ART 370 - Seminar in Architectural History

Semester Offered: Fall
1 unit(s)

(Same as URBS 370) Topic for 2026/27a: Building sites are inherently sites of class confrontation. Financier-capitalists hire architects and managers to supervise workers, who sell their labor for subsistence wages. Once completed, constructed buildings sustain stratification by spatially segregating people by class, race, and gender, on scales ranging from rooms to urban neighborhoods to entire regions. From the moment that architects begin to draw, they formulate means of exclusion: lines represent walls and doors, instruments that restrict who is allowed to be where. Architecture’s very appearance can serve as a marker of class distinction, affirming the aesthetics of a ?cultured? stratum of society, and often reinforcing conservative tastes of the working class. Thus while taste may be related to class, the relationship between these phenomena is frequently complex.

This course studies modern architectural history (from the eighteenth century to today) through the lens of class conflict. Where have buildings exacerbated preexisting divisions between people? What precise spatial, organizational, and material devices contribute to segregation? How do we see ramifications of class stratification in domestic settings and the enforcement of gender norms? Readings include selections from John Ruskin, Harriet Martineau, Karl Marx, Catharine Beecher, Thorstein Veblen, Henri Lefebvre, Pierre Bourdieu, Fredric Jameson, Manfredo Tafuri, Dolores Hayden, David Harvey, and others. Through a combination of focused architectural analysis and an intensive program of reading in political economy and architecture, we develop methods of interpreting urban, suburban, and rural landscapes by considering how they were built, who built them, and who they were built for. Jonah Rowen.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: CLS