option B

Class participation                 25%

Paper abstract                        5%

Paper outline                          10%

Final paper                              60%

 

Students with limited experience in writing research papers or writing in academic English are STRONGLY encouraged to seek support at the Columbia College Writing Center:

https://www.college.columbia.edu/core-curriculum/undergraduate-writing-program/writing-center

 

Students should adhere to standard guidelines regarding academic honesty, such as those described in the GSAPP Statement on Plagiarism, available at:

https://www.arch.columbia.edu/plagiarism-policy

 

Course Materials

All course materials, both required and recommended, are available on Courseworks website, or elsewhere online if indicated below. https://courseworks.columbia.edu/

In addition, a useful background reference is C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). Specific chapters are recommended for certain weeks, below. This and other books may be ordered through at Book Culture (536 West 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Ave.), https://www.bookculture.com/.

Three types of readings are listed each week: primary (required), secondary (selections to be assigned by instructor), and background (recommended). Secondary materials not assigned by any instructors are available on Canvas as a resource for student research or further reading. At times additional primary materials or background reading are recommended along with the required texts, again as a guide for research or further reading.

Many visual materials related to the course are available online at Artstor.org and at SAHARA https://www.jstor.org/site/sahara/#/login

Students are also advised to consult additional reference texts available in Avery Library, including:

Leonardo Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture, Volume 1: The Tradition of Modern Architecture [1960], trans. H. J. Landry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977)

Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth Century Architecture Vols. 1 and 2 (Milan: Electa, 1980)

 

In addition to Bayly, the following texts are also useful for historical background:

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (Cleveland: World Pub. Co, 1962)

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996 [1975])

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989 [1987])

 

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014)

 

Summer Reading

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), “Introduction,” 1-22.

Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from Enlightenment to the Present, “Introduction,” 3-20.

 

Classroom Expectations

Please be conscious of your voice in our shared space and ensure that others have a chance to speak. Be respectful and treat others as equals, please acknowledge and respect people’s pronouns. Keep in mind that we will be addressing difficult topics that may be uncomfortable, but learning new ideas is often challenging—we are all here for intellectual growth.

 

Special Session: Avery Classics (Rare Books) [DATE AND TIME TO BE CONFIRMED]

Students will view rare primary documents from the period in small groups in Avery Library, to be organized by the TFs. A list of these documents will be distributed prior to the session. The visits will be preceded by a brief introduction with Avery Classics librarians.

 

Weekly Topics

1. Architecture and History (9/3)

Primary (required)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men or Second Discourse” [1754], in The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 161-88.

 

Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture [1753], trans. Wolfgang Herrmann and Anni Herrmann (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977), 1-38 (esp. 1-14).

 

Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (London, 1805), Chap. 4, “State of Manners on the Establishment of Independence Etc. in St. Domingo, with a Memoir of the Circumstances of the Author’s Visit to the Island,” 132-148, and Appendix 13, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Augustin Clerveaux, “Declaration of the Independence of Blacks of St. Domingo” [1803], 260-261.

 

Secondary (required)

Michele Rolph-Trouillot, “The Power in the Story,” Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, 1 – 30.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Peter Minosh, “Architectural Remnants and Mythical Traces of the Haitian Revolution: Henri Christophe's Citadelle Laferrière and Sans-Souci Palace,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2018) 77 (4): 410-427.

 

Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222.

 

Tapati Guha-Thakurta,. “The Empire and its Antiquities: Two Pioneers and Their Scholarly Fields”, in Monuments, Objects, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

 

Françoise Choay, “The Consecration Phase: Institutionalization of the Historic Monument, 1820-1960,” The Invention of the Historic Monument, trans. Lauren M. O’Connell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

 

Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” [1784], in What Is Enlightenment? : Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions, ed. James Schmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 58-64.

 

Claude-Nicholas Ledoux, “The Ideal City of Chaux” in “Architecture Considered in relation to Art, Mores and Legislation,” (1804) in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt ed., From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the 19th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966): 199-212.

 

Leonardo Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture, Volume 1: The Tradition of Modern Architecture [1960], trans. H. J. Landry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977), “Introduction: Architecture and the Industrial Revolution,” xv-xxxiv.

 

Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), Chap. 1, “The Making of a Cultural Obsession,” 3-35.

 

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), “Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe,” 3-23.

