ART 394 - Architecture, “Originality,” Reproduction: First-Edition Modern Architecture Publications

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as URBS 394) Vassar College has received a donation of a trove of first-edition architecture books and magazines from the Jeffries family. The collection features Frank Lloyd Wright’s Wasmuth Portfolio (1910), Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (1923), a range of significant nineteenth-century books, and several more by other protagonists of architectural modernism. As a mass medium, mechanical printing rendered architecture obsolete (or so the consensus has been since Victor Hugo’s lament, ventriloquized through the villain of Notre-Dame de Paris, in a chapter titled “This Will Kill That”). Supposedly unmediated experience of architecture demands a physical visit to a completed building: the presumptive “original.” Yet such ostensible authenticity is complicated by forms of presentation and representation such as drawings and text, essential to architectural practice, which are eminently reproducible. Thus we frame our research by asking, What roles do printed matter play in the production of architecture? How did architects use print as a complement to their work in other media and materials, from drawings and photographs to physical building materials? How can we “read” architecture? How can we “inhabit” books?

This Intensive meets in Special Collections to study the publications included in the collection. Deconstructing the concept of originality, we practice direct encounter with original copies of reproduced printed materials that reproduce original built objects, themselves reproduced from architects’ original drawings, printed and reproduced. Jonah Rowen.

Prerequisite(s): ART 106 .

One 2-hour period.

Course Format: INT