HAA 270w

Historiography of Modern Architecture: In Search for a Global History
Patricio del Real
Wednesday 12-2:45pm
This graduate seminar traces the development of architectural modernism as a discursive practice. It explores the construction of a cohesive narrative that enabled modernism to become the hegemonic embodiment of modernity in the mid-20th Century and led to its critique in the 1960s and beyond. We will interrogate foundational texts by architectural historians—such as Hitchcock, Giedion, Benevolo and Tafuri and Dal Co—and address the challenges to these histories with the development of modernism beyond Europe and the United States. We will focus on 'other' modernisms as sites of enunciations, both formal and discursive, that will challenge these foundational histories. The aim is to gain a greater understanding of modern architecture as a global endeavor, as well as to examine architecture history as an operative and critical practice. In examining the historiography of modernism, the course aims to address contemporary historiographic critiques and explore the present need of a global history of architecture.