 

Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821-65.

 

Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls (Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), Part 1, Sect. 1, “Rebuilding the Primitive Hut,” 7-21.

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Chap. 2, “Passages from the Old Regime to Modernity,” 49-83.

 

 

2. Race and Nation (9/10)

 

Primary (required)

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia [1787], (Richmond, VA: J.W. Randolph, 1853), Query 1, “Boundaries of Virginia,” 1-2; Query 8, “Population,” 90-96; Query 14, “Laws,” 140-160; Query 15, “Colleges, Buildings, and Roads,” 161-165.

 

Benjamin Henry Latrobe, The Journal of Latrobe: Being the Notes and Sketches of an Architect, Naturalist and Traveler in the United States from 1796 to 1820 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1905), “Louisiana Limitations,” 225-245.

 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "On German Architecture," [1772] in Art History and its Methods, ed. Eric Fernie (London: Phaidon Press, 1995), 77-84. 

 

Secondary (required)

David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century, (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), “Introduction: Human Variety, Race and Aesthetics,” 11-21.

 

Mabel O. Wilson, “Race, Reason, and the Architecture of Jefferson’s Virginia Statehouse,” in Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals, ed. Lloyd DeWitt and Corey Piper (New Haven and Norfolk, VA: Yale University Press and Chrysler Museum of Art, 2019), 80-97.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Simon Gikandi, Culture of Taste, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chap. 3, "Unspeakable Events: Slavery and White Self-Fashioning,” 97-144.

 

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso: 1983), Introduction, 1-8.

Kurt Forster, "Schinkel's Panoramic Planning of Central Berlin," Modulus 16 (New York: Rizzoli, 1983): 63-77.

 

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution [1938] 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1963), Chap. 3, “Parliament and Property,” 62-84.

 

Carl Anthony, “The Big House and the Slave Quarters: Part I, Prelude to New World Architecture,” Landscape 20, no. 3 (Spring 1976): 8-19.

 

Carl Anthony, “The Big House and the Slave Quarters: Part II, African Contributions to the New World,” Landscape 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 9-15.

 

Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), Chap. 8 “Architectures of Freedom” and Chap. 9 “Building in Britain,” 219–267.

 

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe; An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64-81.

 

David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), “Introduction: Human Variety, Race and Aesthetics,” 11-21.

 

Irene Cheng, “Race and Architectural Geometry: Thomas Jefferson’s Octagons,” The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 3, no. 1 (2015): 121-30.

 

Dorothea E. Von Mücke, “Beyond the Paradigm of Representation: Goethe on Architecture,” Grey Room 35 (Spring 2009): 6-27.

 

Zeynep Çelik, Empire, Architecture, and the City: French-Ottoman Encounters 1830-1914 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), Chap. 4, “A New Monumentality and an Official Architecture,” 159-215.

 

Kenrick Ian Grandison, “Negotiated Space: The Black College Campus as a Cultural Record of Postbellum America,” American Quarterly 51, no. 3 (September 1999): 529-579.

 

Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (New York: Pantheon, 1981), Chap. 3, “The ‘Big House’ and the Slave Quarters.”

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Chap. 3, "Converging Revolutions 1780-1820," 86-120.  

 

 

3. Institution and Education (9/17)

 

Primary (required)

Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, “Type” [1825], Oppositions 8 (Spring 1977): 95-115.]

 

J.N.L. Durand, “How to Acquire in a Short Time True Architectural Talents,” and “Summary of Courses Offered at the École Polytechnique” [1802-1805], in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the 19th Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 199-212.

 

Secondary (required)

Vittoria Di Palma, “Architecture, Environment, and Emotion: Quatremère de Quincy and the Concept of Character,” AA Files 47 (2002): 45-56.

 

Yanze Wang, “Beaux-Arts Composition and Its Evolution in China′s Architectural Education: A Case Study of Architectural Education at Nanjing Institute of Technology,” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 17:2, (2018) 199-204.

 

Secondary (for reference)

David Van Zanten, “The Beaux-Arts System,” AD Profile 17: The Beaux-Arts (1976): 68-79.

 

Richard Chaffee, “The Teaching of Architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts,” in Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ed. Arthur Drexler (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 61-109.

