Big: Monumental Buildings and Sculptures in the Past and Present

Dr. James F. Osborne Spring Quarter 2020 Oriental Institute 230 formerly MWF 11:30 – 12:20, but now mostly “asynchronous”! [email protected] classroom: the internet

BIG: MONUMENTAL BUILDINGS AND SCULPTURES IN THE PAST AND PRESENT

The building of sculpted monuments and monumental architecture seems to be a universal human trait in all parts of the world, from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to the inuksuit cairns of the artic Inuit. What explains our urge to create monumental things? Why are monuments built, and how do we experience them? This course explores various answers to these questions through the disciplines that most frequently address monuments: archaeology, architecture, and art history. In the process, we will encounter a number of the major trends that have characterized the humanities and social sciences in the past century. This course examines humankind’s monumental record through a series of famous case studies from around the world to investigate the social significance of monuments in their original ancient or modern contexts. We will also determine whether lessons learned from the past can be applied to the study of monuments today, and whether studying modern monuments – including those from our immediate surroundings in Chicago – can help us understand those of the past.

Grading: Paper: In-depth study of a monument or monumental building or city of your choice from the past or present. 10-12 pp. 30 %

Attendance and participation in discussion sections: 70 %

The Motherland Calls, Volgograd, Russia

WEEKLY SCHEDULE

Week 1: Introduction

Monuments of the week: Lee/Jackson statue, Baltimore; the Neo-Assyrian lamassu statue in the Oriental Institute Museum; Triumphal Quadriga, Venice

Readings: Riegl, Alois 1903 Der Moderne Denkmalkultus. Sein Wesen un seine Entstehung. Vienna: W. Braumhuller = “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and its Origin,” Oppositions 25 (1982): 21-51.

Wu, Hung 1995 Monumentality in Early Chinese Art and Architecture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Introduction: The Nine Tripods and Traditional Chinese Concepts of Monumentality, pp. 1-15.

Week 2: Monumental Architecture from Beaux Arts to the Modern Movement

Monuments of the week: Chicago World Fair of 1893; Chicago’s Tribune Tower and Saarinen’s Tower (unbuilt)

Readings: Hugo, Victor. 1831 The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Book V, Chapter 2: This Will Kill That.

Kahn, Louis I. 1944 Monumentality. In New Architecture and City Planning: A Symposium. P. Zucker, ed. Pp. 577- 588. New York: Philosophical Library.

Sert, J. L., F. Leger, and S. Giedion 1984 Nine Points on Monumentality. Harvard Architecture Review 4:62-3.

Week 3: Monumentality and Scale

Monuments of the week: the Guennol Lioness; the Great Pyramids; the ziggurats of Ur and Choga Zanbil; Göbekli Tepe

Readings: Porada, Edith 1950 A Leonine Figure of the Protoliterate Period of Mesopotamia. Journal of the American Oriental Society 70(4):223-226.

Trigger, Bruce G. 1990 Monumental Architecture: A Thermodynamic Explanation of Symbolic Behaviour. World Archaeology 22(2):119-132.

Banning, E. B. 2011 So Fair a House: Göbekli Tepe and the Identification of Temples in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic. Current Anthropology 52: 619-660.

Week 4: Monuments and Urban Planning

Monuments of the week: Baron Haussmann’s Paris; Pruitt-Igoe housing project, St. Louis

Readings: Childe, V. Gordon 1950 The Urban Revolution. The Town Planning Review 2(1):3-17.

Agnew, John 1998 The Impossible Capital: Monumental Rome under Liberal and Fascist Regimes, 1870-1943. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 80(4):229-240.

Smith, Michael E. 2007 Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning. Journal of Planning History 6(1):3-47.

Week 5: Urban Symbology

Monuments of the week: Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan, Mexico; Syro-Anatolian cities of the Iron Age

Readings: Ashmore, Wendy, and Jeremy A. Sabloff 2002 Spatial Orders in Maya Civic Plans. Latin American Antiquity 13(2):201-215.

Smith, Michael E. 2003 Can We Read Cosmology from Maya City Plans? Comment on Ashmore and Sabloff. Latin American Antiquity 14:221-228.

Ashmore, Wendy, and Jeremey A. Sabloff 2003 Interpreting Ancient Maya Civic Plans: Reply to Smith. Latin American Antiquity 24(2):229-236.

Week 6: Monuments, Structure, and Agency

Monuments of the week: Monks Mound, Cahokia

Readings: Joyce, Rosemary A. 2004 Unintended Consequences? Monumentality as a Novel Experience in Formative Mesoamerica. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 11(1):5-29.

Pauketat, Timothy R. 2000 The Tragedy of the Commoners. In Agency in Archaeology. M.-A. Dobres and J. Robb, eds. Pp. 113-129. London, New York: Routledge.

Week 7: Power, the State, and Resistance

Monuments of the week: Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Readings: Moore, Jerry D. 1996 Architecture and Power in the Ancient Andes: The Archaeology of Public Buildings. New York: Cambridge University Press. Selections.

Leone, Mark P. 2005 The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital: Excavations in Annapolis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Selections.

Week 8: Monumentality in, and of, the Landscape

Monuments of the week: Stonehenge; Hittite landscape monuments of Anatolia

Readings: Tilley, Christopher 1994 A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford: Berg. Chapters 1 and 3.

Bradley, Richard 1998 The Significance of Monuments: On the Shaping of Human Experience in Neolithic and Bronze Age Europe. London: Routledge. Chapter 8: Theatre in the Round: Henge Monument, Stone Circles and their Integration with the Landscape, pp. 116-131.

Ingold, Tim 2013 Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Chapter 6, “Round mound and earth sky,” pp. 75-89.

Week 9: Monumentality, Memory, and Cultural Heritage

Monuments of the week: Waste Isolation Pilot Plate, New Mexico; Ayodhya and the Babri Mosque; ISIS’ destruction of antiquities

Readings: Young, James E. 1992 The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today. Critical Inquiry 18, 267-296.

Alcock, Susan E. 2002 Archaeologies of the Greek Past: Landscape, Monuments, and Memories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1, Archaeologies of Memory, pp. 1-35; Chapter 2, Old Greece within the Empire, pp. 36-98.

Bryan-Wilson, Julia 2003 Building a Marker of Nuclear Warning. In Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade. R.S. Nelson and M. Olin, eds. Pp. 183-204. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Week 10: Plazas, Courtyards, and Open Spaces

Monuments of the week: Tiananmen Square; Nazi rallying grounds of Nuremburg; 9/11 Memorial, NY

Readings: Wu, Hung 2005 Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Introduction and Chapter 1.

Arad, Michael 2009 Reflecting Absence. Places 21(1):42-51.