This seminar will explore logics of inquiry which are appropriate for critical historicizations
of architecture. Our point of departure is historical materialism: a set of logics with unique
capacities to apprehend architecture’s often ignored, distorted, and disavowed material
and ideological conditions.
The seminar stages itself at a historical moment in which the methods, practices, and
politics of critique cannot be taken for granted—a moment when critique is necessary to
properly grasp historical events, dynamics, and structures but also domesticated through
the institutionalization of critique in hollowed-out and professionalized forms. In such a
moment, critical research methods cannot be assumed; they cannot be grasped nominally
(i.e. what is posed as critique is often anything but critical); and they cannot be posed as
the byproduct of other methods.
Rather, this historical moment (like every other historical moment) solicits its own history:
the history of the theory and practice of historical materialism. In this seminar, we will trace
this history with attention to its double significance for critical architectural history. On the
one hand, we will attend to a history in which historical materialism has been reformulated
in confrontation with colonialism, post-colonialism, subalternity, and Indigeneity; on the
other hand, we will attend to a history structured by transformations of and contradictions
in material conditions.
Pursuing the history and theory of historical materialism for architectural history, the
seminar will not oTer a comprehensive survey of historical materialism nor will it present
its concepts and commitments as fixed, stable, and “correct.” Rather, the seminar is
intended as a space in which we will explore the analytic possibilities that historical
materialism open up for us, today, when we study it as historically situated and socially
constituted. The ambition of the seminar, then, is to leave students with a clear and well-
defined understanding of the current possibilities, limits, and challenges of critical history,
along with a set of research methods and practices with which to negotiate the preceding
in their own scholarly practice.
Readings for the seminar will primarily be drawn from historiography and theory. Student
work will be split between the introduction and discussion of core readings and the
utilization of core readings in individual research projects. The seminar is open to doctoral
students; undergraduate and masters-level students may enroll with permission from the instructor.