 

Louis P. Nelson, “The Architecture of Democracy in a Landscape of Slavery,” Thomas Jefferson, Architect: Palladian Models, Democratic Principles, and the Conflict of Ideals ed. Lloyd Desitt and Corey Piper, (New Haven and Norfolk, VA: Yale University Press and Chrysler Museum of Art, 2019), 98 - 117.

 

Neil Levine, “The Romantic Ideal of Architectural Legibility: Henri Labrouste and the Neo-Grec,” in Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ed. Drexler, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), 325-416.

 

Werner Szambien, “Architectural Drawings at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century," Daidalos 11 (March 1984): 55-64.

 

Carla Yanni, “Divine Display or Secular Science: Defining Nature at the Natural History Museum in London,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Sep., 1996): 276-299.

 

Antoine Picon, “From Poetry of Art to Method: The theory of Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand” in Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 1-68.

 

Alice Y. Tseng, “In Defense of Kenchiku: Itō Chūta's Theorization of Architecture as a Fine Art in the Meiji Period,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society (December 2012): 155-167 

 

Jonathan M. Reynolds, “The Formation of a Japanese Architectural Profession,” in Melinda Takeuchi, ed., The Artist as Professional in Japan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2004), 180-202.

 

Cherie Wendelken, “The Tectonics of Japanese Style: Architect and Carpenter in the Late Meiji Period,” Art Journal 55, no. 3 (Autumn 1996): 28-37.

 

William H. Coaldrake, Architecture and Authority in Japan (New York: Routledge, 1996), Chap. 8, “Building the Meiji State,” 208-250.

Background

 

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chap. 16, “Knowledge: Growth, Concentration, Distribution,” 779-825.

 

 

4. Individual and Society (9/24)

 

Primary (required)

Jeremy Bentham, "Panopticon, or the Inspection House" [1787], in The Emergence of Modern Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810, ed. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 444-454.

 

Robert Owen, “Essay Two,” New View of Society [1817] (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1818), 25-60.

 

Charles Fourier, “The Phalanstery” [1822], in The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier, ed. and trans. Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 240-242.

 

Secondary (required)

Carla Yanni, The Architecture of Madness: Insane Asylums in the United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), Chap. 2, “Establishing the Type,” 51-78.

 

Robin Evans, “Bentham’s Panopticon: An Incident in the Social History of Architecture,” Architectural Association Quarterly 3 (Spring 1971): 21-37.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Osama W. Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 2010), Chap. 3, “Impermanent Monstrosities,” 71-95.

 

Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 195-228.

 

Clare Anderson, “The Andaman Islands Penal Colony: Race, Class, Criminality, and the British Empire,” IRSH 63 (2018): 25-43.

 

Mira Rai Waits, “Imperial vision, colonial Prisons: British Jails in Bengal, 1823-73,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 77, no 2 (June 2018): 146-167.

 

Robin Middleton, “Sickness, Madness and Crime as the Grounds of Form”, Parts 1 and 2 in AA Files 24 (Autumn 1992): 16-30, and AA Files 25, Summer 1993): 14-29.

 

Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” Architectural Design 48, no. 4 (1978): 267-278.

 

Mark Jarzombek, “Corridor Spaces,” Critical Inquiry 36 (June 2010): 729-770.

 

Dana Simmons, Vital Minimum: Need, Science, and Politics in Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), Chap. 3, "Social Reform," 35-54. 

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Chap. 8, “The Theory and Practice of Liberalism, Rationalism, Socialism, and Science,” 284-324.

 

 

5. Nature and Resource (10/1)

 

Primary (required)

Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States with Remarks on Their Economy (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), Chap. 11, “Louisiana,” [excerpt, begins with “Visit to a Sugar Plantation”], 656-715.

 

Richard Payne Knight, “An Analytical Inquiry into the Principals of Taste,” [1805] and Uvedale Price, “An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful,” [1794] in The Genius of the Place: The English Landscape Garden 1620-1820 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 348-350, 351-357.

 

(skim) Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 [orig. 1845] trans. E.C. Otté (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1864), 1-15; 363-369. 

 

Secondary (required)

Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016), Ch. 3, “The Long Life of the Flow: Industrial Energy Before Coal,” 37-57.

 

Louis P. Nelson, “The Jamaican Plantation - Industrial, Global, Contested,” The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of the Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 120 - 143.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), Chap. 8, “The Carceral Landscape,” 208-243.

