Seminars
This seminar will examine these questions and others through historiographical practice and theory. Building upon several recent interventions by scholars examining architecture, art, urbanism, geography, ecology, space, and material culture, we will examine how histories of architecture and feminism have been narrated and shaped. Students will study formal and institutionalized interventions in the realms of practice and theory, as well as historiographical approaches intended to redistribute power and co-produce solidarity. In our discussions, we will examine the objects and methods of architectural history, and attempt to understand how scholars using feminist approaches have attempted to intervene in the practice of writing history.
Syllabus available upon request.
This seminar investigates the criteria for judging architecture and urban design in the last 150 years in America. In doing so, the class will explore the values (such as functionalism, organicism), principles (compositional, contextual, etc.) and intellectual thought (such as idealism, positivism, phenomenology, structuralism, and post-structuralism) that shaped the criteria for evaluating the buildings. Seminar students will criticize the written results in order to arrive at an understanding about how architectural criticism could be improved. The focus is on “applied” criticism in magazines and newspapers, where the buildings are evaluated according to criteria derived from theoretical principles peculiar to a certain time. During the seminar students analyze the critical essays to isolate those principles and criticize their effectiveness, while placing them within historical and philosophical frameworks. At the end of the semester, students themselves will criticize a contemporary work of architecture in New York for a seminar presentation.
Syllabus available upon request.
The course examines the rich tradition of utopian thinking in architecture, urban planning and the visual arts. In this seminar, utopia is explored in its modern form: as a call to transform the world through human planning and ingenuity. The purpose of the course is to better understand the role that the utopian imagination has played in the construction of social practices, the development of urban and social planning models, and technologies of power. At the end of the course, students present slideshows of their vision of a utopia or dystopia for our time.
Syllabus available upon request.
This seminar considers architecture’s articulation with modern and contemporary geopolitical transformations; developing regimes of circulation of people, goods, and information; and changing realities broadly considered under the paradigm of globalization. Students in this course will seek to develop new understandings of architecture’s relationship with place and context adequate to this new paradigm—a relationship that has many times been simplified within disciplinary discourse and that lends itself as a fascinating area for expanded inquiry. The seminar will particularly consider the different orders organizing these territories within which architecture operates (from diplomacy to tourism, from preservation to humanitarianism and environmentalism), as well as the diverse figures consolidating the transactions that it mediates: networks, borders, and camps. Student’s research and writing will explore the expanded forms of practice developed to intervene in those territories and processes.
Syllabus available upon request.
“What-Ifs”: Histories of Environments in Architecture” explores the intersections between environmental imaginaries and architectural designs (built or not) throughout history to investigate how storytelling has informed architectural notions of the environment, climate, and nature. By way of addressing the writer Amitav Ghosh's generative provocation that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination” (2016), this seminar asks: What if we could read and write environmental histories based on buildings? How could we situate architectural histories within the contested grounds of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene/Plantionanocene?
The course encourages students to reckon with normative conceptions of the built environment -- such as continuations of empire and colonialism, fossil capital, geoengineering, and other mitigation strategies regarding climate change -- and read “climate” and environments through agencies of infrastructure, technology, and grassroots movements. Through methods of architectural history in research and visual analysis, along with writing genres and exercises, the class will weekly assess a combination of primary and secondary sources to contend with themes from political and architectural movements, postcolonial and decolonial critiques, and other theoretical frameworks from marginalized geographies and methods. Primary sources will include land treaties, architectural manifestoes, professional statements, speculative designs, scientific reports, artistic genres, and speculative fiction, among others.
Syllabus available upon request.
The seminar is structured around six cities subjected to French rule during the second wave of European colonialism. While these urban enclaves were situated on the periphery of French state, they functioned as laboratories of urban techniques and experimentation and were as essential to the nation’s global ambitions as they were to its aims of reshaping social environments within the “hexagon.”
Each city will be explored through the perspective of distinct colonial policies and practices. Port-au-Prince, the first city studied, will be examined in relation to the ideals of the French Enlightenment and in relation to the terror of the Atlantic slave trade. Cairo, while colonized for only a very brief period, ignited new passions for the east, and will be viewed as a repository of exotic fantasies and as a site for infrastructural modernization. Algiers is to be studied through the policy of assimilation and the destruction of Algerian religious identity. Seen through the prism of France’s so-called civilizational mission, Dakar will be explored in relation to the application of the grid to its urban fabric. Hanoi is to be viewed through colonial theories of acclimatization and architectural hybridity. Finally, Casablanca will be considered in relation to new planning practices and the application of colonial policies of association.
Syllabus available upon request.
This seminar examines architecture and urban planning in North Africa from Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, through the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, the establishment of French protectorates in Tunisia (1881) and Morocco (1912), and the Italian colonization of Libya (1911), to the period of decolonization and post-independence, concluding with present-day struggles over national identity and governance.
A central concern will be the role of modernization in both colonial and postcolonial societies—a process, while integrally connected to European power, dominance, and violence, is often complex and ambiguous. In fact, modernization sometimes precedes European control as was the case in nineteenth-century Egypt, and, in other instance post-independence, it becomes a means to establish national identity and separation from European powers, as in the case of Egypt under Nasser or Algeria under Ben Bella or Boumediene (note, for example, the public commissions of the Brazilian modern architect Oskar Niemeyer in Algiers and Constantine, in which a modern architecture is seen as a distinct break with the Arabesque/ Neo-Mauresque forms of French colonialism). Nor should European influences in North Africa, however dominant and pervasive, be seen as only related to its political and economic control; multi-ethnic populations, trade and commerce, different places of architectural training, and cross-national infrastructures, such as railroad routes, all contributed and continue to contribute to making exchanges between European and Muslim culture diverse and multi-directional, if uneven in their power and influence.
