SpaceCases
ARCH 397 Course Schedule: Mondays, 9:05 am - 11:00 am
Location: 115 West Sibley Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Christian Otto 
Course Overview:
Space is acknowledged to be the essential and irreducible property of architecture. Yet its entry into architectural discourse is relatively recent. A few 18th-century architects employed terms such as 'volume' and 'void' in their discussions about buildings, and from the 1830s on, an intellectually ambitious group of writers began to investigate issues of architectural space. More complex and explicit textual and graphic explorations of architectonic space emerged in the early 20th century in association with Modernism.
In this course, a sequence of case studies brings focus to the cultural and creative production of architectural, landscape, and urban space from the mid-18th to the later 20th century. Weekly lectures, readings and discussions, an analysis project, and a research paper comprise the course requirements.
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History of European Landscape Architecture
ARCH 399/.01/LANAR 524 Course Schedule: Thursdays, 11:15 am - 12:05 pm
Location: 461 Kennedy Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Leonard Mirin 
Course Overview: Three primary assumptions guide the direction of this course. First, that the landscape architectural tradition is rich and varied, its form responsive not only to the architecture, art, engineering, and natural sciences of its time, but to forces of economic, political, and social conditions as well. Second, that principles and techniques employed in the past may - with proper understanding of our time - lead us to inspired contemporary design solutions. And, third, that through repeated exposure to a variety of widely admired outdoor environments, the viewer begins to acquire and formulate a critical “sense of landscape architectural design.”
The course examines the influences and the forms which have established a basis for the landscape architecture tradition in Europe and parts of the Orient. Emphasis is placed upon the recognition of the principles and techniques, and upon the continuity of design imagination inherent in specific examples of the altered environment. Public and private spaces, gardens, estates, streets, parks, housing sites, and new town plans are analyzed with reference to the historical manner in which a variety of determinants - cultural, ecological, legal, strategic, economic - suggest themselves in design solutions. As a parallel theme, the course traces the changing role of the landscape architect from designer for the elite to planner in the public service.
The course format of slide-accompanied lectures surveys the classical tradition in order to establish the focus on developments from the Italian Renaissance to the present. Weekly discussion sections offer opportunities to present ideas developed in short exercises in the graphic comprehension of historic spaces, and are used to elaborate on thoughts presented in either the lectures or readings.
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Italian Renaissance Architecture: 1400 - 1600, Regola and Invenzione
ARCH 399.02 Course Schedule: Thursdays, 2:45 pm - 4:25 pm
Location: 101 West Sibley Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Daniel Sherer
Course Overview:
The course provides a historical overview of the major figures of Italian Renaissance architecture from 1400 to 1600: Brunelleschi, Alberti, Bramante, Michelangelo, Peruzzi, Giulio Romano, Sansovino, Sanmicheli, Palladio, Serlio. Stressing the dialectic of rule and linvention implicit in the revival of classical forms, we will study the diverse cultural and artistic factors that entered into the project of forging a new language based on antiquity yet moving beyond its example. Topics covered include the social and cultural implications of the link between architecture and humanism; the role played by architecture in elaborating new urban strategies, chiefly in Florence, Urbino, Mantua, Rome, Milan, and Venice; the search for a new type of canon that simultaneously presupposed and challenged the authority of Vitruvius and the study of ancient buildings; the rise of the new techniques of graphic representation based on orthographic and perspective projection; the emergence of the treatise and its articulation of universally applicable theoretical norms, along with an awareness of the potentials of license; the transformation of architectural culture by printmaking, whose mechanical reproduction of image and text revolutionized the dissemination of theory, conferring upon the image the status of model and making it into the primary vehicle of architectural knowledge; the theorization of an architecture which draws both on the precepts of nature and on the example of the other arts; the division of architects into three basic categories, based on their early training and experience as masons, painters, or sculptors, and two subcategories, comprising goldsmiths and theatrical set-designers; the active role of the patron and the parameters of artistic freedom accorded to the architect; the assertion of an unprecedented social, cultural and intellectual status for the architect, constituted by novel concepts of authorship, access to theory and the antique, and a new consciousness of the historicity of architecture and the city; the relation of architecture to new uses of visual representation that helped inaugurate the modern era.
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Manfredo Tafuri: The Historical Project and the Crisis of Modernity
ARCH 399/699.03 Course Schedule: Fridays, 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: 144 East Sibley Hall
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Daniel Sherer
Course Overview: From the 1960’s onwards, and especially since his participation in Oppositions and the circle around the IUAV, Manfredo Tafuri has played a pivotal role in contemporary architectural discourse. His concept of modernity as a permanent crisis devoid of any teleological mission re-framed the trajectories of architecture from the Renaissance to the present and brought about a new understanding of the discipline. Basing itself on a reading of a convergence of different factors (ideological, political, and social) while placing architecture’s immanent formal processes at the center of the analysis, this understanding highlights architecture’s historical constraints, its fragile margins of autonomy, the dialectic between its specific cultural role and exchanges with the other visual arts, and its problematic relation with such overfamiliar categories as Modernism, Postmodernism, the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde. Tracing Tafuri’s intellectual development through its various contexts of production and reception in Europe and the U. S. A., and comparing his approach to rival accounts elaborated by seminal figures like Wittkower, Rogers, Rossi, Zevi, Rowe, Banham and Frampton, the seminar will attempt to move beyond the ingrained clichés that have tended to impede assessments of his work—the end of architecture, nihilism, political and economic determinism and a nostalgic disconnection from the present. In their place, it will emphasize the hermeneutic potentials of some of the key concepts animating Tafuri’s historiography and criticism (the modernist “eclipse of history”, the critical dimension of autonomy, operative criticism, utopia, architectural ideology, and the “weak power” of historical analysis). The course will situate the originality of his contribution not in those theoretical imperatives most commonly associated with his legacies but in the evolving tension between the architectural project and the historical project.