 

Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), “Wilderness, Wasteland, Garden,” Chap. 6, 230-244.

 

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2014), Chap. 5, “Slavery Takes Command,” 98-135.

 

Ann Bermingham, “System, Order and Abstraction: The Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795,” in W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 77-101.

 

Louis P. Nelson, Architecture and Empire in Jamaica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016) Chap. 4, “Plantation and Power,”, 219–67.

 

Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (New York and London: Verso, 2001), Preface, 1-16.

 

Norton Wise, “Architectures for Steam” in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 107-140.

 

Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), Chap. 7, “The Government of Nature: Imperial Science and a Scientific Empire, 1873-1903,” 221-68.

 

Jill Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Chap. 2, “Transplanting the Metropole,” 45-93.

 

On Barak, Powering Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), Chap. 6, “Fossil,” 194-224.

 

Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) Chap. 4, “The Religious Regeneration of the Landscape,” 233-326. 

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Chap. 12, “The Destruction of Native Peoples and Ecological Depredation,” 432-450.

 

 

6. Culture and Style (10/8)

 

Primary (required)

Rām Rāz, Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus [1834] (London: J.W. Parker, 1834), 1-40.

 

William Hodges, Travels in India During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, & 1783 (London: J. Edwards, 1793), Chap. 4, “Description of Benares – Elegant Façade – Hindoo Temples – Dissertation on the Hindoo, Moorish, and Gothic Architecture,” 59-77 (esp. 62 ff.)

 

Heinrich Hübsch, In What Style Should We Build? [1828], trans. Wolfgang Herrmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 63-85.

 

Secondary (required)

Geremie R. Barmé, “The Garden of Perfect Brightness, A Life in Ruins,” East Asian History 11 (June 1996): 111-158

 

Madhuri Desai, “Interpreting an Architectural Past: Ram Raz and the Treatise in South Asia,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 71, no. 4 (December 2012): 426-487.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Charles Davis, Building Character: The Racial Politics of Modern Architectural Style, 1860-1945 (University of Pittsburgh, 2019) Chap. 2, “Beyond the Primitive Hut,” 71-112.

 

Abigail Van Slyck, “Manana, Manana: Racial Stereotypes and the Angle Rediscovery of the Southwest’s Vernacular Architecture, 1890 - 1920,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 5, Gender, Class, and Shelter (1995): 95 - 108.

 

Barbara Whitney Keyser, “Ornament as Idea; Indirect Imitation of Nature in the Design Reform Movement,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 2 (1998): 127-144.

 

Gülru Necipoğlu, The Topkapi Scroll - Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1995), Chap. 4, “Ornamentalism and Orientalism: The Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century European Literature,” 61-72.

 

Martin Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) Chap. 3, “Museum Architecture and Imperialism of Whiteness,” 81-121.

 

Wolfgang Hermann, “Introduction” to Heinrich Hübsch, In What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1992), 1-60.

 

Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture, Chap. 1: “Useful Knowledge: Interpreting Islamic Architecture, 1700-1840,” 15-36.

 

Alex Bremner, “Nation and Empire in the Government Architecture of mid-Victorian London: The Foreign and India Office Reconsidered,” The Historical Journal 48, no. 3 (September 2005): 703-742.

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Chap. 6, "Nation, Empire, and Ethnicity 1800-1860," 199-243 (esp. 199-226).

 

 

7. Industry and Morality (10/15)

 

Primary (required)

Augustus Welby Pugin, Contrasts: Or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Similar Buildings of the Present Day [1836], 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1898), 1-59; see also plates beginning on p. 102.

 

John Ruskin, “The Nature of the Gothic,” in J. D. Rosenberg, ed., The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from the Writings (1863), 170-196.

 

Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, The Foundations of Architecture: Selections from the Dictionnaire Raisonné, trans. Kenneth Whitehead (New York: Braziller, 1990), “Style,” 231-263.

 

(skim/browse) Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and Son, 1856)

Available online at: https://archive.org/details/grammarornament01jone/mode/2up

 

Secondary (required)

Robin Evans, “Rookeries and Model Dwellings,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 92-114.

 

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, “The ‘New Birth of Freedom:’ The Gothic Revival and the Aesthetics of Abolitionism,” in Irene Cheng, Charles Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds., Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 116-133.

