Through in-depth study of a particular thematic topic, students will engage with the latest research and approaches to understanding the history of architecture as embedded within cultural, political, and economic contexts. Students will produce individual research papers. The topic of this course will be unique from other architectural history courses offered in the previous three years.
ARCH 504D: Architecture and Labour
Sara Stevens
Two notable groups are advocating for labour issues in the field of architecture today: Who Builds Your Architecture (WBYA?) and The Architecture Lobby (TAL). Both have raised questions about the complex relationships in the professional world between the work of a designer and what happens in the field during construction. But the historical conditions of labour in architecture are not well understood.
This course will ask: In what ways does the work of an architect denote a certain kind of labour, and in what ways is construction choreographed through design? How have debates around authenticity and style found their justification in questions of labour? And how have architectural processes shaped global material flows, social relations, and labour conditions? In the time period before the modernist movement, before the German Werkbund, and before the social movements that would bring significant change (women’s suffrage, decolonization, ending child labour, civil rights and ending Jim Crow, etc.) the terms for architecture’s relationship with labour and work were established. Covering significant global content while rooted in North American traditions, the class will look at the domestic labour of women, slave labour camps, Indigenous labour and treaties, and colonialism, as well as the expected debates around authenticity and style in the Arts and Crafts movement, industrial factories, and the history of practice in the 1800s to end with the enshrinement of efficiency in bricklaying techniques and skyscraper construction at the turn of the twentieth century.
Open to all students in SALA.
ARCH 504F: Architectural Imaginations of the Environment
Sara Stevens
Resilience and sustainability might be the terms du jour, but architecture’s relationship with its environment, as well as its desire to overcome this environment, is baked into the discipline. This course will study pre-1900 architecture across a set of global geographies to understand how thinking about the environment and the natural world has influenced architecture. By addressing architecture’s imaginations of environment, we will take as a given that one’s ideological frameworks influence how space is conceptualized. This supposition also enables an inclusive definition of architecture, ranging from the vernacular to the unbuilt and from the scale of landscapes to that of clothing. Organized thematically, rather than chronologically or geographically, the course will examine the contingent relationships between buildings, climates, and understandings of science.
The course will unfold in three parts: foundations, extractions, and circulations. Foundations will introduce our conception of the Anthropocene today, and dive quickly from there into eighteenth century scientific thought as it relates to air and politics and energy. We will learn about how French fireplaces conceptualized interiority and air flow, and how political theory influenced picturesque garden design. Extractions will explore Turtle Island’s colonization and the lumber production behind settlers, and the new ideas about environment that took hold in the nineteenth century. Circulations will examine the movement across oceans of materials and people, and the circulation of ideas about architecture and its environments. We will conclude with a coda on the oil crisis of the 1970s to contrast two different eras and reflect on how architecture relates to its environment in new ways in the late twentieth century. How can we leverage these historical understandings of architecture’s relationship to its environment, and the power of imagination that is behind architectural production, to reflect in new ways about the human-centred causes of climate change?
Open to all students in SALA.