Buildings, Texts, and Contexts III: Architecture in the 20th Century

This course will examine the discourse and practices of modern architecture in the context of the political, economic, aesthetic, and cultural changes that occurred across the span of the twentieth century. Organized around thematic concerns proposed and debated by architects, the course will address the foundational dimensions of architectural practices during the first of the century as well as the subsequent reactions and revisions to those practices in the latter half of the century. Lectures, discussion sections, and other formats will incorporate different techniques of historical and theoretical investigation of several different trajectories of discourse, to produce not a chronological survey but a synthetic pre-history of the architectural present.