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This one and only lecture introduces the broad theme of academic facilities that were erected, and rose to prominence during the Islamic Age. As the Islamic faith became known, and one of the dominating movements of its era, it became necessary to pass down the verses of the Quran, which were transcribed onto paper. Ergo, Islam augmented its reach based upon a predication of literate followers. Facilities, such as mosques and madrasas, became central spaces respecting the…
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This first lecture introduces the broad theme of sub-Saharan cities and settlements in the pre-1500 world. In order to deconstruct the widespread misconceptions about the absence of significant sub-Saharan cities before the arrival of the European colonizers in the continent, we will introduce and analyze three different examples of sub-Saharan settlements and their architecture. We will discuss how cities such as Kilwa, Benin, Great Zimbabwe, and M’banza Kongo became the ce…
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This lecture tracks multiple travel experiences of architects, artists, and scientists who crossed the Sahara from the 1850s to the twentieth century. It examines the itinerary of their trips, their drawings, and the photographic and filmed materials collected during their trips with a particular attention for the architectural and urban realm. Focus of our study will be the ginna, the Dogon main house, the compound of the Dogon village, the teleuk, or Mousgoum hut, and the …
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In looking at Johannesburg, South Africa, this lecture introduces three different waves of people migrating to and within the city from the gold boom of the 1880s to present time. This will allow us to discuss the topics of labor control, forced migration and displacement, focusing on the places of resistance to apartheid. In the first part of the lecture, we will discuss the process of colonization, soil exploitation and the scramble for resources in the Transvaal colony (a…
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In looking at the work of artists such as Yinka Shonibare, a British-Nigerian artist living in the United Kingdom, and the brightly colored Dutch wax fabric he uses in his artwork, we will explore the concept of transoceanic exchanges, cosmopolitanism and hybridization within the contemporary challenging growth at work in Lagos, Nigeria. We will discuss Lagos as a global place of encounter and negotiation among traditions since the foundation of Lagos Island and its later pe…
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This lecture introduces what I call the “Social Package” that travelled from Africa from around 60,000 BCE throughout the entire globe. Traditionally, the emphasis has been on tools and weapons; here I want to emphasize the integration of tools with art making, hut making, and dance. The tendency in the scholarship has been to see these things as separate and to focus on ‘firsts.’ The point I want to make in this lecture is to focus on the time when the various elements of s…
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In the last lecture, I introduced the idea of the “Social Package” that made us modern humans, from 150,000 or 200,000 BC through today. There is a lot more than can be said, but the lecture was intended to give the rudiments of a more elaborate discussion. This lecture moves the clock forward to the period called the Last Ice Age (ca. 24,000 BCE – 10,000 BCE). Though the world was uniformly colder than before, it was coldest in Europe, Russia, Siberia and Canada, which w…
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Shamanism is a generic term that describes a broad set of ritual beliefs about the human relationship to other humans and nature. It is linked also to Animism. This lecture introduces the broad parameters of shamanism while also trying to get students to realize that shamanism is not a ‘dead religion.’ In the last few decades, it has even been revived – just think of the so-called neo-pagans who flock to Stonehenge! So what we see today in some parts of the world is a mixtu…
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The Lecture is about the modern world. Shamanistic world views are not dead, but alive and well especially in Asia, but also Africa. To understand this, one has to take off the monotheistic blinders. Animism was incorporated into the core principles of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and is most present in Shintoism. We start therefore with the THE BI-CAMERAL THESIS, as coined by by Julian Jaynes. The idea is to get students to see an alternative way of describing the world. T…
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It is often argued that the Holocene set the stage for agriculture. This lecture starts from this premise, and demonstrates that the Holocene also set the stage for an expansion of First Society cultures. By 3,000 BCE, around the time we see the first cities in Mesopotamia, we see extensive First Society cultures developing in areas of particularly rich and diverse flora and fauna. The most notable of these was the emergence of fish-based and ocean-shore societies that …
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This lecture studies the emergence of the mound and plaza cultures beginning around 3,000 BCE in the lower Mississippi River area. It discusses Poverty Point and brings the student up to the Hopewell Culture in Ohio, a culture that thrived almost exclusively on the ceremonial exchanges. We then focus on northern Peru. First will be the site of la Galgada, an early ceremonial center where irrigation systems were first developed in this area. We then move to the cultures of th…
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This lecture discusses the development of large ceremonial complexes in which the buildings play an active role as part of the ceremony. Some parts of these ceremonies involved large numbers of people and took place in outdoor spaces. Others were meant to be experienced individually in introspective ways, in underground, labyrinthine passageways. Scale, sound, and varying degrees of light and darkness contributed to enhance these experiences and punctuate them with culminati…
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This lecture tracks a long history of the rise of corn in the development of the Americas. We discuss the genetic development of teosinte into corn and its impact in the architecture and culture of Mesoamerica and North America. We follow the repercussions of corn centrism in the rise of the Olmecs and their colonization of the marshes in San Lorenzo and La Venta. We then skip forward to 200 CE to see the fulfillment of this food’s promise in the architecture of the Maya…
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During this lecture we will be looking at areas that are quite frequently left out of the narrative on architecture in the Americas. We will be looking at a series of Coastal sites along the Atlantic coast from the Caribbean to Canada and into Greenland. And we will look at each other these places through time as well. So we will be travelling temporally and geographically throughout this class.
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This lecture and the next will look at the developments in the present southwestern United States and northern Mexico prior to c.1100CE. This includes the Mogollon, the Hohokam, and the Anasazi. This lecture in particular will look at the Mogollon development of the kiva, space geared ceremonially around corn; Hohokam sites at Snaketown, where a large irrigation system was developed to support agriculture; Anasazi villages on Black Mesa; the interstitial site of Chaco Canyon…
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Mounds were by the far the most numerous architectural imposition in the landscape designed and constructed by the native populations in the present United States. These mounds developed in a number of ways, which this lecture makes evident. But in every case, they became ceremonial and ritual spaces important in the structuring the societies that built them. This lecture discusses the large cultures of the U.S. Southeast, starting with an extended discussion on the Cahokia,…
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This lecture discusses three interrelated, pre-Inca societies: the the Nazca, the Tiwanaku, and the Chimú on western coasts of Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile. It will discuss the geoglyphs and underground aqueducts of the Nazca, the cosmographic city of Tiwanaku, and The Chimor Empire’s capital city Chan-Chan, an administrative capital that at its peak held an estimated 40-60,000 people.
