Versailles to the Visionaries
GSD 4421, Lecture, Spring 2009

A course on architectural theory and achievement in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. While we will proceed chronologically from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution of 1789, ours will be a selective as opposed to comprehensive approach to designs, edifices and treatises.

The course will begin by addressing architecture as an emblematization of power. This ideological context will set the stage for the gradual expansion of architectural theory and its resulting discursive field, which moved beyond debate over the orders to include phenomenology (architecture's relation to the senses), historicism (or the origins of architectural form), and the environment (the cult of nature). Our aim throughout will be to explore the larger political and social contexts of architectural creation as well as the aesthetic controversies and philosophical perspectives that brought architecture to its revolutionary juncture at Enlightenment's end. Topics to be covered: the urban royal square, Versailles and the image of absolutism, Perrault's Louvre colonnade, the church dome from Hardouin-Mansart to Soufflot, Rococo interiors, the picturesque garden, Laugier's "rustic hut," cemetery spaces and the architecture of death, visionary architects and the Sublime, the utopian city.

The Piranesi Effect
GSD 4422, Seminar, Spring 2009

This seminar focuses on the work and legacy of the architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). A selective approach to relevant aspects of the engraved corpus (from the archaeological views of Rome to the architectural fantasy of the prison etchings) will frame our contemplation of the ways in which the Piranesian image can be understood to represent the epistemological break between the early modern and modern periods.

Topics include: perspective and scenography; the visual components of the capriccio, the veduta, the pianta and the frammento; the image of Rome; architectural typologies (from bridges, arches, temples, mausolea, amphitheatres, and streets to foundations, columns, capitals, sculptural fragments, antique vases, and ornamental fireplaces); antiquarian culture; Piranesi's own polemical writings; the context provided by Vico's philosophy of history; and the modern intellectual response (Eisenstein, Foucault, Huxley, Tafuri, Yourcenar). In this seminar, major emphasis is placed on how to look at Piranesi's etchings. His is an enormously complex pictorial intelligence whose incongruities establish the basis for a formalism poised between the extremes of pure invention and archaeological veracity. Accordingly, we devote much time to attempting to decipher the compositional issues his images provoke as well as the ambiguous relationship they forge between architecture and pictoriality.

Buildings, Texts, and Contexts: Classicism: From Theory to History
GSD 4201M1/GSD 4202M2, Lecture, Fall 2008, with K. Michael Hays

The two-module sequence 4201-4202 will be taught as a single semester- long course for Fall 2008. This course is structured as a dialogue between historical and theoretical frameworks that affect our understanding of architecture and its genesis. The organizing principle here is syncretic as opposed to chronological, and synoptic rather than merely factual. We treat a selected range of concepts developed by philosophers, historians, and theorists to explain the production and experience of architecture. We move back and forth between projects from the early modern to the (almost) contemporary periods by means of one or several theoretical intertexts, which we use to open up a historical narrative across examples.

We set the stage by means of the persistent dilemma of theoretical- historical thought, inaugurated here by concepts from Kant and Hegel: is art an autonomous form or is it determined by its historical context? We then turn to Classicism, its emergence as aesthetic doctrine during the Renaissance, its association with concepts of order and universality, its historiographic legacy, and its complex relation to Modernism. From there, we move to the interaction of ideology and representation; we discuss the symbolics of perspective, architectural metaphors of power in the Baroque period, and the discursive development and transformation of ideology in Althusser and Jameson. Deleuze is the major interlocutor in the next sections, which focus on the diagrammatic imagination, its philosophical roots in Leibniz, its use as a materialist social critique, and its implications for architectural design. Deleuze's elaboration of the diagram also serves as stepping stone first for a discussion of the Sublime in Enlightenment and Postmodernist contexts, and second for the key concepts of utopia, dystopia, and heterotopia, respectively.

We conclude with the persistence of the Dialectic from Marx to Adorno to the present in order to address the production of space, the problem of abstraction, and the contemporary status of immanent critique.

The Ruin Aesthetic: Episodes in the History of an Architectural Idea
GSD 4420, Seminar, Fall 2008

One of the most arresting images in Michel Serres's Rome: The Book of Foundations is the idea that history is "a knot of different times" — a knot most visibly reified by the tangible traces of past civilizations.

Serress knot speaks as readily to the stratigraphic realities of Roman urban space as to the composite aesthetics of eighteenth-century ruin pictures or Auguste Rodins Symbolist recasting of Medieval church portals. Artifacts, fragments, vestiges, rubble, debris, detritus,wreckage: all this has prompted a venerable body of writings and objects that work the metaphor of ruin into anything from template for the Sublime to mechanism for iconoclastic violence. We will begin by thinking about architecture and the vision of the past in the early modern period, considering a range of examples such as the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Nicolas Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego, and the plates of antiquarian treatises. We will then consider how the cult of the ruin has shaped notions of nostalgia and dystopia in modern contexts. Examples might include the Surrealist discovery of the broken column house at the Desert de Retz, Le Corbusier's apprehension of columns segments from the north facade of the Parthenon, Albert Speer's ruin theory of architecture, the Heideggerian concept of Ruinanz and the reflection of absence in the National September 11 Memorial. Writings by Arnaldo Momigliano, Alois Riegl, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Manfredo Tafuri and Anthony Vidler among others will be crucial to address.