This lecture course explores monumentality through a close historical and theoretical examination of what a monument has been thought to be, what monumentality has meant, and how monuments have succeeded or failed to embody their intended meanings. The course material extends chronologically from pre-history to the present but remains within the cultural heritage of the Western tradition and is, in fact, a course about that intellectual and artistic tradition with examples ranging from Stonehenge and Archaic Greek Kouroi to Breuer’s proposed service to war memorial on Cambridge Common (1945). In-depth case studies will display the variety of monuments and monumentality exemplifying the hermeneutic breadth of these concepts in the Western tradition of art, architecture, and urbanism. The course proposes a fresh look at projects which have been marginalized in academic scholarship and offers viewpoint diversity to other architectural history courses at the GSD.

All monuments are about memory but the significance of many, perhaps all, is not stable or fixed but evolves over time. Case studies will highlight how monuments are used in the creation of political and cultural identities. Always awe-inspiring and therefore close to wonder, monuments serve as a powerful idiom which, as historical examples such as Milan’s Castello Sforzesco to Hitler’s Germania show, can be abused. Urban projects will be considered through the lenses of monumentality and memory. Particular attention is given to American architecture and urbanism from the design of Washington D.C. to Rockefeller Center in New York. Some, such as the Seven Wonders of the World, fall into a separate class of monuments, lauded especially for their engineering and technology, while others, such as many UNESCO heritage sites, represent the culture that produced them. We will look to religious buildings and martyria (buildings or shrines over the tombs of martyrs), such as St. Peter’s in Rome, Richardson’s Trinity Church, Boston, and Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights in Manhattan, places of worship, which could be considered an explicit act of memory in a public place. The time seems right for a re-evaluation of the many nineteenth and twentieth-century monuments, monumental buildings, and urban communities done in historicizing styles, which are considered by Modernists as either inauthentic, authoritarian, or both. Throughout the course we will remain mindful of the Modernist rejection of the American examples, asking whether it is true.