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This lecture expands on the oftenforgotten existing cultures of the Amazon basin, including the Shuar in Ecuador, the Yanomami in Brazil, and the Tairona in Colombia. It looks at their culture and their architecture such as the Shuar Huts, the unique shabono of the Yanomami, and the network village of Teyuna in Colombia. The sophisticated networks and tectonic structures of these villages has been dismissed because of its fragile status in comparison to the stone structures…
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This lecture discusses the interrelation of material and beliefs in the architecture and culture of the Inka Empire, which we should properly call by its name, the Tahuantinsuyo. We will start first with their coastal neighbors, the Chimu, and their adobe city of Chan Chán. The tall walls of Chan Chán were intricately carved and remind us the presence of multiple cultures throughout the western coast of South America. They were eventually subsumed by the Inkas, whose po…
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This lecture examines two cities, both capitals of empires in Central Mexico: the monumental city of Tula, capital of the Toltec, and the floating city of Tenochtitlan, capital of the Mexica. With the Toltec and Mexica we arrive to hierarchical societies in which monumental core buildings speak to the power of the rulers and elites. In Tenochtitlán, the ceremonial center is set apart from the common folk as they literally float around in artificial islands called chinampas. …
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This lecture looks at the continuing presence of the culture, buildings, and peoples of the Americas within the continent from the moment of conquest, throughout the repeated attempts at erasure, and in the present. We start with the moment of encounter and conquest, with the arrival of the Spanish to Tenochtitlán and examine the ruins of the city lying beneath contemporary Mexico City. We then go to Cusco and to the multiple layers within the Coricancha or temple of the …
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This lecture seeks to introduce and set the background to the set of lectures on West African Modernism. It does this by first of all dealing with definitions and a short introduction to the literature related to modernism, the tropics and the key associated theories most cited. Issues such as geographies, regionalism, and actor networks are some areas which are also discussed. The lecture concludes by suggesting ways through which students might want to review the first set…
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This lecture focuses on the work of two architects, Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Beverly Drew, who worked extensively in the UK, India and Africa throughout the mid-20thC. Their pioneering work attempted to develop a ‘modernism’ for the ‘tropics’, and one an architecture that responded to social, political and aesthetic concerns. Jackson delivers a critical analysis of Fry and Drew’s body of work in West Africa and situates this within the broader themes of their engagement wi…
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The architects James Cubitt and Kenneth Scott, arguably were amongst the most powerful actors in the post WW2 the architecture scene in West Africa. Despite the partnership being relatively short lived both architects developed a joint approach best understood in their development of the KNUST campus in Kumasi, that helped underpin their future design activities in West Africa. This lecture discusses their joint development of the KNUST campus in Kumasi, Ghana and the subseq…
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This lecture relates university architecture in Anglophone West Africa to development and decolonisation politics. Development and decolonisation were central issues in mid twentieth century West Africa, and informed the activities of both architects and their critics. The lecture charts the rise and fall of an era in which ideas about university architecture, African liberation, and development were tightly intertwined. It starts in the 1930s, when nationalists demanded th…
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This lecture focuses on the shift of West African architecture and urban design from the colonial to the postcolonial periods, in particular in Ghana (independent since 1957) and Nigeria (independent since 1960). Specifically, this lecture will show the change of programs (broad distribution of housing and health, culture, education provision); technologies (emergence of local construction material industries and their modernization); education (emergence of new architectura…
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This lecture examines issues of power and place through the prism of race in urban and rural cultural landscapes, primarily between 1880-1930. From the Reconstruction Era through the beginning of the Depression, the United States saw unprecedented demographic shifts, which caused new questions about race, place, and identity to emerge in planning. Students of this period in architecture and planning might ask if a gendered, racial, or class-based approach to planning origina…
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Starting at the scale of infrastructure, policy, and land acquisition, this lecture examines how the groundwork has been laid for ongoing exploitation and slow violence against communities of color in the United States. It explores the impacts of industrial pollution and contamination by highlighting the connections between the built environment and public health in light of the history of industrial zoning. Acknowledging the connections between race and contaminated envi…
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Named for the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of mid-century America’s leading African American newspapers, the Robert L. Vann Tower of the Belgian Friendship Building rises substantially higher than any of the Confederate statues on Richmond, Virginia’s nearly Monument Avenue ever did. Although prominent on the city’s skyline, the Belgian Friendship Building has been overlooked in histories of the importation of European modern architecture into the United States, a…
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Nairobi, Kenya was the location of urban housing for Africans that demonstrated the racist segregationist colonial strategies meant to ingrain inferiority of the native populations. The lecture espouses the spatial strategies manifested in the architecture and strategies of urban housing estates that defined the architecture of Eastlands, a city-reserve for the race, in the era of British suzerain rule of early to mid-20th Century. Framed in Foucauldian theorem of panoptical…
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This lecture examines issues of power and place through the prism of race in urban and rural cultural landscapes, primarily between 1880-1930. From the Reconstruction Era through the beginning of the Depression, the United States saw unprecedented demographic shifts which caused new questions about race, place, and identity to emerge in planning. Students of this period in architecture and planning might ask if a gendered, racial, or class-based approach to planning originat…
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This lecture looks at the making of the modern sewage system of Mexico City in a non-linear way. By doing this, we aim to look at each moment and place in this history within its own frameworks, acknowledging them as historical constructs while at the same time studying them within their own set of parameters and ideas. By doing so, we claim that in the making of this infrastructures, architectures, events, and their circulation in the media, the sewage sys-tem became a medi…
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Lecture Abstract: Imaginaries about Latin America place it at a considerable distance from the Islamic World. Languages, religions and cultural paradigms lead us to associate Latin America either with the Occident, the pre-Columbian or, in some countries, with the Afro culture. We rarely imagine links with the Islamic World. But, surprisingly, there are many connections between both cultures. First, because of Spanish Mudejar or Moorish heritage and then as a consequence of …
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Lecture Abstract: Imaginaries about Latin America place it at a considerable distance from the Islamic World. Languages, religions and cultural paradigms lead us to associate Latin America either with the Occident, the pre-Columbian or, in some countries, with the Afro culture. We rarely imagine links with the Islamic World. But, surprisingly, there are many connections between both cultures. First, because of Spanish Mudejar or Moorish heritage and then as a consequence of …
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Lecture Abstract: Almost all Latin American countries, declared their independence in the first half of nineteenth century. From that moment, these young American nations, ruled by elites of enlightened “Criollos”, began to look to European countries as models (especially France, England and Germany). Together with these new models, many European fashions and tastes came into Latin America, which had a huge impact on customs, arts and, of course, architecture (particularly…
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Lecture Abstract: In the recent context of globalization, in Latin America many architectural complexes emerged, which were conceived for spreading the Islamic culture. They are based on prismatic volumes with a decorative incorporation of traditional Islamic shapes, like arcs, domes and minarets. Because their monumental scale and privileged locations, these buildings have a significant urban impact in our cities, reinforced by their singular shapes that combines horseshoe…
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Los imaginarios sobre América Latina la ubican a una considerable distancia del Mundo islámico. Lenguajes, religiones y paradigmas culturales nos permiten asociar a América Latina con Occidente, lo Pre-Colombino o, en algunos países, con la cultura Afro. Raramente imaginamos vínculos con el Mundo Islámico. Pero, sorprendentemente, existen muchas conexiones entre ambas culturas. Primero, por la herencia Mudéjar y Morisca Española y luego, como consecuencia de los inmigrantes …
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El principal tema en este período es la continuidad de características islámicas en la cultura de las colonias españolas. Podemos encontrar en las sociedades hispánicas de los siglos XVI al XVIII muchos rasgos de la España Medieval Islámica. Cuando los españoles vinieron a América, trajeron su experiencia y conocimientos del legado hispano-islámica a este continente. Este tipo de cultura es conocida como Mudéjar Iberoamericano. (Desde el siglo XIX, el arte Hispano-Arabe post…
