ARTH 282
(ARTH 682)
Modern Architecture
Instructor: Professor Jonathan Farnham
MWF 11-12

Course Description

In Art History 282/682, Modern Architecture, we will trace the riveting development of Western Architecture from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth-first century, exploring key styles and movements and placing significant buildings, projects, texts, and architects in their intellectual, technological, political, economic, social, and cultural contexts. In lecture and discussion sections, we will examine a broad range of topics including nineteenth-century engineering, Louis Sullivan and the Chicago skyscraper, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Vienna 1900, Futurism and Expressionism, Le Corbusier's esprit Nouveau, Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, De Stijl and Russian Constructivism, Mies van der Rohe, the International Style, twentieth-century classicism, Art Deco, Alvar Aalto and regional modernisms, postwar modernism in the US, Pop in postwar Britain, Louis Kahn, the late modernism of Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, and others, Robert Venturi's critique of modernism, the Greys and Whites, Post-Modernism, and new directions in contemporary architecture. We will read and discuss critical, interpretive texts by architectural historians as well as polemical manifestoes by modern architects and their champions. Enhancing our classroom sessions, we will venture into the field to scrutinize several significant architectural sites in and around Philadelphia. Students will write a short critical paper and a longer research paper.