 

Secondary (for reference)

John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture [1849] (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1854), Chap. 5, “The Lamp of Life,” 123-145.

 

G.A. Bremner, Imperial Gothic and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire 1840-1870 (London: Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art, 2013), Chap. 3, “Adaptation and Invention: The Theory and Practice of Acclimatisation.”

 

Charles Davis, “Viollet-le-Duc and the Body: The Metaphorical Integrations of Race and Style in Structural Rationalism,” Architectural Research Quarterly 14, no. 4 (2010): 341-348.

 

Deborah E. B. Weiner, “The Architecture of Victorian Philanthropy: The Settlement House as Manorial Residence,” Art History 13, no.2 (June 1990): 212-227.

 

Richard Wittman, “Space, Networks, and the Saint-Simonians,” Grey Room 40 (Summer 2010): 24-49.

 

Anson Rabinbach, “Transcendental Materialism: The Primacy of Arbeitskraft,” The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 45-68

 

Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), Chap. 2, “Socialism in Modern Villages,” 32-53.

 

Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, 1814-1879 (Burlington, VT and Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014), Chap. 10, “Instinct and Race,” 333-380, AND/OR Chap. 11, “Style,” 381-406.

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Chap. 9, “Empires of Religion,” 325-365.

 

 

8. Capital and Labor (10/22)

 

Primary (required) 

Karl Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital” (1847) in The Marx-Engels Reader (Norton, 1978), 203-206.

 

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848)

 

Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: A Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, and Christian Homes (New York and Boston: J. B. Ford and H. A. Brown, 1869), Required: Chap. 1, “The Christian Family,” 17-22; Chap. 2, “A Christian House,” 23-42; Recommended: Chap. 3, “A Healthful Home,” 43- 58; Chap. 6, “Home Decoration,” 84-103; Chap. 19, “Economy of Time and Expenses,” 247-254.

 

Secondary (required)

Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), Chap. 4, “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom,” 115-124. 

 

Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods and Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), Chap. 3 “Feminism and Model Households,” 54-65.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Thomas Dublin, “Women, Work, and Protest in the Early Lowell Mills: ‘The Oppressing Hand of Avarice Would Enslave Us,’” Labor History 16, no. 1 (1975): 99-116.

 

Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1993), Chap. 2, “The Passage from Arcade to Cinema,” including “Passage II,” 47-99.

 

Roger N. Holden, “The Architect and the Lancashire Cotton Industry, 1850-1914: The Example of Stott & Sons,” Textile History 23, no. 2 (1992), 243-257.

 

Annmarie Adams, Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses and Women, 1870-1900 (Montreal: McGill’s-Queens University Press, 1996), Chap. 4, “Childbirth at Home,” 103-128.

 

Background

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chap. XIII, “Labor: The Physical Basis of Culture,” 673-709.

 

 

9. City and Territory (10/29)

 

Primary (required)

1. D. Judah, “A Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad” (1857), online at the Museum of the City of San Francisco: http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist4/practical.html

 

Ebenezer Howard, To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1898), “Introduction,” 1-11; Chap. 1, “The Town-Country Magnet,” 12-19, Chap. 2, “The Revenue of the Garden City, and how it is obtained—The Agricultural Estate,” 20-19; Chap. 3, “The revenue of the Garden City—Town Estate,” 31-35; Chap. 4, “The Revenue of the Garden City—General Observations on Its Expenditure,” 36-50; Chap. 9, “Administration—A Bird’s Eye View,” 91-93.

 

5. Belgrand, Les travaux Souterrains de Paris: 5. Les Égouts (The Underground works of Paris, Volume 5: The Sewers), excerpt to be translated. For visual browsing only, here.

 

Victor Baltard, Monograph of the Central Market Halls of Paris Built Under the Reign of Napoleon III and the Administration of Mr. Baron Haussmann Senator, Prefect Of The Seine Translated by Elliott Sturtevant and Lucia Allais (Paris, A. Morel & Cie., 1863), 1–14.

 

Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, The Transformation of Santiago. Notes and Indications Respectfully Submitted to the Illustrious Municipality, the Supreme Government, and the National Congress by the Intendent of Santiago, Translated by Pedro Correa Fernández, with Irina Chernyakova, Maur Philippe Dessauvage and Lucia Allais (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta de la Librería del Mercurio, 1872).