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Casi todos los países latinoamericanos declararon sus independencias en la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Desde ese momento, aquellas jóvenes naciones americanas, gobernadas por criollos ilustrados, comenzaron a mirar a los países europeos como modelos (especialmente Francia, Inglaterra y Alemania) Varios intelectuales y gobernantes de la región viajaron a Europa para aprender las nuevas propuestas que la ciencia y el arte podían ofrecer con el objetivo de contribuir al d…
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En el contexto reciente de la globalización, emergieron en Latinoamérica varios complejos arquitectónicos concebidos para difundir la cultura y religión islámica. Estos edificios son financiados por los ricos países petroleros del Golfo Pérsico con el objetivo de proveer una mejor infraestructura a los musulmanes de la región y a la vez, promover el crecimiento de la religión en el área. Frecuentemente son encargados a estudios de arquitectura del Mundo Islámico, u otros…
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This lecture explores the ways in which architecture and built environments are used as a medium for social and political agenda, particularly in the Asian context. Since the 19th century, modern Asian nation state formation has encompassed a variety of processes, viz. the consolidation of monarchical centers, the dissolution of European colonial powers, democratization, modernization, and the engagement with international diplomacies. Architectural projects have been an imp…
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First, we will examine the general concepts and principles of “the spirit of place” and “critical regionalism” Next, we will look at a few representative examples of architecture from different parts of the world through the lenses of “the spirit of place” and “critical regionalism.” We will then turn our attention to examples of modern architecture in Greece and Turkey. We will compare the work of architects Sedad Eldem (from Turkey) and Dimitris Pikionis (from Greece) Fina…
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This lecture provides an overview of Belgium’s colonial anti-urbanization policies for its African colonies. The cities of Kinshasa, Bujumbura, and Kigali (the present-day capitals of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda, respectively) were all molded by Belgian policies. However, Belgium differed from many other colonial powers in that it did not establish grand imperial cities in Africa. In fact, Belgium often followed “anti-urbanization” policies that wer…
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In one century, Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, developed from a small trading outpost to a metropolis of millions of people. Throughout the course of Kinshasa’s development, parameters of visibility and invisibility have been paramount in shaping urban life for the residents of Kinshasa. In the colonial era, the Belgian authorities used the visibility of the colonized as a tool of social control, and visibility of the colonizers as an expression o…
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This lecture will look at the historical development of Kigali, beginning from its founding as a German outpost in 1907. It will trace Kigali’s subsequent development as a Belgian colonial administrative center, and then its transformation into the capital city of an independent nation. It will also look at how some historical sites in Rwanda have been transformed into sites for tourist consumption, as certain building materials or forms become coded as “traditional,” while …
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This lecture introduces the long-lasting eclectic tradition of architecture in Colombia and the modernization of the architectural practice in the first decades of the 20th century. It firstly displays the contribution of foreign and Colombian (often educated abroad) architects and engineers in the production of eclectic buildings based on imported models, which defined a new, bourgeoise, scenography gradually replacing colonial buildings in central urban areas. Then, it foc…
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This lecture displays the architectural production resulting from the first reflections on the problem of national identity in Colombia. Like in many other Latin American countries, Colombian architects and engineers started looking at their past, namely at the Spanish-colonial tradition, as source for a national architecture. As a result, from the 1920s several typologies were designed by both Colombian and foreign professionals, mostly US American, in a wide range of Spani…
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This module explores the transformation of Asian trade networks and societies following the Mongol conquests in the 13th century. We focus on the circulation of architectural and artistic forms along the ancient Silk Route and the spread of Buddhism in Southeast Asia and the Himalayas. We explore the cultural connections of Ming China, its tension between dynastic authority and the increasingly powerful merchant class; the rise of the Ottoman, Timurid, Safavid, and Mughal em…
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This lecture, along with the two other lectures that it is associated with, uses certain eastern commodities (coffee, porcelain, and Indian textiles) to conceptualize spatial and geographic relationships in ways that offer an alternative to the pervasive state-centered narratives which fix territory in more static and landbound ways. Yet, this is the only one of the three that looks at a comestible product, the other two examine manufactured wares, and are thus much more foc…
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In this lecture, we will look at what made Chinese porcelain, and particularly blue and whites, so desirable during this time. We will then consider the various ways that we can understand Chinese porcelain historically, as it circulated around the globe, enticing audiences wherever it went. As you will see, Chinese porcelain was coveted from Amsterdam to Istanbul to Mexico City, so its impact was extraordinarily far reaching. Moreover, it inspired many imitations. Thus, Chi…
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This lesson introduces students to one of the most iconic monuments in the world: the Taj Mahal. It emphasizes the theme of cross-cultural encounter throughout. The lecture begins by laying out historical coordinates, with slide and lecture points on the Mughal empire (1526-1858), the patron Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1627-58), his wife Mumtaz Mahal (d. 1631) (the interred), and the architect Ustad Ahmad Lahori (d.1649). It then introduces students to the urban context of Mughal…
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This lecture focuses on two cities, Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica Empire, and Mexico City, the capital of New Spain. Because Mexico City was built upon and drew sustenance from the Mexica capital, the lecture addresses both urban space and colonial projects in early modernity. At issue are two questions: (1) how were urban capitals in the Americas organized as physical spaces, both before and after colonization; and (2) how does colonization shape what we can know …
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Architectural histories of colonial North America tend to highlight the architecture of European settlers and trans-Atlantic connections: saltbox houses in New England, grand estates such as Monticello in Virginia, plantations in Louisiana. This unit, by way of contrast, turns to the western United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Mission of San Francisco de Asis (Mission Dolores) in San Francisco, California forms the focus of this unit, which consi…
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This lecture focuses on the House of Wonders, a grand palatial and administrative center standing on the waterfront of Zanzibar City, which now is part of the nation state of Tanzania and once acted as an important Swahili coast center of maritime trade and exchange for centuries. In many ways the patron and builders of the House of Wonders drew on ancient local and Indian Ocean architectural precedents, but they also fused them with forms from the North Atlantic world, espe…
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This lecture explores the global history of mass housing in the twentieth century. From war-damaged Europe to suburban California and from apartheid Johannesburg to high-rise Singapore, the lecture surveys the major types of housing that have accommodated the world’s unprecedented population growth and in doing so, have shaped the vast expansion of our urbanized world. It focuses not only on the ideas of architects and planners and the schemes of developers, but also the com…
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This lecture provides an overview of Iranian Armenian Church architecture. Due to the historical presence of Armenians and Assyrians as two historical nations, today, there are hundreds of churches in different geographic parts of Iran, which have remained from different periods and cultural-political conditions. The religious architecture of the Armenian churches in Iran has more than 1,700 years of history along with considerable geographical dispersion. It sets on the typ…
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Lecture 1 | Exporting American Architecture & Lifestyle (1948-58) By focusing on the period between 1948 and 1958, the first lecture provides materials to discuss how the export of American household commodities and cars, under the Point IV program, set a basis for the expansion of a new lifestyle among Iranians. To this end, this lecture firstly addresses the impact of the American technical and self-help aids, such as the home-economy program, on the domestic life of ordi…
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Lecture 2 | Recasting Public Housing Practices in Iran: The Example of Kuye Kan (1958-68) In the previous lecture, I looked at the ways through which the capitalist mode of consumption and production led to the development of a design manual for the city of Tehran. The second lecture firstly discusses how this manual shaped the built environment of a prototypical housing model known as Kuy-e Kan in West-Tehran; and how Iranian architects used this model to stimulate a new l…
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This lecture provides an overview of Armenian Church architecture. It sets the architectural tradition within the landscape and history of the Armenian plateau. Armenian churches flourished in the medieval period and developed a distinctive construction method, floor plan, and decorative style. Each example is considered in the context of regional and global architectural currents, including Byzantine and Iranian. The lecture also considers the legacy of medieval Armenian ar…
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This first lecture introduces the broad theme of “cultural borders” with a focus of their formation on the historical regime changes and population movements in the targeted regions. It highlights both the spatial, physical borders, as in the case of the Ryukyu Kingdom, and the more intangible, less geographically defined cultural borders, as in the case of the Great Xia and the Hui ethnic group.
