History of Architecture and Urbanism

PICK FIVE QUESTIONS TOTAL TO BE ANSWERED:

Each answer must be 150 to 400 words. To be typed, not hand­written. Email your final exam to your discussion leader.

1. The concept of "modern architecture" underpins the second half of this course. As argued throughout the lectures and in the course readings, there are seemingly many different interpretations and views on what exactly "modern architecture" is, how it might be ideologically and formally different from what came before (ie. historicism, eclecticism, the march of the styles, "history" itself), and what architecture and modernity have to do with one another. Throughout the semester, it has been argued that "modern architecture" can be understood variously as a specific epoch, an origin point, an ideology, a style, an anti­style, a source of ethics, a pedagogy, a historically­determined canon, a technological viewpoint, a historical inevitability, even a contemporary design cliché. Pick a building discussed in class and explain its relationship to the larger concept of "modern architecture."

2. Engineering and architecture are two fields of knowledge that continually intersect and bifurcate in the period that we have been studying. What is relationship between architecture and engineering in modern architecture; in other words, what contribution does engineering make that architecture can't make itself? What is to be gained by looking closer at engineering, according to Le Corbusier?

3. Abbe Laugier's primitive hut served as a crucial cultural object in the architecture of the Enlightenment and the debates we tracked throughout the 18th century. In the following quote from Laugier's seminal text, what is he imploring architects of his day to do?

"Such is the course of simple nature; by imitating the natural process, art was born. All the splendors of architecture ever conceived have been modeled on the little rustic hut I have just described. It is by approaching the simplicity of this first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved."

4. Both Mies vs. Le Corbusier spend a considerable part of their early lives as architects thinking about the implications of concrete, steel, and glass as "new" materials in the 1910s and 1920s. Yet these materials had been around since roughly 1850 if not much longer in the case of concrete. How do they argue for the "modernity" of these materials and what do they propose comes from this new approach to materials?

5. Cartesian perspectivalism is arguably one of the most central concepts to understanding the art and architecture of the Renaissance. What is the connection between the development and codification of perspective and the early work of Brunelleschi and Alberti? What is the role of the grid in both?

6. What is Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion house attempting to achieve? Why did it fail? In what ways did it succeed?

7. What is the difference between how architecture was taught at the Ecole des Beaux Arts versus at the Ecole Polytechnique around 1800? What kind of products did the students produce? What model of creativity is inherent in each?

8. What is the relationship between the Republic of Congo and the art nouveau? What is the whiplash style? How can we understand the colonialist regime of Belgium through their architecture at this particular historical juncture?

9. What is the definition of the avant­garde in modernism? How do the various factions of early 20th century architecture such as the Futurists consider themselves to be avant­garde, if they do at all?

10. Adolf Loos' famous essay "Ornament and Crime" contains the following quote:

"You are kind enough to describe my activity to date as ‘architectural.' Unfortunately it isn't. True we live in an age when even a designer of carpets calls himself an architect. Not that it matters. In America, even the people who install central heating call themselves engineers. But the decoration of apartments has nothing to do with architecture. It has simply provided me with a living, simply because it is something I knowhowto do. Just as in America, I kept the wolf from the door for a time by washing dishes."

What is his personal definition of architecture and how does his own work elucidate or contradict his position on the definition of architecture and the role of ornament in modern culture?