CourseNo: ARCHA4348_001_2012_3 Meeting Location: AVERY HALL 113 Meeting Time: R 11:00A-01:00P AHI Syllabus This syllabus is available for download as a pdf under 'Files & Resources'. A4348 Architecture History 1660-1860 Instructor: Mary McLeod ([email protected]) Teaching Assistant: Collin Anderson ([email protected]) Class Meetings: Thursday 11-1 (1:30 or 2 if films or outside lectures) Location: Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall Sections: To be announced. Office Hours: Friday 1:30-3:30, 306 Buell Hall Phone: 212-854-8262 The objective of the two semester sequence Architecture History I, II is to provide students with a basic critical understanding of major developments in European (and to a lesser extent, American) architectural history during what is sometimes considered the modern period, from the late seventeenth-century to the post-World War II era. The course emphasizes moments of significant change in architecture, whether they be theoretical, economic, technological, or institutional in nature. Each lecture usually focuses on a theme, such as positive versus arbitrary beauty, enlightenment urban planning, historicism, structural rationalism, social utopianism, etc. Topics sometimes involve changes generated by developments internal to architecture itself, other times by events external to the discipline, at least as it was conceived at that moment in time. The readings and lectures stress the link between theory and practice, and more generally, the relationship between architecture and the broader cultural, social, and political context. Lecture Schedule 1. Theories of Beauty: Claude Perrault and Christopher Wren (9/6) 2. Rococo: Le Gout Moderne (9/13) 3. Origins: The Greco-Gothic Ideal (9/20) 4. Piranesi (9/27), viewing of Piranesi prints in Avery Library after class (to be confirmed) 5. The English Garden and the Picturesque (10/4) 6. The City of the Enlightenment (10/11), film on Salines de Chaux until 1:30 7. Character and Type: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu (10/18) 8. Fragmentation of the Classical Ideal: Dance, Adam, and Soane (10/25) 9. An Architecture of National Identity: Jefferson, Latrobe, Mills (11/1) 10. Historicism: Goethe, Schinkel (11/8) 11. Utopian Socialism and the Architecture of Social Control (11/15) 12. The Gothic Revival: Pugin and Ruskin (11/29) 13. The Academy Reassessed: Romanticism, Rationalism, and the Neo-Grec Movement (optional lecture , readings required during study week following reviews) Course Requirements Sections: There will be 6 section meetings (approximately every other week) to discuss themes relevant to readings or lectures. All readings must be finished before class meetings. Attendance is required, and if for some reason you cannot attend, the instructor should be informed before class. Participation in sections will be considered in grading. Besides the short essays, students may be given other smaller assignments including preparing questions for discussion and presentations. A schedule giving section topics and readings will be distributed. The following is a proposed schedule of section meetings: 9/17 or 9/18 Discussion of readings for weeks 1 and 2 10/1 or 10/2 Discussion of readings for weeks 3 and 4 10/15 or 10/16 Discussion of readings for weeks 5 and 6 10/29 or 10/30 Discussion of readings for weeks 7 and 8 11/12 or 11/13 Discussion of readings for weeks 9 and 10 11/26 or 11/27 Discussion of readings for weeks 11 and 12 (no paper assigned this week) Section essays: A short, double-spaced typed essay (about 3 pages) will be required in conjunction with each section, except the last. Students are allowed to skip one short paper (4 out of 5--in general, it’s best to save this option either for mid-review week or later in the term). Topics, as well as detailed requirements, will be handed out in the course of the term. Papers are to be handed in to the section leader at the beginning of the related section meeting. These papers, like all written assignments, are to be done independently and must be footnoted properly, following Chicago Manuel of Style. See A Pocket Guide to Writing History (available at Book Culture) if you have any questions you might have about style. Final Assignment: Students have the option of taking a take-home examination or writing a 15-page research paper. Option 1, Final Exam: A take-home examination will be due December 14. This will consist of several essay questions. The exam must be typed. Students are to complete the exams and preliminary study independently. Questions will be distributed following first-year design reviews. All reading assignments should be completed before the questions are distributed so that the exam week can be devoted to organizing material and ideas, and to writing. Option 2, Final Paper: A 15 page (approximately) research paper, due December 17. A series of topics will be distributed in the course of the semester. Students may choose an alternative topic, but they must discuss