URBS 272 - Topics in Architectural History

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as ART 272) Architectural history, considered through the material factors required for buildings’ construction. Topics covered include industrialization and urbanization, shifting colonial and national formations, and geographic division of labor. We also track the consolidation of liberal capitalism and the effects of environmental extractivism in and through built spaces and landscapes. Temporal scope varies by semester, but generally cover the period of modernity, from the 1750s until today.

Topic for 2026/27b: Architecture, Land, and Labor across the Atlantic IV: The Age of Acceleration (1946 - 2000s). Who builds architecture, where, and to whom do we attribute credit for its design and realization? This course studies design and construction from the end of the Second World War to today, against the backdrop of the combined phenomena of speed and privatization of wealth. From the scales of materials and construction assemblies to city plans, and from housing crises and mass-produced schemes for architectural construction to factories and sites of agricultural extraction to private capital translated into sites of commerce disguised cultural institutions, we consider architecture from the perspective of its production. Our focus is the architecture of the Atlantic World: U.S. imperialism and Latin American states’ alternating resistance and compliance, African independence in defiance of continued resource exploitation from abroad, and declining global power of post-imperial Europe. Through the lens of technological innovations and economic developments, we consider how concepts of the value of labor and territorial possession contributed to the built environment. Jonah Rowen.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS