Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Modernity and Architecture 1900-1945
GSD 4204-M4: Spring

This six-module sequence, offered over three semesters, presents an introduction to the complex, interwoven web of conceptual issues and historical narratives in western architecture from antiquity to the present. Each module presents detailed case studies of buildings, writings, and theoretical concepts in the specific contexts of their formation. In each case study, a major architectural or urban project is presented in depth and discussed in its social, political, and cultural contexts. Special attention is given to the interdependent relationships between architectural concepts and audiences, social institutions, aesthetic theories, and building practices. The first and last modules examine critical and theoretical issues in architecture's history (module 1) and contemporary practice (module 6); modules 2-5 cover, in chronological sequence, four of the major historical periods in the history of western architecture. Each module may be taken independently.

Module 4 is concerned with the pluralism of modernity in the first half of the 20th century; with the many different conceptions of both the modern condition and the role of architecture in shaping the spaces of modern life and society. Like the earlier modules, this one is organized in terms of a series of case studies of a buildings, unbuilt projects, and urban assemblages, which will be broadly contextualized in terms of larger problematics and themes which are critical to understanding modern architecture and the debates which constituted the discourses of the Modern Movement.

Some of the principal themes of modernity which are explored insofar as they relate to major works, ideas, and debates about architecture and the city in the module include: the new ‘mass’ scale of modern society, the development of new methods of production, the evolution of new spatial conceptions especially ‘space-time’, the impact of new mass media, film and photography in particular, and finally, a theme that pervades the period: the evolution of mass political parties on the both the left and right, and the contested space of the city and housing which were political rallying points. This context will also provide a framework for considering relationships between political ideology and the architectural avant-gardes during a period of radical social and economic change.

Requirements: two lectures per week plus one discussion section per week; readings, prepared discussion, and analytic notes for section meetings; one take-home final examination. Basis of grade: assignments and performance in section.

Transparency
GSD 4401, Lecture/Seminar

The concept of transparency is critical not only to understanding early and mid-20th century modernism, but also to engaging current architectural concerns with mediation, density, surface, light, movement, and information. The purpose of the course is twofold: to recover the theoretical, ideological, and formal complexity of transparency in the discourses of modernism, and to explore the significance of the concept of transparency for architecture today.

This exploration is founded on two working propositions: First that the discourse of transparency constitutes a kind of subtext of the discourses of modernism — a text that continuously negotiates between the technological, aesthetic, social, and psychological dimensions of architecture. Second, that modes of representational discourse outside architecture — photography, film, electronic and digital media – have figured in important ways in the architectural conception of transparency.

The first part of the course is concerned with the conceptualization of “abstract space,” in the early decades of the 20th century. This includes models of “kinesthetic” and “haptic” perception and space formation around 1900; the development of an anti-perspectival conception of “relational space” or “space-time” by architects, artists, and theorists associated with the Bauhaus (van Doesburg, Moholy-Nagy, Gropius, Giedion, etc.); experimental cimematography (Hans Richter, in particular); as well as Le Corbusier’s “plans libres” (or free plans) and the “betonte Leere” (or heightened emptiness) of Mies’s interiors in the late ‘20s.

The second part of the course examines the art/science of camouflage, theories of pattern recognition, as well as Rowe and Slutzky’s seminal articles (in Perspecta, 1963, 1971) on “phenomenal transparency” and their impact on design and architectural education in the 1960s and ‘70s: on Peter Eisenman and the New York Five as well as connections to media studies, phenomenology, and “object” art in the 1960s.

The third part of the course engages the conception of transparency in the 1990s and today (2000s): from Terrence Riley’s “light construction” (1995) and what others characterized as manifestations of “dematerialization and diffusion,” of “deep surface,” of “environment become information” to SANAA’s relational, performative transparency.

Proseminar in History, Theory and Urban Studies
GSD 4501, Seminar

This research seminar addresses subjects of history, theory and human sciences related to architecture and the city for students preparing for or enrolled in doctoral degree programs.