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The Yunnan province in China used to be the land of the Nanzhao (738-937) and Dali (937-1253) Kingdoms. Bordering and adjacent to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, the various ethnic groups in this region, especially the Dai, had long been practicing Theravada Buddhism as a major way for community building. The presence of Han and Tibetan Mahayana schools in this southwestern province, as well as both Confucian and Daoist believes incorporated into the religious and secu…
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The northwestern Chinese provinces of Ningxia and Gansu are homes of the largest Sinicized Muslim communities, the Hui. Historically, this area often supported independent regimes coexisting with a major Chinese dynasty, such as the Xixia Kingdom in the 10th to 13th centuries. Bordering the Han Chinese, Turkic Uighur, and the Tantric Tibetan, architecture in the former land of the Great Xia evolved into significant local styles in different building types, Islamic mosques, B…
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Inner Mongolia is the region within the PRC where concentrated Mongolian communities dwell. Culturally and geographically bordering China Proper, Khalkha Mongolia, Islamic Uighur, and the Tibetan Amdo, the architecture of Inner Mongolia demonstrate the colorful spectrum of multi-cultural assimilation. It is also the historic homes of many nomadic groups that had been passing through Inner Asia, such as the Huns (Xiongnu), Tartar, and Turks among others. During the Yuan dynas…
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In looking at the architecture in the land of the Rykyu Kingdom, this lecture introduces buildings of both public, religious, and official nature, and that for private and vernacular residence. The typology of Okinawa architecture indicates influences from both China and Japan, and the archaeological discoveries suggest further Southeast Asian links in dwelling modes and construction techniques. The extensive use of stone in residential compounds, castles, and bridges, howev…
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This lecture discusses the diversity of Aboriginal groups across Australia, explaining the concept of Country as central to Aboriginal spirituality and identity and how the concept of Country includes all parts of the environment, cultural practices, knowledges, songs, stories, art, architecture and all peoples, past, present and future. The lecture is presented in five parts: 1. Indigenous occupation of Australia This contrasts various Western science models of how Ab…
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The lecture focuses on the architectures and infrastructure of precolonial Australian Aboriginal societies. This period has also been titled ‘classical’ ethno-architecture, ’classical’ Aboriginal architecture, vernacular architecture, and traditional architecture. This lecture discusses that prior to British invasion in 1788, the architecture typologies and infrastructures of Aboriginal settlements across Australia were rich, varied and diverse. This lecture is in thr…
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This lecture discusses the inland expansion of the colonial frontier and the impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander architectures and details the architectural ingenuity of displaced people forming communities. The lecture discusses the concentration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples into pastoral camps, government reserves and settlements, town camps, missions, lock hospitals and leprosariums, the invention of the ‘Aboriginal community’ and the b…
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Christian missionaries and their churches have had a huge impact on Indigenous cultures and peoples across the world. Christian paradigms regarding Indigenous humanity were flawed and paradoxical (especially given that they were based on the concepts of Terra Nullius (Australia) and Manifest Destiny (US)) and efforts to protect and proselytize First Nations peoples across various countries on the Pacific Rim had mixed results. Despite this, over time, many Indigenous peo…
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The recognition of Indigenous cultural domains by institutions has fundamentally changed since the mid-twentieth century, when architects (almost exclusively non-Indigenous Australians at that time) first accepted and then later celebrated Indigenous cultures and identity/s in building design. This lecture discusses exemplars of architectural design and examples that illustrate various architectural approaches, debates and discourses. These new building typologies provide an…
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The first lecture introduces the Aboriginal people who have lived in Australia for over 40 millennia. Several sites demonstrate the presence of early Aborigines as nomadic hunter-gatherers; cremations, burials, ovens, and artifacts date to at least 40,000 BCE. Early evidence of aquaculture evinces a rare instance of hunter-gatherer engineering that led to food surplus and stone houses. Etching, stenciling, and painting on rocks denote the presence of Dreamings, whose paths i…
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The Uluru-Kata Tjutu National Park in the Northern Territory contains many rock formations, including Uluru. Aborigines believe that Dreamings created every topographical feature, including water holes, hills, caves, and fissures. Rock art in caves represents wallabies, humans, and other Dreamings that, according to the Pitjantjatjara, Anangu, and other groups, created Uluru. To the west, Kata Tjuta is a group of monumental domed rocks. Aboriginal oral tradition recounts tha…
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In addition to rock painting, petroglyphs (carved rock) some as early as 40,000 BCE, are found in nearly every region of Australia. Local stones were used as carving tools. Imagery includes birds, marine life, and people. Australia also features meaningful arrangements in a variety of configurations. Some rock art in caves was made with fingers and sticks pressed into soft limestone. Specific sites were used for important events such as childbirth. Some detailed rock engravi…
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For at least 20,000 years Aboriginal Groups have occupied the region of Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. It contains the largest concentration of rock art in Australia. The painted rock shelters provided places to sleep and protection from the rain. Different types of painting include naturalistic representations and an “x-ray” style that shows outlines and interior anatomical details of people and animals. Some painted surfaces contain layers of imagery that …
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To the east of Kakadu National Park is Arnhem Land, an Aboriginal reserve in the Northern Territory. The region is an immense landscape of rock shelters, some of which were manipulated by altering ceilings and removing natural stone pillars. Some rock paintings may be 45,000 years old. Subject matter includes Dreamings, supernatural spirits, rituals, fauna, and the arrival of Europeans. In a few cases, beeswax pellets were applied to cave walls to create relief imagery. The …
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The final lecture concerns the transformation of traditional Aboriginal mark-making that utilizes new materials, content, and venues. For thousands of years Aborigines painted on eucalyptus bark. This tradition changed in the mid-20th century, when missionaries asked artists in several provinces to create bark paintings to be used in educating white Australians about indigenous culture and to sell so that profits could help support missions. This coincided with some national…
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The lecture covers the earliest phase of architectural history in the East European Plain from the end of Antiquity until the end of the 10th century AD. The continuous construction of kurgans (burial mounds) linked the ancient Scythian culture with the architectural production of the Scandinavians, who around the 8th century AD discovered a shortcut from the Baltic to the Black and the Caspian Sea via the network of East European rivers. In the East European Plain the Norse…
