ARTH 106
An Invitation to World Architecture Fall 2024
Division I D Difference, Power, and Equity

Class Details

What is architecture? Built form? Object? Space? How do we think about architecture as we move around, within, and through it? What can architecture tell us not only about material, design, and engineering, but also about the individuals, groups, and communities who make it? These inquiries provide the starting points for thinking about what architecture means as concept, space, and practice, and how it affects the ways in which human beings experience the world. As the primary mode through which we organize our lived reality, architecture not only channels human behavior into specific repertoires of action and reaction but also symbolizes beliefs, value systems, and ideas about the self, gender, nation, race/ethnicity, community, life, death, and the transcendent. Such themes, thus, constitute the critical lenses that students will use over the course of the semester to unpack how structural form has and continues to define the human condition in the broadest sense. Drawing from a variety of texts and examples that emphasize the diversity and complexity of architectonic traditions around the world, this course will analyze how individuals have employed architectural strategies to solve the problems of living within diverse contexts and how such spaces not only provide meaning in everyday life but also actively and dynamically order the world as space, object, environment, text, process, and symbol.
The Class: Format: lecture/conference; This course has 2 components: lectures and conferences / discussion sections. Students will be expected to attend two lectures and one conference / discussion section weekly. Students will sign up separately for the lecture component and the conference / discussion section component.
Limit: 45
Expected: 45
Class#: 1358
Grading: yes pass/fail option, yes fifth course option
Requirements/Evaluation: Written evaluative measures: 6 - 8 object lab assignments and / or written responses to class prompts, and 6 in-class quizzes. Other evaluative measures: conference / discussion section participation and attendance.
Prerequisites: none
Enrollment Preferences: This course has a running waitlist. Students waitlisted from past semesters will have enrollment priority, followed by art history majors, and then first-year students.
Distributions: Divison I Difference, Power, and Equity
DPE Notes: This course fulfills DPE requirements in two ways. First, it unsettles established presuppositions, biases, and predispositions that have positioned the "West" as "best" in canons of architectural history. Secondly, it explores how architecture - past and present - communicates, supports, and/or resists hierarchies of power and socio-political influence in society by acting as modes of propaganda, tools of imperialism, sites of resistance, and/or spaces of affirmation.

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