this topic and have it approved by instructor before October 25. In preparation for this essay the student should use primary texts. All students writing a paper should submit a preliminary description of the topic, whether on the list or not, and complete bibliography by October 31. The synopsis should be typed, double- spaced, and approximately 1 page in length. It should discuss the major themes and issues that are being examined. Plagiarism: Unfortunately, we have had several cases of plagiarism at the GSAPP in the past few years. This is unacceptable and is grounds for dismissal from the university. A concise description of plagiarism is provided in A Pocket Guide to Writing History (available at Book Culture). If you have any questions about what constitutes plagiarism, please consult your section leader or Mary McLeod. Note: Any students whose English skills are weak are strongly encouraged to enroll in Columbia University’s American Language Program before the beginning of the semester. Classes are free, and most students who take them find them useful. Please see Danielle Smoller, the Dean of Admissions, for further information. Classes fill up quickly. Good English ability is especially essential for AH 1, as this lecture course demands considerable skills in reading and writing. If you have any question about this, please talk to your section leader or Mary McLeod. Readings Students are expected to read the required readings before each lecture. Additional readings are also listed to enable those students who wish to pursue a topic further to do so. Students who have already read some of the required readings in previous courses should substitute those readings with suggestions from the supplemental list. In general, those readings listed first in the Additional Readings section are considered most relevant to the lectures. The list, however, is quite extensive in order to help students who wish to pursue themes in their short essays in further depth. If students have not had a previous survey in 18th- and 19th-century architecture, they should consult regularly and read the relevant sections in Alan Braham, The Architecture of the French Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California, 1980), *Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Robin Middleton and David Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth Century Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1983), now titled Architecture of the Nineteenth Century, History of World Architecture (Phaidon, 2003). Useful sources for primary documents are *Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) and *Harry Francis Mallgrave, Architectural Theory, Vol. 1: An Anthology from Vitruvius to 1870 (Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), although the excerpts in both books are frustratingly short. All books marked with an * on the reading list have been ordered for purchase at Book Culture on 112th St. between Broadway and Amsterdam, though availability on some books is unclear. (Amazon.com, abebooks.com, and bookfinder.com are good options especially for books that out of print, such as Allan Braham’s excellent book on eighteenth-century French architecture, Claude Perrault’s Ordonnance, and Kenneth Clark’s The Gothic Revival.) Students who have never had a lecture course on nineteenth-century European architecture will find reading Bergdoll’s book extremely useful as a supplement to the lectures and should consider buying it. The bibliography at the back is also very helpful and should be consulted by students electing to write a final paper. Besides Bergdoll’s and Braham’s surveys, it might be helpful to purchase Marc Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture; William Pierson, American Buildings and Their Architects: Vol. 1 The Colonial and Neo-Classical Styles; and Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival (only available on line and not in the reader), as large sections of these books will be assigned. Store books are returned at mid-semester. Therefore students should purchase books for the last half of the class early in the semester. A reader of selected shorter texts is available for purchase at Village Copier on Broadway. All required readings are also on reserve at Avery Library. Lecture 1 Theories of Beauty: Claude Perrault and Christopher Wren The relation between seventeenth-century science and cultures. Perrault and Wren as scientists turning to architecture. The “battle of the ancients versus the moderns.” Perrault’s Vitruvius and Ordonnance. Perrault’s theory of two kinds of beauty: positive and arbitrary beauty. The east facade of the Louvre. Wren’s Tracts on Architecture. Wren’s theory of two causes of beauty: natural and customary. Saint Paul’s cathedral. * Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, l500-l700, Middlesex, l973; New Haven, 1999 (paperback), pp. 326-32. Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, Santa Monica, 1993, preface, pp.