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Case Studies in Modernist Suburbia
ARCH 399/699.04
Course Schedule: Wednesdays, 9:05 am - 11:00 am
Location: 144 East Sibley Hall
Prerequisites: A
RCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: David Salomon 
Course Overview: At first glance, nothing seems more antithetical than the goals and forms of modernism from those of the typical suburban sub-division. One is avant-garde the other traditional, one radical the other conservative, one minimalist, efficient and elegant the other extravagant, wasteful and ugly. Yet, before and after WWII many modern architects tried to influence and participate in the ever-expanding suburban market; often proposing solutions that were in many respects consistent with the methods used by the so-called “community builders.” In other words, it wasn’t for lack of trying that modern architecture is relatively scarce in certain parts of suburbia. Still, enough modernist sub-divisions were planned and built such that we can ask if there are any general explanations for their historical failure, and, to see if those failures can teach us anything about how modern architecture can re-engage the issues and problems confronting suburban design and development today.
Modernism’s alternative vision of suburbia was not limited to the flattening of roofs. There was, of course, an emphasis on experimenting with new materials, methods, spaces, and landscapes in and around the single family house. Physical form was important, but so too were their suggested changes to political, economic, and social forms; changes that directly addressed the larger historical trends of racial and social discrimination in housing policy and the acceleration of industrial and urban decentralization. For example, almost all the subdivisions, small towns and regional plans proposed by modernists suggested that land be held or owned cooperatively. On this point even Gropius and Wright could agree. Yet, like many of their merchant-builder rivals, most modernists emphasized walkable neighborhoods, strict uni-functional zoning, as well as deed restrictions and the creation of semi-private or quasi-governmental institutions to ensure a development’s long-term social, economic and aesthetic conformity and stability. To help sort out these seeming contradictory facts a variety of well known and not so well know case studies - including those by Le Corbusier, Wright, Gropius, Hilbersheimer, Barragan, Jones, Gruen and Ain - will be thoroughly examined in order to establish the operative similarities and differences between the normative suburbs and their modernist doppelgangers.
This course is designed for upper level undergraduates and graduate students with a maximum enrollment of 24.
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Tale of Two Cities: Modern Landscape Architecture in New York and Paris
ARCH 399/699.05 Course Schedule: Fridays, 9:05 am - 11:00 am
Location: 200 Rand Hall
Prerequisite: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Leonard Mirin 
Course Overview: Two of the West’s greatest cities entered the modern age almost simultaneously and in the aftermath of cataclysmic national socio-political events. Spurred on by rapid technological innovations, Paris and New York altered the fabrics of their urban personalities with dramatic productions of landscape architectural creations. Public parks, grand avenues, social housing schemes, playground designs, urban corporate estates, rooftop gardens, waterfront recovery and international expositions are but some of the areas which will be investigated during the courses. The cross fertilization of ideas between important figures in landscape architecture such as Jean Adolphe Alphand, Eugene Haussmann, Gabriel Gueverkian, in Paris, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Robert Moses and Gilmore Clarke in New York will be reviewed to understand how the “old world” and the “new” contributed to distinctly innovative approaches affecting each city’s open space designs.
The emphasis of the course will be on three broad periods in the life of these cities:
1850 – 1900
1900 - World War II
Post W.W. II – The Present
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Architectural Historiography
ARCH 680 Course Schedule: Tuesdays, 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: Fine Arts Library Classroom
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Medina Lasansky
Course Overview:
This seminar will provide a survey of architectural historiography paying particular attention to the paradigm shifts of the last twenty-five years. Through a series of readings (a combination of case studies and critical theoretical pieces) we will assess the preoccupations of current scholarship. We will consider the relationship of contemporary practice to history; the relationship between architectural history and the disciplines of art history and historic preservation; the extent to which their separation has both energized and handicapped the separate fields; canon formation and the mechanics of fame; and the changing role played by institutions (museums, universities, journals, publishers) in re-framing the field.
Through the critical readings of important texts we will discuss the current state of the field while simultaneously reconsidering our position in it. Our discussions will focus as much upon the historical studies of others, as upon our own practice of history. How can we intelligently apply theory to practice, develop research strategies that maximize methodological alliances, imbue the study of the past with contemporary relevance, and contribute as much to other disciplines as we borrow from them.
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Situating Le Corbusier
ARCH 688 Course Schedule: Wednesdays, 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: Fine Arts Library Classroom
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Christian Otto 
Course Overview: Considered by many to be the most significant architect of the 20th century, Le Corbusier is the subject of a multitude of monographs and analytical works, the iconic center of a foundation that protects and provides access to his built work, and maintains an archive of his writings and designs. So powerful was his aesthetic and textual production that his influence has been widespread and pervasive – entire schools of architecture (including Cornell in the 1960s and 1970s) were referred to as “Corb academies.”
This seminar situates Le Corbusier in a modernist context and brings focused study to his writing, graphic work and designs. It also considers Le Corbusier from a historiographic perspective – how his contemporaries, and subsequent generations of historians and cultural institutions have assessed and analyzed his work, and the ways that generations of architects have reacted to, and even emulated the architect’s modes of articulating a design theory and practice.
This seminar requires close reading and discussion of Le Corbusier’s writings, and of significant contemporary texts and monographic studies. Buildings and graphic work will also be studied, at times in relation to written or spoken production. Participants in the seminar will likewise be asked to produce work that is written, graphic and spoken.
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