Beauty, Bridges, Boxes, and Brutes: “Modern” Architecture From 1750 to 1960

This course aims to give, through slides and readings, a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of modern architectural practice and theory from its origins in Enlightenment notions of ideal beauty, type, form, and scientific function to its postwar iteration in the new Brutalism, based on truth to materials, concrete challenges, subconscious impulses, and a theory of the ugly. Along with major movements (Arts and Crafts, Technological Sublime, Art Nouveau, Bauhaus) and figures (William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier), we will learn to read architecture and to read with architects in order to contextualize form and its urban, sociopolitical, and epistemological implications and to see how architecture gives form to context. Group conferences will focus on primary sources, dealing with beauty, the sublime, ornament, destruction, and totalizing reason in architectural theory. Two papers and an architectural notebook dedicated to class notes, readings, drawings, musings, etc. will be required.