 

Secondary (required)

David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2003), Chaps. 5-7, “Money Credit and Finance,” “Rent and the Propertied Interest,” “The State,” 113-148. 

 

Ana María Leon, “Bones of a Nation,” Manifest Journal 3 (2020): 20-32.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Margareth da Silva Pereira, “The Time of the Capitals: Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo: Words, Actors and Plans," in Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850-1950, ed. Arturo Almandoz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 75-108.

 

Swati Chattopadhay, The Limits of ‘White Town’ in Colonial Calcutta,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (June 2000), 154-179.

 

David Van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital 1830-1870 (1994). Selections.

 

Francesco Dal Co, “From Parks to the Region: Progressive Ideology and the Reform of the American City”, in Giorgio Ciucci et al. The American City: From the Civil War to the New Deal (London: Granada, 1980).

 

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), Chap. 3, “Pricing the Future: Grain,” 97-147.

 

Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Chap. 9, “A Productive Countryside” 211-255, and [Appendix] “Gaspard Riche de Prony (1755-1839),” 349-353.

 

Walter Johnson, “Introduction: Boom,” River of Dark Dreams, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1-17.

 

Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), “Lecture One: 11 January 1978,” “Lecture Two: 18 January 1978,” and “Lecture Three: 25 January 1978”, 1-86.

 

Anthony Vidler, “Scenes of the Street” in Stanford Anderson, ed. On Streets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), 29-51.

 

Carol McMichael Reese, “The Urban Development of Mexico City, 1850-1930,” in Arturo Almandoz, Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850-1950 (New York Routledge, 2002), 139-169.

 

Ramón Gutiérrez, “Buenos Aires, A Great European City,” in Arturo Almandoz, Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850-1950 (New York Routledge, 2002), 45-74.

 

 

10. Exposition and Imperialism (11/5)

 

Primary (required)

Gottfried Semper, “The Four Elements of Architecture” [1851, excerpts], in Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans H. Mallgrave and W. Hermann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 101-111.

 

Rifāʻah Rāfiʻ Ṭahṭāwī, An Imam in Paris: account of a stay in France by an Egyptian cleric, 1826-1831] translated by Daniel L. Newman. London: Saqi, 2004: “4. On the housing of the people of Paris and related matters;” “5. On the food of the people of Paris and their eating and drinking habits” pp. 216-225.

 

Frederick Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), “Introduction,” 1-4. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wells/exposition/exposition.html#I  

 

(browse/skim) Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (London and New York, various editions beginning in 1896)

 

Secondary (required)

Irene Cheng, “Structural Racism in Modern Architectural Theory,” in Cheng, Charles Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds., Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 134-152.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Zeynep Çelik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), Chap. 3, “Search for Identity: Architecture of National Pavilions,” 95-137.

 

Sarah Allaback, “Louisa Tuthill, Ithiel Town, and the Beginnings of Architectural History Writing in America,” in Kenneth Hafertepe and James F. O’Gorman, eds., American Architects and Their Books to 1848 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 199-215.

 

Pieter Van Wesemael, Architecture of Instruction and Delight: A Socio-Historical Analysis of World Exhibitions as a Didactic Phenomenon (1798-1851-1970) (Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 2001), Chap. 4, “The Exposition Universelle et Internationale in Paris (1863/1867/1872),” 219-284.

 

Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1991), Chap. 3, “Imperial Display,” 52-81.

 

Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), Chap. 7, “The Origins of Modern Cairo,” 98-117.

 

On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), Chap. 2, “En Route,” 21-52.

 

Alain Schnapp, The Discovery of the Past: The Origins of Archaeology (London: British Museum Press, 1996), Chap. 4. “On the Rejection of the Natural History of Man,” 221-272.

 

Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoğlu, “Toward Postcolonial Openings: Rereading Sir Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture,” Assemblage 35 (April 1998): 6-17.

 

Nicholas Pevsner, Some Architectural Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), “James Fergusson,” 238-251.

 

David Watkin, The Rise of Architectural History (London: Architectural Press, 1980), Chap. 3, “English Antiquarians and the Gothic Revival," 49-93, (esp. 56-93).

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004) Chap. 11, “The Reconstitution of Social Hierarchies,” 395-431.

 

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chap. VI, “Cities: European Models and Worldwide Creativity,” 241-321.