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This lecture explores the early phase of assimilation of the Middle Byzantine tradition of masonry church architecture in medieval Rus’ after its Christianization by Prince Vladimir at the end of the 10th cent. CE. It focuses on the introduction of the cross-in-square churches from Constantinople and possibly northern Anatolia and Bulgaria first in Kiev and Chernigov--the southern urban centers of Rus’ in modern Ukraine--and subsequently in Novgorod and Polotsk in Russia and…
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This lecture discusses the original synthesis between the Middle Byzantine architectural tradition and the Romanesque construction and decoration techniques that defined the ecclesiastical and palatial architecture of Vladimir-Suzdal’ region in the northeastern lands of Rus’ during the second half of the 12th and the first quarter of the 13th century. The princes of Vladimir attracted masons from the Holy Roman Empire in modern Germany and northern Italy. These Romanesque ma…
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The lecture introduces the students to the gradual process of the adaptation of the Middle Byzantine tradition to the conditions of northwestern Rus’. Two major centers of northwestern Rus’, the commercial republics and city-states of Novgorod and Pskov, developed a distinct type of patronage: most of their churches were commissioned by merchants, bishops and chief administrators of the republics rather than the princes as in the other part of pre-Mongol Rus’ and later in th…
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Based on fragmented existing evidence, this lecture reconstructs the history of the Golden Horde architecture in the East European Plain between the 13th and the 16th centuries. During this period, the progressively islamicized nomadic empire of the Golden Horde and its successor states were in continuous conflict with the Slavic and Christian Orthodox principalities of northeastern Rus’, gradually united by the Grand Principality of Moscow. This conflict determined the post…
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After the Mongol conquest, most of the old urban centers of Rus’ (with an exception of Novgorod and Pskov) declined; in northeastern areas Vladimir and Suzdal’ were gradually overtaken by Moscow, which eventually established control over most of the East European Plain. With the progressive increase of wealth under their control, the grand princes of Moscow were able to fund construction that reflected their imperial aspirations. Yet already in the 15th century they discover…
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The lecture explores the most complex and original phenomenon of medieval Russian architecture – churches with tent (shatër) domes that appeared in the middle of the 16th century and were prohibited in the middle of the 17th century by Russian Patriarch Nikon as a deviation from the Byzantine canon of Christian religious architecture. Clearly distinct from the Middle Byzantine tradition of cross-in-square plan characteristic of most masonry structures in medieval Rus’ and th…
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This lecture is an introduction to architecture and urbanism in a “Spanish colonial space called Puerto Rico”. We will look at cultural landscapes defined by four hundred years of European colonialism. The lecture’s title is a nod to the key roles that the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean sea have wielded on Puerto Rican transcontinental relationships. Metaphorically they seem to define a play in two acts. We will consider Puerto Rico’s architecture examining a series of layer…
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Many surveys discuss the Celts, but only after Rome invaded under Caesar beginning in 58 BC. In reality the Celts came to dominate most of Europe beginning in the 5th century. New research in the last decade has made it clear that the Celts were not the strange wild barbarians that the Romans made them out to be. They were important trading partners for the Romans, providing copper, gold, iron and tin. The Celts also provided a tremendous organizational skill to the dispara…
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The Principality of Moldavia, situated in the northeastern part of modern-day Romania, emerged as an independent state in the 14th century. Within the sphere of influence of Byzantium, Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, and, after 1453, of the Ottomans, this region of the Carpathian Mountains gave birth to a unique form of religious architecture that combined the iconography of Byzantium, the construction technologies of the Gothic, and the rituals of the Orthodox faith. What is now…
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Lecture 1 provides an overview of the structure of the module and an introduction to its main themes and concepts. The lecture will then offer a broad overview of the precursors of coffeehouses and teahouses in the pre-1500 world. This introductory part aims to set the module in a longer trajectory of human existence on the globe. The lecture will then focus on the history of wine and beer and their socio-spatial dimensions in the ancient world. This would provide a backgrou…
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In the previous lecture, we looked at the emergence of coffee as a novel social drink in the eastern Mediterranean in the 16th century. This lecture deals with the architecture of coffeehouses, from the mid-sixteenth-century to mid-eighteenth-century. In each context, we start with a broad description of the introduction of coffee and the coffeehouse and the circumstances of their transfer, along with a detailed analysis of one or two representative examples. The lecture end…
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Lecture 3 first offers an overview of the ways in which the emerging trade networks affected the dissemination and popularization of new substances. Using maps and diagrams, we will explain how a new web of maritime trade dominated by European powers was formed. The various trajectories of coffee, chocolate, and tobacco distribution across the globe will serve as illustrations of the workings of this newly formed colonial system.
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This lecture offers a global architectural history of teahouses. Starting with Chinese tea culture, the lecture will specifically focus on the development of the Japanese tea ceremony and its architectural setting. The lecture will then consider the teahouse in the global context from the seventeenth century onward. We will specifically focus on the emergence of the British tearooms and tea gardens, which will be explained in the context of the hegemonic colonial presence of…
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Lecture 5 begins with a brief review of colonial production and trade of coffee in the mid-18th century. We will first focus on the emergence of coffeehouses as self-contained structures—first in private gardens, and then in public ones— in the late 18th century/early 19th centuries. The second part examines urban coffeehouses in the same period. We examine how coffeehouses became sites of urban leisure for European bourgeoisie during the first half of the 19th century. The …
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Our week on “the closet” traces a long history of the architecture of privacy and asks how the “closet” came to signify a space of familial secrets and forbidden sexualities. We are looking at the “closet” both as an architectural site that raises boundaries and marks rites of passage, as well as a metaphor that structures sexualities around visibility and obscurity. We open the concept of the closet to a transcultural understanding, comparing and contrasting the various way…
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This lecture will take us to England and the United States, and then to Tehran, Iran. We will explore how the domestic architecture of privacy developed in England alongside shifting cultural notions and practices of individuality, privacy, and the self.
