Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: THEORY AND MODERNISM

Department: Architecture

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: This course operates as a forum for thinking broadly about the cultural modernity and architectural modernism. This semester, the course will consider a deeply persistent, greatly underestimated, and increasingly important cultural figure: the building that lives. We will study some of the most important formulations of this trope from antiquity to postmodernity, from figures such as the flying temples and walking statues of antiquity to contemporary problems of posthuman existence and 'animate' materials in architecture. We will see that the living building inhabits a 'monstrous' terrain where the limits of three central fabrications of culture--humanity, technology, and nature--are mutually transgressed. Graduate/Undergraduate Equivalency: ARCH 625.