ARTH 500
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: The Shapes of Utopia Fall 2012
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

This seminar takes as its subject the architectural articulations of utopia in the early modern period. Setting the stage for our discussions will be some of the Classical philosophical models–from polis to metropolis–as interpreted by urban historian Lewis Mumford, among others. We will grapple with the medieval monastery as organizing principle of communal life (the Plan of St. Gall). We will then turn to the image of the city-state and the connections between microcosm and macrocosm it articulated. The word “utopia” denotes simultaneously “no-place” and “happy place”–a double meaning exploited in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), the novel that defined the genre. We will treat More’s city of Amaurote as well as Ambrosius Holbein’s memento mori map in the context of the Age of Discovery. Ultimately ours will be a selective as opposed to comprehensive approach to the theme, including such examples as: the Ideal City panels of Piero della Francesca’s circle, Filarete’s city of Sforzinda, the geometric configurations of the fortified city (orthogonal, circular, and radial), and the myth of Arcadia and its legacy (from the Pastoral Concert attributed to Titian or Giorgione to Nicolas Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego). We will conclude with Enlightenment experiments such as Boullée’s visionary architectural drawings and Ledoux’s ideal city of Chaux.