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This lecture introduces the kitchen as a space of both communal exchange and arduous labor, from the spaces of food preparation in the Americas at the time of the European arrival to the start of the 20th century. The lecture presents the kitchen as a domestic, private space that contains multiple transnational narratives of trade, from raw materials to the migrating populations it employs in the modern era, minorities and women. A broader narrative arch traces the struggles…
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This lecture continues the theme of labor in the kitchen into the second half of the 20th century. The lecture will examine the tension between public and private, communal and individual spaces in the preparation and consumption of food. The notion of the communal kitchen puts pressure on the increasingly private and isolated workspace created by the conditions of industrial capitalism. Particularly in the west, these conditions create a physical separation of household spa…
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Lecture one begins with an overview of the Sub-Saharan region and foregrounds the issues with studying its architecture. These forms have been overlooked by many histories of world architecture in part due to their lightweight construction and impermanence in comparison to the monuments of the canon. Add to this their relatively small archival footprint and the legacy of colonial representation, scholars tended to view architecture in the region as “backwards” and inferior t…
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Like smaller scale domestic works in the region, palace structures in Sub-Saharan Africa were important manifestations of cultural identity and political power. Displaying a range of formal, material, and stylistic variation, palaces were the center of religious, economic, and political activities. Often organized as a series of courtyards, palaces were sites of tremendous artistic production and contain many of the most important cultural artifacts of their time. Lecture 2 …
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Anti-colonial movements swept across the Sub-Saharan region in the 1950s and 1960s. Years of colonial occupation were overturned, and African leaders faced new political challenges. Chief among these concerns was how to best express their national identity after independence. Architecture in this period became a complex register of inherited modern traditions from colonial occupiers and new expressions of hopes and aspirations. Architects like Demas Nwoko and Pierre Goudiaby…
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Sub-Saharan Africa has a long history of building monumental sites of religious importance. While history textbooks emphasize iconic works in Egypt and other sites in North Africa, this lecture discusses the rich history of monumental architecture in Sub-Saharan Africa. Monuments constructed by the great empires of the era of trans-Saharan trade are symbols of power and evidence of the global spread of religions. Particularly important was the influence of Islam and construc…
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This lecture is prepared for Domesticity across Space and Time Module of GAHTC. Numerous sources have been used for this module. However, the most prominent ones are listed below and they are required reading for this lecture. Although never formally a colony of a Western country, Iran’s strategic location and natural resources made it subject to indirect—what may be called semi-colonial—political and economic intervention by the West. The essence of this semi-colonial chara…
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This lecture is prepared for Domesticity across Space and Time Module of GAHTC. The main sources that were used are listed below and are required reading. This lecture shows how larger policies of the Cold War and the Iranian government influenced domesticity. Something as simple as new ways of cleaning the house can be traced to America’s exercise of “quiet diplomacy” in Iran. Revisiting this era fosters understanding of the culture and daily life of people not just in Iran…
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This lecture explores how earth has been conceptualized and integrated into African thought and architectural practice as material, metaphor, environment, and intervention over time. Some of the first known man-made environments on the African continent were carved out of rock features in the landscape, and from this point of origin, cultures across the continent would proceed to develop a variety of distinctive architectural traditions and material practices that were regul…
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Picking up where the previous lecture left off, this lecture explores the ways in which earth and architectural practice has evolved in the contemporary period in the context of increased concern around issues of pollution, unsustainable development, and the widespread depletion of natural resources in Africa. Architects are increasingly turning to so-called vernacular materials like earth and experimented with different methods of construction technology in an effort to est…
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East Asia is a relatively clear idea defined by geography, culture, political constitution, and history. For more than two millennia, the high culture of the region was part of the Chinese cultural sphere, most centrally defined by the influence of Chinese script, Classical Chinese, and the wide range of cultural practices that it entails. At the same time, East Asia contains a vast diversity of political entities, ethnic communities, and language groups. China is presently …
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We know very little about Neolithic and Bronze Age architecture in East Asia. Many regions were not under centralized governance yet during this period, thus the lack of permanent monumental construction. Housing, often built with temporary material, and often succumbed to the lapse of time and easily vanished in repeated redevelopments during the following eras. The life and history of this remote past survived only fragmentally in legends and artifacts. In recent years, ar…
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Fengshui (pungsu in Korean, literally “wind and water”) is a theory in East Asia to identify the best locations in nature for a city or a building. In China and Korea, with the belief that the fengshui of the ancestral tomb or living residence influences the fortune of the descendants and the prosperity of the family, consulting a fengshui master is important for the construction of both residential and funerary architecture. Confucianism highlights family values and vener…
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The practices of laying out cities with regard to the geomantic principles of fengshui, enclosing and subdividing urban space within an orthogonal grid of walls and thoroughfares, and creating a hierarchy of space based upon functional and status considerations makes up one of China’s most significant contributions to the global history of urbanism. The rational, gridded order of the Chinese city served as metaphor and reinforcement for compelling ideologies of centralized …
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The extraordinary legacy of art and architecture associated with the teachings of Buddhism constitute one of the most enduring elements of cultural connection among diverse cultures in Asia. Originating in South Asia, these teachings found multifarious and complex pathways over both land and sea to find followers in cultures as distinct in their values as they separated by geographical distance. The history of East Asian Buddhist architecture, and Buddhist belief and pract…
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The extraordinary legacy of art and architecture associated with the teachings of Buddhism constitute one of the most enduring elements of cultural connection among diverse cultures in Asia. Originating in South Asia, these teachings found multifarious and complex pathways over both land and sea to find followers in cultures as distinct in their values as they separated by geographical distance. The history of East Asian Buddhist architecture, and Buddhist belief and pract…
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Buddhist architecture since the 14th century became more and more integrated into local cultures, creating colorful mixtures in philosophy, ritual practice, as well as architectural space, form, and decoration. Major dynasties and cultural periods in East Asia since the 14th century Maritime route connection, replacing the land route Silk Road, became the main venue for cultural exchanges. Influences from mainland East Asia on Japan and the Korea Peninsula were mainly fr…
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This lecture focuses on the palatial residences, together with the surrounding monumental ritualistic structures that legitimatize their claims to rule, highlighting the period between 1400 and 1800 but also tracing its ideological origins to earlier monuments. Centered on the major capital cities of the Ming and Ching dynasties in the continent, the Joseon Dynasty in the Korean peninsula, and the castle complexes of the late Muromachi and Momoyama period in Japan, the city …
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Literati culture boomed in East Asia since the 10th century. The greatest architectural expression of the literati culture is the private garden, where all intellectual and artistic activities associated with the literati taste took place, such as poetry, calligraphy, painting, qin zither playing, weiqi (go in Japanese) chess, refined theater, and antiquarian connoisseurship.
