Course Syllabus

Description: This doctoral colloquium addresses histories of architecture and modernity. The class will assume some acquaintance with more familiar extant narratives of the history of modern architecture and the key topoi through which they have been conceptualized—standardization and industrialized mass production, capitalist rationalization, nationalism, secularism, urbanization, circumscribed social and gender relations and hierarchical structures of class and race, labor and leisure, health and hygiene, media and the public sphere, Kantian aesthetics, abstraction, enlightenment notions of progress, technological invention and environmental control, utopian ideals and revolutionary upheavals, regionalism, etc.  The ambition is not to refuse or reject the more compelling versions of such critical frameworks and the variegated and contingent stakes that motivated and subtend them.  Rather, taking them as an important discursive and disciplinary archive, the ambition of the colloquium is to ask how, why, and to what ends additional historical materials and foci as well as critical and conceptual frameworks are being and/or might be introduced to complicate, recast, or even dismantle such already variegated narratives.  The course will ask, that is, how alternative genealogies and representations of this historical period have been or might continue to be forged: What happens, for instance, when modernity is no longer equated with enlightenment notions of progress or rationality, or when it is no longer understood simply to have emanated from a Western metropolitan condition?  What happens when other archives supplement existing histories, or when other stories, or even other types of stories are told, including those addressed, for instance, differently with respect to questions of gender, social injustice, race, colonization, anti-colonial struggles, geopolitical transformation, the persistence of mysticism, or the discipline’s relation to the emergence of new techniques of power?  We might also ask what other readings might emerge from within familiar discourses, such as Taylorism and Fordism, or when other political technologies are brought into focus?  Who and what, we can ask, emerge as key protagonists, discourses, sites, programs, practices, institutions, territories, forms, and technologies within such histories? And what role would the aesthetic and formal dimensions of architecture continue to play?

The ambition of the colloquium is thus to raise a set of questions relating to how as an architectural historian one constructs or demarcates an archive for the discipline and its historiography, deciding what is included, what is excluded, and how to address that which has previously been cast as other to the discipline.  It raises the question, in turn, of how to take responsibility for articulating critical, political, and disciplinary stakes within the domain of architectural history, stakes that attempt to account for architecture’s imbrication within a transforming and disjunctive modernity.  In this sense the course will operate at times in the manner of a workshop for historical projects, providing a platform for students to critically interrogate methods of conceptualizing architecture’s encounters with the forces of modernity, and of complicating historical representations. 

Students will be expected to participate in weekly seminar discussions and to make one in-class presentation of readings and two in-class presentations of their research—a short mid-term stocktaking and a final presentation.  The final paper will be a research paper on a topic, work, or figure within the history of architectural modernism.  The paper is not to be a historiographic analysis per se, but to demonstrate a methodological self-consciousness in the writing of architectural history.  Research strategies will be foregrounded.

Requirements and Grades:  Students are expected to attend all sessions and to keep up with required readings. Students are required to make all presentations specified above. All work submitted should be original and written for this course. Students should familiarize themselves with Columbia University’s Statement on Academic Honesty, found at https://www.gsas.columbia.edu/content/academic-integrity-and-responsible-conduct-research

The grade for this class will be determined as follows:

Participation and presentation    50%

Final Paper                               50%

Readings:

Required readings are available on CourseWorks and can be found under “Class Files,” then the sub-file “Shared Files.” They are organized by week.

Note: Readings have been selected to frame a series of shared references and conversations, not as methodological directives or indications of the “most advanced” practices.

AAUP Statement

Knowledge flourishes when inquiry is free and respectful. This class aims to advance knowledge through discussion, debate, and carefully selected readings and assignments. In accordance with principles of academic freedom promulgated by the American Association of University Professors and affirmed by many universities, including Columbia, the instructor has the authority to set the class syllabus, which may include controversial material relevant to topics being studied. While all participants and their views will be treated respectfully, no one should expect to be shielded from challenging or even upsetting ideas, since thoughtfully engaging such ideas is crucial to free inquiry and intellectual growth.

AI Statement

The default for this seminar is that the use of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools is disallowed unless the instructor states otherwise. If you find yourself needing to use AI tools for a specific purpose, please request permission in writing so we have a clear record. When approved, any such use must be appropriately acknowledged and cited, in every instance. In addition, note that the information produced by AI generative tools may be unreliable, inaccurate, biased, outdated, or copyrighted, and you will remain responsible for its use in this regard. To reiterate: each student is responsible for assessing the validity and applicability of any submitted AI output, and violations of this policy will be considered academic misconduct.