 

 

11. Machines and Meaning (11/12)

 

Primary (required)

Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott's Magazine (March 23, 1896): 403-409.

 

William Morris, News from Nowhere: Or, An Epoch of Rest, being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance, (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1893), Chaps. 1-3, 1-30.

 

William Morris, “SPAB Manifesto”, in From William Morris, ed. Chris Miele (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005): pp. 337-339.

 

Hermann Muthesius and Henry van de Velde, “Werkbund Theses and Antitheses” [1914] in Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on Twentieth-Century Architecture, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 28-31.

 

Secondary (required)

On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), Chap. 5, “The Urban Politics of Slowness,” 146-174.

 

Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Chicago 1890: The Skyscraper and the Modern City Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), Chap. 1, “Western Architecture: The Tall Office Building as Regional Type," 13-37.

 

Secondary (for reference)

 

Mary Woods, From Craft to Profession: The Practice of Architecture in Nineteenth Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), Chap. 5, “Assistants, Rivals, and Collaborators,” 138-180.

 

Catherine Boland Erkkila, “American Railways and the Cultural Landscape of Immigration,” Buildings and Landscapes 22, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 36-62.

 

Mark Jarzombek, “The ‘Kunstgewerbe,’ the ‘Werkbund,’ and the Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 1 (March 1994): 7-19.

 

Thomas P. Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), Chap. 7, “Berlin: The Coordination of Technology and Politics,” 175-200.

 

Walter Benjamin, "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century" [1935], trans. Howard Eiland, in Eiland and Michael Jennings, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 32-49.

 

Charles Davis, “Henry Van Brunt and White Settler Colonialism in the Midwest,” Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020).

 

Anthony D. King, ‘Towards a Global Historical Sociology of Building Types,” in Michael Guggenheim and Ola Söderström, eds., Re-shaping Cities: How Global Social Mobility Reshapes Urban Form (New York: Routledge, 2010), 21-42.

 

Background (recommended)

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chap. XIV, “Networks: Extension, Density, Holes,” 710-743.

 

 

12. Metropole and Colony (11/19)

 

Primary (required)

Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago, Prepared Under the Direction of the Commercial Club During the Years MCMVI, MCMVII, and MCMVIII, ed. Charles Moore (Chicago: The Commercial Club, 1909), Chaps. 1-3, 1-42.

 

Herbert Baker, “The New Delhi,” in The Times (London, Oct. 3rd, 1912), 7.

 

Secondary (required)

Deborah L. Silverman, “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism,” Part I, West 86^th, 18, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2011): 139-181.

 

Prita Meier, “Architecture Out of Place: The Politics of Style in Zanzibar.” In Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 102-138.

 

Secondary (for reference)

Adedoyin Teriba, “Style, Race, and a Mosque of the ‘Òyìnbó Dúdú’ (White-Black) in Lagos Colony, 1894,” in Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 277-287.

 

Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), Chap. 9, “Techno-Cosmopolitanism: Governing Morocco,” 277-319.

 

John Summerson, The London Building World of the Eighteen Sixties (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973).

 

Judith Kenny, “Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85:4 (1995), 694-714.

 

Joanna Bruck, “Landscapes of Desire: Parks, Colonialism, and Identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland,” International Journal of Historical Archeology 17, no. 1 (March 2013): 196-223.

 

Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), Chap. 2, “The Ringstrasse, Its Critics, and the Birth of Urban Modernism,” 24-115.

 

Yasemin Avci, “The Application of Tanzimat in the Desert: The Bedouins and the Creation of a New Town in Southern Palestine (1860-1914),” Middle Eastern Studies 45, no. 6 (November 2009): 969-983.

 

Jens Hanssen, “‘Your Beirut Is on My Desk’: Ottomanizing Beirut under Sultan Abdülhamid (1876-1909)" in Peter G. Rowe and Hashim Sarkis, eds. Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City (Prestel: Munich, 1998), 41-67.

 

Sean Anderson, Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea: An In-visible Colony 1890 - 1941 (London: Routledge, 2015), Chap. 1, “Displaced in the Sun,” 17-57.

 

Background

C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780-1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), Chap. 7, “Myths and Technologies of the Modern State,” 247-283; Conclusion, “The Great Acceleration, c. 1890-1914”, 451-487.

 

Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Chap. 8, “Imperial Systems and Nation-States: The Persistence of Empires,” 392-468.