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Though traditional histories of East Asian architecture inevitably focus upon the gridded cities, extraordinary structural, decorative and iconographic complexity of religious architecture, and the scale and technical sophistication of the centers of elite power, the built environment of ordinary people in all cultures is one of the most diverse and rich in world architectural history. This is so partly for simple reasons of scale – East Asia for most of world history has h…
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The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a fundamental shift in the power structure of the world and of the East Asian region. Marked by the loss of the Opium wars, the Qing Dynasty went into radical decline. At the same time, Japan ascended as a world power by quickly absorbing and adapting to Western technology. With this fundamental shift in the power structure of the region, East Asia enters a fascinating, tragic historical period of imperialism and colonialism, of…
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The unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World-War II marked the beginning of a new world order that has directly shaped the environment that we now live in. The ensuing decades of the Cold War saw the rise of communist China, the division of the Korean peninsula into north and south, the disarmament and democratization of Japan and its re-emergence as an economic powerhouse. Even though the conditions of architectural production among the newly-born nation states…
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Si bien las historias tradicionales de la arquitectura de Asia oriental se centran inevitablemente en las ciudades reticuladas, la extraordinaria complejidad estructural, decorativa e iconográfica de la arquitectura religiosa, y la escala y la sofisticación técnica de los centros de poder de la élite, el entorno construido de la gente común en todas las culturas es uno de los más diversos y ricos en historia arquitectónica mundial. Esto se debe, en parte, a razones simples d…
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El siglo XIX y principios del siglo XX significaron un cambio fundamental en la estructura de poder del mundo en general y de la región de Asia Oriental en particular. Marcado por la pérdida de las guerras del opio, la dinastía Qing entró en decadencia radical. Al mismo tiempo, Japón ascendió como potencia mundial al absorber y adaptarse rápidamente a la tecnología occidental. Con este cambio fundamental en la estructura de poder de la región, el este de Asia entra en un per…
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La rendición incondicional de Japón y el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial marcaron el inicio de un nuevo orden mundial que ha dado forma al entorno en el que vivimos hoy. Las décadas posteriores a la Guerra Fría vieron el surgimiento de la China comunista, la división de la península coreana en el norte y el sur, el desarme y la democratización de Japón y su resurgimiento como una potencia económica. A pesar de que las condiciones de producción arquitectónica entre los est…
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Asia oriental es una idea relativamente clara definida por la geografía, la cultura, la constitución política y la historia. Durante más de dos milenios, la alta cultura de la región fue parte de la esfera cultural china, definida de manera central por la influencia de la escritura china, el chino clásico y la amplia gama de prácticas culturales que conlleva. Al mismo tiempo, el este de Asia contiene una gran diversidad de entidades políticas, comunidades étnicas y grupo…
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Sabemos muy poco acerca de la arquitectura neolítica y de la Edad de Bronce en el este de Asia. Muchas regiones no estaban aún bajo un gobierno centralizado durante este período, por lo tanto, no hubo una construcción monumental permanente. Las viviendas, a menudo, fueron construidas con materiales temporales, y con frecuencia sucumbieron al paso del tiempo y se desvanecieron fácilmente en remodelaciones repetidas durante las siguientes épocas. La vida y la historia de este …
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El Fengshui (pungsu en coreano, literalmente "viento y agua") es una teoría del este de Asia para identificar las mejores ubicaciones en la naturaleza para una ciudad o un edificio. En China y Corea, con la creencia de que el fengshui de la tumba ancestral o residencia viviente influye en la fortuna de los descendientes y la prosperidad de la familia, consultar a un maestro del fengshui es importante para la construcción de la arquitectura residencial y funeraria. El confuc…
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Una de las contribuciones más importantes de China a la historia global del urbanismo es la práctica de diseñar ciudades con respecto a los principios geománticos del fengshui, delimitar y subdividir el espacio urbano dentro de una red ortogonal de muros y vías, y crear una jerarquía de espacio basada en consideraciones funcionales y de estado. El orden racional y cuadriculado de la ciudad china sirvió como metáfora de las ideologías de control centralizado que encontraron u…
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El extraordinario legado del arte y la arquitectura asociados con las enseñanzas del budismo constituyen uno de los elementos más perdurables de conexión cultural entre las diversas culturas de Asia. Estas enseñanzas, que se originaron en el sur de Asia, encontraron caminos múltiples y complejos por tierra y mar para conseguir seguidores en culturas tan distintas en sus valores como separadas por la distancia geográfica. La historia de la arquitectura budista de Asia orienta…
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Después de la introducción del budismo en Corea y Japón como una herramienta impulsada por la élite para la centralización socio-política y económica de arriba hacia abajo entre los siglos IV y comienzos del VIII, surgieron nuevas variedades de pensamiento budista para expandir la base de su práctica a franjas más amplias de la sociedad. Esta ampliación se produjo en conjunto con reacciones a veces violentas e incluso una supresión total del budismo, un sistema de creencias …
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En Japón, el budismo zen llegó a una base cada vez más amplia de la sociedad. Patrocinado por los nuevos gobernantes samurai del período Muromachi, la austeridad ritual del budismo zen, el énfasis en la disciplina física e intelectual y la estricta adhesión a los conceptos de la transmisión maestro-acólito resultaron particularmente atractivos para los líderes que no eran considerados suficientemente cultos por las debilitadas elites de los aristócratas que habían dominado …
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Esta clase se centra en las residencias palaciegas, junto con las estructuras rituales monumentales circundantes que legitiman las pretensiones de los gobernantes, destacando el período entre 1400 y 1800, pero también rastreando sus orígenes ideológicos hasta monumentos anteriores. Está centrada en las principales ciudades capitales de las dinastías Ming y Ching en el continente, la Dinastía Joseon en la península coreana y los complejos de castillos de finales del período M…
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La cultura literati creció en el este de Asia desde el siglo X. Su mayor expresión arquitectónica es el jardín privado, donde se realizaron todas las actividades intelectuales y artísticas asociadas con el gusto literati, como poesía, caligrafía, pintura, práctica de la cítara, ajedrez, weiqi (go en japonés), teatro, y el saberes anticuario. Esta cultura, que primero floreció en la región de Jiannan del Delta del Yangtze en el sur de China, también influyó en las culturas…
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Starting at the scale of infrastructure, policy, and land acquisition, this lecture examines how the groundwork has been laid for ongoing exploitation and slow violence against communities of color in the United States. It explores the impacts of industrial pollution and contamination by highlighting the connections between the built environment and public health in light of the history of industrial zoning. Acknowledging the connections between race and contaminated envi…
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The first lecture discusses the origins of Etruscan culture and maps its global connections, through materials, technology, belief structure and trade networks. By tracing the production of iron, fired bricks, terra cotta and stone vaulting methods, Etruscan cities and temples become part of a larger flow of technologies and ideas. In addition, this lecture will address Etruscan ritual practices – including augury and divination – as part of a larger cosmic worldview with …
