Major social, political and cultural changes are reflected in ways humans build and shape their environments. Since the Industrial Revolution, the rapid transformation of regimes, the remaking of social classes, the development of new technologies and the emergence of new methods of production have marked a distinctive era of accelerating modernization that ushered in new ways of interacting in and with the world. In this course we will examine buildings and landscapes from about 1750 CE to the present, including the development of infrastructures for transportation, communication and energy production that transformed the ways people live and work, the ways products are made and distributed, the ways territories are planned and resources exploited. The emergence of modern nation-states in the 19th-century and decolonization in the 20th were accompanied by concepts of citizenship, human rights and political ideologies that required new types of buildings, cities and borders. Global organizations including colonial empires, world’s fairs, sports associations, and the United Nations required buildings that project and shape identities while accommodating new publics. Countering the effects of relentless modernization, the development of museums, historic preservation and world heritage redefine sites and monuments and how we relate to past and remote cultures. The scale and violence of global wars and on-going regional conflicts necessitate temporary and improvised construction and redefined the idea and purpose of commemorative monuments. Through the lens of the built environment, the priorities, potentials, failures and novelties of the modern world emerge in all their awesome, terrible complexity.
Core Course for the Architectural Studies (BA) major and the Architecture (BS) major.