1. INTRO
“If, roughly from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth,
a coded language may be said to have existed on the
practical basis of a specific relationship between town,
country, and political territory, a language founded on
classical perspective and Euclidean space, why and how
did this coded system collapse? Should an attempt be
made to reconstruct that language, which was common
to the various groups making up the society—to users
and inhabitants, to the authorities and to the technicians
(architects, urbanists, planners)?”
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 1974 (Oxford,
Blackwell, 1991) 17.
This critical survey on architecture and urban
theory from the 15th to the 19th centuries will
concern itself with the question of the evolution
and eventual devolution of the Western
architectural canon. This course will investigate the making of the urban master-narrative
in relationship to 20th century modern architecture and urban theories.
In the case of this particular subject and timeline, the master-narrative can be substituted
for the master-plan. The building up of this history, the instrumentalizaton of various
aspects of Renaissance, Mannerist, Baroque and Enlightenment architectural and urban
histories have served to institutionalize over the course of the late 19th and early 20th
centuries a ʻscientificʼ urban practice. The crises effecting architecture and urbanism in
the post-war era were part of a much broader series of deep interrogations into the
legitimacy of the meta-narrative effecting philosophy, the arts, and ultimately the
sciences.
We intend to examine how the emergence of the master-narrative—predicated on a
series of highly exclusive ʻcanonicʼ events, becomes further structured and authoritative.
Over the longer duration, however, such structures have proven to become increasingly
problematic and marginal when considering the much more complex environments that
make up todayʼs urban landscapes. Hybridism, systems logic, fractal patterns and
combined forms of “recombinant” structures are recognizably altering contemporary
approaches to architecture and the city.
Today architects and urban designers are engaged in a dialectical debate over
strategies and tactics that might either loosely guide—or tightly control the future of our
great cities. This course is structured on a set of overlapping studies: an examination of
the history of architecture and cities and their consequent critical interpretations that
include most recent theoretical contributions; and a weekly survey of different aspects of
urban cultural production- from dance to rap, from theater to street art, from the printing
press to internet as a means of gauging the cityʼs position within the transformation of
public life and public space.
“The environment should be perceived as meaningful, its visible parts not only related to each other
in time and space but related to other aspects of life: functional activity, social structure, economic
and political patterns, human values and aspirations, even individual idiosyncrasies and character.
The environment is an enormous communications device…”
Kevin Lynch, Site Planning, Second Edition.
(Cambridge, MIT Press, 1971) 226.
Students will be required to choose one major city at the beginning of the semester from
a list provided below (see week 1, Monday), and develop a semester long project that
investigates the urban contextʼs multiple characteristics and physical dimensions. Final
presentations will consist of multi-media diagrams, maps, texts and will be linked to the
class web log.
