Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: EVOLUTION CUSTOM BUILT: ARCHITECTURE, GENETICS, AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Department: Art History

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Credit Hours: 3

Description: In the twentieth century, architects, scientists, engineers and technocrats attempted to free humanity from the constraints of nature…and were met with developments in science and technology sufficient to do so. Tracking the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century techno-scientific impetus to re/design the shape of the future, from the level of genes to the scale of the built environment, this seminar combines investigations and theories of landscape, object-oriented ontology, architecture and ecocriticism. In the first part of the course, we’ll unpack the history of modern agrilogistic thought, which projected empty, unoccupied space for opportunity and development onto otherwise occupied chromosomes, cultures and landscapes. The second section of this seminar traces the drive to order the biological world, using logics of efficiency and accountability, by rereading developments in energy, industry and resource development through the lens of object oriented ontology. Finally, we’ll reconsider developments in the plant, animal and human sciences that bolstered humanity’s twentieth-century hubris, from the birth of genetics to the role radiation played in liberating plant breeding from the confines of Mendelian crosses. Graduate students will have six additional readings and extra presentations of the landscape and architecture projects. Graduate/Undergraduate Equivalency: HART 473. Mutually Exclusive: Cannot register for HART 573 if student has credit for HART 473.