What is “visionary” in the study of architecture and the built environment? What is the role of ideology in the shaping of architectural visions? Is history destined to repeat itself? What if we work our way back ... to the future? This course critically interrogates visionary architecture in its historical and spatial dimensions.

What makes an architect great, and who decides what counts as a masterpiece? Through readings, discussions, and archival visits this seminar explores how ideals of genius and singular authorship have shaped architectural history and how collective, feminist, and everyday practices challenge these narratives foregrounding architectures of care, informality, and even failure.

What does it mean to call a building, a career, or a life mediocre, and who decides? This seminar takes mediocrity seriously as a historical and conceptual problem, tracing its long inversion from classical virtue to the sin of hustle culture, and exploring how different architectural history might look when written from the middle of the curve.

How can we think of utopias in the dystopian times we live in? Are all utopian visions devoid of reformist agency, as historians have pointedly warned us? What is the role of architectural history in navigating these questions? This course critically interrogates the concept of utopia in its historical and spatial dimensions, through a combination of lectures, readings, and in-class discussion.