Course description
Background
Now that the modern is no longer the universalizing metric used to judge the present it can now be treated as an historical phenomenon, admittedly different than such previous phenomenon but necessarily of a past.
Method
To rethink what was the modern and what is it now through reading and drawing. What the nature of that difference is, for instance universalizing and idealizing, will be one of the strands of this seminar following this reconsideration of the modern.
The course will be divided into two halves, one concerned with modernism from 1914–1939 and the second with postmodernism from 1968-1988. Each will be prefaced by an introductory class and six presentation days. There will be two twenty-minute presentations required of each student, one on modernism and one on postmodernism, in lieu of a final paper or exam.
Each class will have a short introduction to place the week’s subject in context. This will be followed by the first student presentation and then discussion after. A ten-minute break is followed by a second presentation and discussion. Because open house is Thursday, April 4, Friday’s class will be moved to Thursday.
Part I: 1914-1939
January 18 Introduction
- The Five Points of Architecture/Maison Domino
- Vers une Architecture/Le Corbusier
- Assignment: No presentation
January 25 Le Corbusier
- Villa Stein at Garches
- Villa Savoye at Poissy
- Nine squares
- Assignment: 2 presentations
February 1 Mies van der Rohe
- Brick Country House
- Concrete Country House
- Weissenhofsiedlung
- Assignment: 2 presentations
February 8 Le Corbusier
- Swiss Pavilion
- Cité de Refuge
- Assignment: 2 presentations
February 15 Adolf Loos
- Villa Muller
- Assignment: 2 presentations
February 22 Italian Fascism and Power
- Marcello Piacentini
- Giuseppe Terragni
- Adalberto Libera
- Assignment: 2 presentations
March 1 Russian Constructivism
- Schroder House/Gerrit Reitveld
- De Stijl
- Assignment: 2 presentations
Part II: 1945-1988
March 8Introduction
- Sigfried Giedeon
- Reyner Banham
- Manfredo Tafuri
- Team 10
- Assignment: 2 presentations
March 29 Louis Kahn
- Assignment: 2 presentations
April 4 Robert Venturi
- Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
- Assignment: 2 presentations
*April 12 James Stirling/Brutalism
- Assignment: 2 presentations
April 19 Italian Rationalists vs. Radicals
- Aldo Rossi
- 15th Milan Triennale 1973
- Assignment: 2 presentations
April 26 OM Ungers/Rem Koolhaas
- Assignment: 2 presentations
Bibliography
Migayrou, Fredrick, ed. La Tendenza: Italian Architectures 1965-1985. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2012.
Le Corbusier. Vers une architecture. Paris: G. Crès et Cie, 1924.
Venturi, Robert. Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.