ENVI 311
North American Suburbs Spring 2010
Division I Writing Skills
Cross-listed ARTH 311 / ENVI 311
This is not the current course catalog

This course, with two morning and one afternoon (field) sessions weekly, details the intentions, built forms, and historical unfolding of that environment which now houses more Americans than either city or countryside. Among the topics to be studied are: seminal suburban communities in various regions of Canada and the United States; the quest for a rural ideal and the celebration of a tamed outdoors; the extent to which suburbs may be environments for child-raising, given the status of youth in modern societies; the successional patterns as farmlands, or estates, are subdivided (as with Dutch New York’s bouweries) and later may become part of central business districts; the kaleidoscope of architectural styles and revivals; the manner in which these communities may be products of their various linkage systems to a central place, or city; the degree to which they are increasingly centers in their own right, with attendant automobile-induced horizontality; and their unfolding historiography. For that historiography this seminar will scrutinize comparatively the work of such scholars or commentators as Scott, Copeland, Olmsted, Gottmann, Warner, Gans, Fishman, Kelly, Kennedy, Venturi, Binford, Rowe, Stern, Kenneth Jackson, Sies. Special attention, in the field, will be given to the suburban growth of Albany.