This course is the second in the undergraduate two-course sequence (ARCH 313/323).
The history of architecture is typically understood, taught, and learned as a history of architects. As such, architectural history has been organized by architectural authors, movements, and periods; it has been occupied with historicizing, theorizing, or otherwise contextualizing architectural masterworks; and it has aimed to produce architectural precedents for use in the design studio. A foundational assumption of this course is that confining historical attention to what has historically passed as “architecture” forces us to privilege history from above: from the perspectives of those who have had access to capital, property, power, authority, and architecture’s other preconditions. Seeking to understand the ways in which architecture has historically mediated struggles over labor, land, capital, and the material world, this course will introduce you to the global built environment through the struggles that this environment has advanced, managed, inspired, and endured. In so doing, the course will present architectural history not as an empirically verifiable record of the past “the way it really was,” but rather as a mediation of present-day concerns and a production of possible futures through historical inquiry: a project that aims to open up new architectural itineraries and new ambitions for architecture.
