This seminar explores how architecture and urbanism foster, or fail to foster, meaningful human communities by exploring the conflicting claims of Historicism and Modernism through particular built examples in the United States from about 1800 to 1940. We will need to think critically about what monuments are and how they succeed or fail to embody memories of the past in the present for the future. And to distinguish monuments, which are objects, from monumentality, a quality promoted, if not invented, by early Modern theory. The course material which, while extending chronologically from pre-history to the present through comparisons and precedents, remains within the cultural heritage of the Western tradition; this is, in fact, a course about that intellectual and artistic tradition.

Viewpoint diversity is central in several ways. The course juxtaposes opposing conceptions of “good’ architecture and urbanism. Emphasis will be on the variety of objects serving, or having served, as monuments and on the diverse definitions of monumentality exemplifies the hermeneutic and critical breadth of these concepts in the Western tradition of art, architecture, and urbanism. We will take a fresh look at architectural, sculptural, and urban projects which, having been marginalized in academic scholarship, are inadequately known. The readings are almost entirely from primary sources, facilitating insight into how the projects embodied the values of those who conceived and first used them, values quite different from those common today. This emphasis on diversity in subject matter, in interpretive method, and in pedagogical intent, invites students to evaluate the built and written evidence for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

The semester is divided by topic into three learning units. The first lays out the themes of the course through readings and built work, especially by the published proceedings of the symposium titled “The Need for a New Monumentality” (1948) and John Russell Pope’s National Gallery of Art (1941). The second topic traces the creation of Washington D.C., capital city of the new democracy, from Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 plan to Henry Bacon’s Lincoln Memorial, dedicated in1922. The third, titled “A New Monumentality?” puts forward for evaluation three civic centers created in New York City between 1900 and 1940. These are: Grand Central Station and Terminal City; the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Morningside Heights; and Rockefeller Center. The topics of the units and the subjects of their constituent lectures are shown in the syllabus.

Note regarding the Fall 2026 GSD academic calendar: The first day of classes, Wednesday, September 2nd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. This course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 2nd.