Spring 2008 Territories of Investigation: Architecture and Urbanism Contact Zones: "Colonial & Post Colonial Cities as Dialectical Landscape of Transfer" ARCH 338/638.01 / CRP 619
Schedule: Thursdays. 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: 142 East Sibley Hall
Professor: Jeremy Foster Prerequisites: The course is open to graduate students in city & regional planning, architecture, landscape architecture, as well as upper-level undergraduates in the same fields. Class size will be limited to 16 students.
Course Overview:
“The local and global are not set apart but seen as soliciting each other. The double geography of the global/local is not simply a matter of the global reaching into the local, but it is also a matter of the local needing that which is not local to constitute itself. The quest for a sense of identity is not simply a return to an autochthonous essence, it is always also about an ‘experience of division’”. –Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire
If the ‘landscape idea’ epitomizes the Western gaze that distances, objectifies, and attempts to control peoples or territories perceived to be in some way ‘other’, and urbanism is based on the persuasive use of rational analysis, planning and design, then the urban landscape could be seen as one of the prime theatres in which European imperialism has been enacted, projected and naturalized. This class explores this proposition by looking at the spatial design and cultural use of ‘colonial cities’. Rather than focusing on the asymmetries of power that created these cities, the course will consider them as a ‘contact zones’ – productive spaces in which subjects previously separated by geographical or historical circumstances are brought into spatial and temporal co-presence with each other, and in which subjects and groups are constituted in and by their relation to each other; it stresses co-presence, interaction, interlocking relations of power, and the dialectical construction of places, identities, and ideologies. This ‘contact’ perspective has recently come to the fore in debates about globalization, but it has been implicit ever since the inauguration of overseas trade and travel through which western Europe constructed its political, cultural and economic authority. Thus, although geographically removed from the centers of power, colonial cities played an important role in the strategic development of European modernity, as well as the tactical emergence of self-consciously “non-European” societies and cultures. Urban forms produced by this interaction helped symbolically and materially mediate ideas about nature, identity, health, gender, race, and social order, not just in colonial locations, cantonments, ports-of-call, hill stations and administrative centers, but also in imperial capitals, industrial metropolises and trading entrepots.
This course uses a ‘contact’ perspective to explore how the colonial city – its overall configuration, buildings, infrastructures, public open spaces and monuments -- helped mediate this mutual cultural and ideological construction, in both the center and periphery. We begin with an overview of geographical discourses that shaped Western colonialism, and the urbanistic consequences of this, by comparing the articulation of metropole and colony in two different ‘empires’, drawing on examples from ‘grand narrative’ 19th C. imperialism as well utopian 20th C modernist internationalism. The class will then turn to the legacy of this center-periphery articulation today, when the geographical flow of people and ideas has become stronger and more omnidirectional, and international patterns of trade, travel, and consumption intersect with the politics of migration and diasporic identity. Using texts and visual imagery, we will explore the inventive, combinative forms and practices that emerge in cities subject to transnational exchange of money, ideas and practices, the use of urban and architectural design as a vehicle of ‘decolonization’, and how émigré communities are transforming the cities of the metropole. Finally, we will consider how, under the neo-colonial order of globalization, the increasingly-differentiated privatized city of the global North is finding its counterpart in cities of the global South, where multi-national and non-resident enclaves co-exist with informal settlements and other ‘zones of indistinction’. Our discussions will range from cities in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australasia & South America, to those in Europe and elsewhere that have been reciprocally shaped by this colonial encounter.
Requirements: Students will be expected to read, and discuss about, 40 - 50 pp. of reading each week. In addition they will need to submit a carefully-researched and critically-informed ca. 3,500 word research paper on a particular urban condition or formation in a specific city (or pair of cities) whose culture and identity have been/are currently being shaped by exchanges of resources, people and/or ideas. There will be interim presentations to allow discussion and review of research in class.
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The City as a Site of Consumption
ARCH 338/638.03 Schedule: Fridays. 10:10 am - 12:05 pm
Location: Fine Arts Library Classroom
Professor: André Bideau Prerequisites: Course limited to 15 upper-level and graduate students with basic knowledge of 20th century architecture history.
Course Overview:
Now we are left in a world without urbanism, only architecture. The neatness of architecture is its seduction; it defines, excludes, limits, separates from the „rest“.
Rem Koolhaas, Whatever happened to Urbanism? (1994)
Urban development is inscribed in economic cycles. The history of the city can be read not only in terms of these cycles, but also through the subjectivities that capitalism has produced: Ever since the inception of metropolitan culture, narratives of chaos, crisis and loss have been projected onto the city. The architectural object registers these „shocks“, as does the architectural profession.
Modernism attempted to systematize the urban condition by embracing the logics of classic Taylorization and by locating architectural discourse in a political, economic and technological infrastructure. In advanced capitalism, however, urban development, modes of production and patterns of consumption eschew the logic of planning. This has led recent practises to search for adequate conceptual responses by registering the fluid dynamics of postfordist accumulation.
Straddling concepts of “modern” and “postmodern” space, this seminar addresses the relationships between urbanity, consumption and architectural objects. Architectural production will be discussed within a framework of urban growth, hypertrophy and dysfunctionality. The focus of The City as a Site of Consumption are case studies and theoretical-critical readings (Foster, Hardt/Negri, Harvey, Jameson, Koolhaas, Lash, Tafuri, Urry, Zukin etc.). We will investigate the fascination, opportunism, love-hate relationships developed by architectural avantgardes toward political, institutional and corporate forces that reshape cities. And we will ask how far avantgarde rhetoric has itself become a commodity in an urban condition where cultural and economic spheres have merged.
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The Urban Landscape of Renaissance Rome
ARCH 384 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.
The class in limited to fifteen students.
Professor: Medina Lasansky
Course Overview:
This class will explore the urban morphology, architecture, and civic life of Renaissance Rome as well as the historiographic legacy of that period. We will survey the important issues, individuals, and building projects of the city between 1450 and 1600 as well as critique the fascination with Renaissance Rome by subsequent generations of architects, historians and tourists as diverse as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Le Corbusier. The class will also study pertinent primary source material housed in the Johnson Museum and the Kroch Rare Books Library (including early editions of Vitruvius, Alberti, and Palladio, the engravings of Piranesi, as well as a variety of material produced by and for tourists). Students will complete several research projects throughout the course of the semester.
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The Cumulative City
ARCH 393 Course Schedule: Tuesdays. 11:15 am - 1:10 pm
Location: 101 West Sibley
Prerequisites: ARCH 181/182 or ARCH 581/582 or permission of instructor.
Professor: Christian Otto
Course Overview: In this course we address the physical transformation of the cityscape. Our purpose is to explore the complex and tangible evolution of urban form, to understand visual meanings lodged in the urban domain, to comprehend the dynamics of order within dissonance. We engage our investigation thematically, and by probing change in modes of representation. Our case study approach considers several European and American cities from 1800 to 2000. Requirements for the course are substantial: readings, dialogs, graphic analysis, written papers, and examinations; the course is a good choice for those who love cities, and who recognize that the city is too important to be casually considered.
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