This course offers a global view of architectural and urban history from antiquity (c. 3500 BCE) to the early modern period (c. 1750 CE). The class is organized around three types of historical characters: travelers, believers, and makers and chronicles the built environments that they created or imagined. Each class session will be based around case studies that ask how a certain type of person—a craftsperson, a queen, or a monk—-might have constructed and used their physical environments. Through the semester we will also address the concept of global as an environmental response by individuals and communities to connect with people and places that were different from themselves. Sometimes this happened through travel and migration or through trade or conquest. Other times persons remained stationary yet imagined and created worlds that connected the living and dead, the profane and the spiritual, or the mundane and the philosophical. Yet other times people were forced to move—as enslaved persons or as nomad—these persons too made their worlds with the resources that were available to them. Studying the built environments of people who thought, lived, and comported themselves differently from “us” will prepare you to live, work, and play in a world increasingly marked by difference rather than homogeneity.
Core Course for the Architectural Studies (BA) major and the Architecture (BS) major.