This course explores architecture’s role in the rise of global capitalism, circa 1700 to present. Surveying a wide range of buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes across the Atlantic world, the aim is to understand how the built environment evolved to guide practices of capital accumulation—from the plantations of the early modern Caribbean to the “supertalls” of Billionaires’ Row. Readings draw from a growing body of scholarly literature that approaches design as an agent of political economy as opposed to a reflection of pre-existing ideas and economic structures. The seminar’s case studies therefore emphasize the reciprocity between themes of architectural and capitalist modernity (e.g., Circulation, Development) as well as the spatial forms and extractive processes that accompany them. Course work results in critical historical perspectives for the study of present-day spatial inequality. Moreover, moving beyond familiar narratives and geographies of modernity, we will consider architecture’s relation to not only the production of wealth, but also counter-models of local autonomy, mutual aid, and redistribution.
