History, Criticism and Theory in Architecture: Things of Modernity

Abstract

This course will unpack the agency of a wide range of devices, gadgets and apparatuses in the design of buildings, the experience of the city and the mediation of social relations in the modern era.

Objective

Students successfully completing the course will be in a position to consider ways of applying these conceptual apparatuses to architectur

Content

Architectural histories focussing on the discipline’s ‘heroes’, ‘styles’ and ‘canonical buildings’ miss the complexity of a practice embedded in, and actively contributing to, the global process of modernisation. For the factors that have transformed architecture worldwide in the last two hundred years have been less individual figures, formal accomplishments or singular buildings, than new technologies, organisational models and professional alignments. One way of grasping these processes, and by extension better understanding architecture’s central role in the continual unfolding of modernity, is to shift our attention from the discipline’s internal discourse to what buildings are actually made of. In other words, to think of architecture as an assemblage of technical objects (in the case of the HIL building, for instance, a concrete frame, metal cladding panels, glass panes, neon lights, elevators, air-conditioning machines, ventilation ducts, radiators, partitions, studded rubber tiles, and so on). From this standpoint, modern buildings appear as ensembles of things. But what is a ‘thing’? And how do such ‘things’ change the way we conceive of buildings, of ourselves and of others? This course will unpack the agency of a wide range of devices, gadgets and apparatuses in the design of buildings, the experience of the city and the mediation of social relations in the modern era. Throughout the course, we will do so by tracing the positioning and function of discrete artefacts within broader networks of human, material and legal stakeholders. Parallel to that, we will survey a broad literature on the ontological, epistemological and social politics of things and matter more in general. Readings will include key texts in architectural history, semiotics, material culture studies, actor-network theory, and the recent field of ‘new materialism’. Students successfully completing the course will be in a position to consider ways of applying these conceptual apparatuses to architecture and to read buildings from an object-oriented perspective.

Resources