Among the many issues the course plans to address, as it considers connections between architecture and its political and social context, are: modernization under the Ottoman empire, differences among English, French, and Italian colonization, the role of the Catholic church in the destruction of Muslim religious structures and urban transformation, stylistic hybridity, association versus assimilation, Lyautey’s vision of cultural difference and urban segregation, colonial cities as “laboratories” of modernization, Mediterraneanism and visions of integration, debates about historic and urban preservation, modernism as form of national identity, and contemporary efforts to reclaim vernacular traditions.
Syllabus available upon request.
This course explores the role that migrant communities have historically played in the construction of New York as well as the spatial negotiations, frictions, and conflicts derived from their settlement in the city. Architecture and urban strategies have historically participated in the definition of frameworks of belonging and have supported networks of kinship for migrant communities. However, they have also been used as tools for the exclusion of minoritized communities, as an alibi in xenophobic arguments, and as mediators of assimilationist policies.
We will discuss the manifold relations of architecture and migration. Migrant individuals and communities are responsible for the design, transformation, and resignification of different structures and enclaves. We will regard both the spatial, material, and aesthetic properties of these transformations as well as the social and cultural struggles, exchanges, and dislocations that they mediate.
We will also discuss the inextricable connection between New York City and migration. The city historically served as the major port of entry for migrants into the US and continues to be a major attractor for transient populations. We will regard New York simultaneously as a city characterized by its ethnic diversity, and one in which immigrants continue to struggle to secure housing, assert their presence in public space, guarantee their access to resources, and defend their rights.
Architecture and Migration in New York is organized around class discussions and a semester-long project involving historical research, mapping, and spatial observation.
Syllabus available upon request.
The seminar “Colonial Practices” considers colonial practices through architectures, institutions, and ecologies around the world. Each week, we study aesthetic and spatial practices alongside Black and Brown consciousness, Feminist, Indigenous, and anticolonial and decolonial theory. The places around which maps have been constructed, across which migrants have moved, and within which insurgents have configured form the intellectual problems of this course and strategic positions from which to sense, write, and think with the constructed environment.
Students lead discussions on shared readings, co-produce collaborative research with community partners for public dissemination, and write papers based on individual research. Our collective studies examine archives of colonial practices, museum-based institutional critique, insurgent art and design practices, and forms of geographical counter-cartography and architectural counter-occupation. Students are expected to conduct in-depth independent research, bringing their own interests and objects of historical inquiry into the course, and special sessions of the course will be targeted toward the development of students’ scholarly research and methods.
To study de/colonial practices using embodied methods across forms of difference, the course incorporates collaboration between students and faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in New York, the Technical University of Kenya (TUK) in Nairobi, and the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) in Mumbai in a travel-based module titled “Architecture as a Form of Knowledge.” Participants engage in online discussion of shared readings in preparation for convening in Nairobi mid-semester for intensive study with artists, architects, urbanists, and scholars, using architecture (broadly defined) as a basis for research methods of historical sites and institutions around the city. During the “Architecture as a Form of Knowledge” module, students attend especially to African history, theory, and practice, building a body of research in partnership with the GoDown Arts Centre, a Nairobi urban arts institution directed by Barnard College 2020 Virginia C. Gildersleeve Visiting Professor Joy Mboya, which is engaged in situated critical aesthetic and heritage practices. Students will share and publish this collaborative research in conjunction with “Nai Ni Who?” [https://thegodown.org/nai-ni-who-2/], a community-based program of festivals and events facilitated by the GoDown Arts Centre.
Syllabus available upon request.
This advanced seminar explores key debates in contemporary urban planning and policy. Most fundamentally, these debates are about how we make collective decisions regarding shared problems, which arise from our co-inhabitation of urban space. Resolving these debates is not always an either-or proposition—there are multiple shades of gray and multiple potential resolutions. Nor are there necessarily right or wrong answers. The positions one takes in these debates are fundamentally normative—they are shaped by one’s place in the world and one’s view of it. Nevertheless, these debates require decisions. In urban planning and policy, we are called upon to act, not just debate. In this course, we will endeavor to develop informed positions that can help us engage with others to take action.
These debates are not new, nor are they unique to any one place. But their specific articulation varies as a function of historical and geographical context. In this course, we will explore both levels of these debates: we will first discuss them as they have been understood in history and theory, and we will then discuss them with reference to cases drawn from different parts of the world. Specific cases will be selected collectively by the class at the beginning of the semester, and students will develop and present the case study materials in consultation with the instructor. Students are therefore actively involved in the design of the course and are encouraged to bring 2 their own interests and agendas to the table. (Case studies might address, for instance, policing, school busing, mixed income housing, participatory budgeting, universal basic income, etc.)
This year, the course is being offered in an immersive, online format with an introduction and five one-week modules. Each module will address one debate: preservation versus progress, democracy versus authority, diversity versus identity, plan versus market, and reform versus revolution. In the first meeting of each week, we will explore the debate’s general contours; in the second meeting, we will investigate its articulation in a specific case study; and in the third meeting, we will hold an in-class debate.
Syllabus available upon request.