Scale and Modernity: City, Object, Subject
GSD 4130, Lecture

Modernity, since the late 19th century, has been experienced, perceived, and imagined in terms of radical and transformative changes in the scale of the city, the architectural object, and the social subject. Scale, which is both objectively and subjectively constituted, has operated in highly ambiguous and contradictory ways in the programs and projects of modern architecture and urbanism. Mass urbanization, mass society, mass politics, mass media, mass marketing, mass production and mobilization, are some of the tropes of modernist discourse used to described the amplified scale of modern life. Architecture and urbanism responded to the social imperatives of scale with mass housing, mass transport, superblocks, megastructures, ‘grands projets,’ megalopolis, and so on. At the same time, however, the expanding dimensions of modernity were often experienced as contraction. At the beginning of the century, for instance, as new technologies of communication connected far flung places, time and space effectively contracted—a new ‘condensed’ geography and ‘elastic’ time were created. Over the course of the 20th century, the cognitive dissonance between the objective and subjective operations of scale continuously destabilized hierarchies and identities. Indeed, the shifting scale of economic and political life is conceived today (in the age of globalization) in the same terms as it was a hundred years ago, that is as a scenario in which the metropolis is expanding to absorb the nation, and/or the nation is contracting into a metropolis.

The Sixties: Architecture in the Time of the Vietnam War
GSD 4403, Seminar

This seminar examines a critical moment in American architectural culture, during which disillusionment with postwar corporate modernism and the failure of urban renewal and public housing evolved in the mid-1960s into a sustained critique of the social and economic tenets and the reductive codes of the Modern Movement itself. In the late 1960s, the critique of modernism would turn from an activist emphasis on radical institutional reform to a preoccupation with signification and the communicative power of the architectural object.

These transformations took place within the context of radical social and political upheavals. The defining events of the decade: the civil rights movement, political assassinations, urban riots, and especially the Vietnam War, deeply divided American society along lines of race, marginality, and gender, that cut across traditional conceptions of class. At the same time, the development of new mass technologies of communication, media culture in the advanced industrial countries, rapid modernization in much of the non-Western world, and the transition to multinational consumer capitalism (the Third Technological Revolution) intensified and magnified the impact of the social and political movements of the period while shifting the focus to their representation. Although these movements often failed to achieve their immediate political goals, they created some of the physical and conceptual spaces, as well as the political subtext, for the cultural transformations that followed in their wake.

The purpose of the seminar is to interrogate this proposition by examining moments of transition—from oppositionist avant-garde subculture (informed by philosophies of alienated subjectivity: phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism) in the early 1960s, to political activism, and cultural radicalism in the mid- and late-1960s. Discussions focus on readings, key issues, and debates of the period. Connections to popular culture, avant-garde art practices, film, supergraphics and electronic spatial experiments, the "banal," as well as the discourses of political activism are explored.

Modern Architecture and the Big City as Form and Idea in Europe, 1890-1940
GSD 4340, Lecture

This course investigates the development of a modern architectural discourse (manifest in built and conceptual projects, as well as key texts) regarding the architectonic form of the big city. Focusing on the metropole as both the site of modernization and place of modernity in the early decades of the 20th century, the course examines the cultural and economic factors that gave rise to a new scale and organization of urban space and architecture. But its particular concern is with the big city as an architectural problem during this period - with projects (built and theoretical) that propose an active transformational role for the urban architectural object as an instrument in planning and transforming the metropolis and shaping both the public and private spaces of modern urban life. Beginning with Haussmann's Paris and the Vienna Ringstrasse, the course examines key sites and projects: the turn-of-the-century German practice of "city-building" and Greater-Berlin Competition; Camillo Sitte's City as a Work of Art; Otto Wagner's infinitely expandable Cosmopolis; Adolf Loos's concept of metropolitan culture; Farkas Molnar's and Hilberseimer's socialist counterprojects to LeCorbusier's Ville Contemporaine; "Americanism”: megastructures, superblocks, and skyscraper-city projects in the early 1920s; Red Vienna, and the New Berlin and Frankfurt; capitalist and collectivist projects in Czechoslovakia (Zlin, Brno, Prague); Moscow in the 1930s, and the founding of "CIAM-East" on the eve of World War II.

A significant component of the course is examination of modes of representation of the big city—particularly in films of the period. Maps and other materials may also be consulted in Harvard's collections. The course will consist of lectures and discussions in which students will give short presentations of assigned topics relating to the lectures and readings. In addition to assigned readings and class participation, a research paper is required of each student.