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The second lecture will focus specifically on the ritual death practices and tomb architecture of Cerveteri and Tarquinia (both sites jointly recognized as UNESCO World Heritage Sites). The partially subterranean, rock-cut tombs have significant global ties to Greece, Syria, and West Asia as well as earlier Celtic tombs. Like other chthonic work, a distinct language of spaces results from a geologically-dependent, subtractive architecture. And yet, these spaces remain link…
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The third, and final lecture will focus specifically on the transition from Etruscan to Roman power, and the corresponding global architectural ramifications. As influence shifted away from Etruscan cities to the Iron Age village developing along the banks of the Tiber River (through both conquest and assimilation), certain architectural ideas were adopted and assimilated, and others abandoned. Etruscan temple architecture fused with a continual influence from Greece, givin…
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This lecture introduces what I call the “Social Package” that travelled from Africa from around 60,000 BCE throughout the entire globe. Traditionally, the emphasis has been on tools and weapons; here I want to emphasize the integration of tools with art making, hut making, and dance. The tendency in the scholarship has been to see these things as separate and to focus on ‘firsts.’ The point I want to make in this lecture is to focus on the time when the various elements of s…
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In the last lecture, I introduced the idea of the “Social Package” that made us modern humans, from 150,000 or 200,000 BC through today. There is a lot more than can be said, but the lecture was intended to give the rudiments of a more elaborate discussion. This lecture moves the clock forward to the period called the Last Ice Age (ca. 24,000 BCE – 10,000 BCE). Though the world was uniformly colder than before, it was coldest in Europe, Russia, Siberia and Canada, which w…
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Shamanism is a generic term that describes a broad set of ritual beliefs about the human relationship to other humans and nature. It is linked also to Animism. This lecture introduces the broad parameters of shamanism while also trying to get students to realize that shamanism is not a ‘dead religion.’ In the last few decades, it has even been revived – just think of the so-called neo-pagans who flock to Stonehenge! So what we see today in some parts of the world is a mixtu…
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Rock Art accompanied all First Society cultures the world over. Its meaning and purpose can only be known through conjecture. This lecture introduces some examples and introduces the idea of Sacred Landscape. The lecture moves to what are certainly the most spectacular examples – the caves in southern France and northern Spain, made by the Magdalenian Culture. The history of these caves is not known definitively, but they were probably begun by the Gravettians. As the cli…
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This lecture introduces the Holocene (around 10,000 BCE) and its consequences for the development of social forms. It is often argued that the Holocene set the stage for agriculture. This lecture starts from this premise, and demonstrates that the Holocene also set the stage for an expansion of First Society cultures. By 3,000 BCE, around the time we see the first cities in Mesopotamia, we see extensive First Society cultures developing in areas of particularly rich and …
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At the core of the lecture is a map that differentiates the forest- and shore-based societies of the north and the emerging monsoon-based societies around the equator. It is to the latter that the word ‘civilization’ is often linked. What tends to be forgotten in that narrative is the emergence of the pastoral tradition and its new relationship to animals. Pastoralism developed in Africa and West Asia and had a huge impact on the social structure in the area of Africa-Eur…
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This lecture is dedicated to agro-pastoralism, where agriculture and pastoral traditions blend into a single village-based worldview. Pastoralism and agro-pastoralism develop more or less at the same time, but in different eco-landscapes. The emergence of agro-pastoralism begins around 9,000 BCE and involves the concentration of energy around a single set of plants. Whereas First Society people used many plants in various ways, agriculturalists began to elevate one or two ab…
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The first four centers of agriculture were Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus region, and China. These places expanded outward from a clear center. Different is the story of Europe, where the agro-pastoral revolution arrived after expanding westward and northward from Mesopotamia, starting 5,500 BCE and reaching Ireland around 4,000 BCE. There were two main tracks, one overland through Romania and Germany, and one along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The latter…
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At the same time as the expansion of the agro-pastoral tradition across Europe, we see in Malta the emergence of a unique culture built not around self-sustaining agriculture, but a religious economy. As difficult as it might seem to the modern mind to imagine, this site in Malta was one of the first great regional sites of the world – perhaps even more important than Stonehenge, with which it has parallels. People came from afar by boat to visit one of the temples, to expe…
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This lecture covers the East Asian agricultural/horticultural worlds. I start with Hemudu, one of the first places where rice was grown agriculturally. The expansion of rice to the islands would come, however, remarkably late. First there was the Polynesian expansion, which did not involve rice, but a host of plants that were connected to solving the problems of food, clothing, building materials and the like. This ‘civilizational package’ was highly mobile and brought by b…
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This is a long lecture that can easily be shortened or split into two. It covers the emergence of cities in the Tigris-Euphrates marshes. Unlike the conventional approach, which ‘naturalizes’ this phenomenon as part of the inevitable march of civilization, I want to make sure students realize that at that time, the first cities were highly speculative and filled with extreme risk. They had economies that had never been attempted before, namely single production economies (th…
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American architectural history often ignores or glosses over Black architects and their contributions. Yet, prior to the advent of formal architectural education, which in its infancy offered little opportunity for Blacks to participate, large numbers of Black men prospered in the building trades. Louisiana’s gens de couleur libres or free people of color offer a previously unexplored but essential case study. These men and women contributed to the built world of Louisiana …
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The lecture on Los Angeles and Tokyo creates a basis for a discussion of the global characteristics of the respective city films with individual histories of urban development, architecture, film cultures, and their histories. Attention to global influences reflects the circulation and reception of transnational exchange between the two cities and their film cultures. The history of urban planning, design, and architecture of Los Angeles emphasizes car culture and highways, …
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The lecture on Berlin and Paris discusses films that depict the two respective cities in their own right and in relation to each other. Berlin as a city functioned in national and global contexts. While the Nazi regime imagined a highly nationalist state with its central capital envisioned as “Germania,” its anti-Semitic and anti-communist politics led many urban designers, filmmakers, and architects to flee Germany and influence a global imaginary of modernist art and archi…
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The first part of this lecture chronicles two phases of Shanghai’s globalization. The first phase known as “the treaty port phase” began with Britain’s victory in the First Opium War (1839–42), which inaugurated the making of Shanghai into a global city. This phase ended with the Japanese occupation of Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) and the subsequent Second World War, when most foreigners fled the city, bringing Shanghai's 101 years as a treaty port …
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The second part of this lecture presents how films represent Shanghai’s current global status, the historic globalization processes that have shaped the city, and the tensions between high-end and low-end globalization processes, using four films—Skyfall (2012, English Directed by Sam Mendes), Meili xin shijie [Beautiful New World] (1999, Directed by Shi Runjiu), Yima de houxiandai shenghuo [The Postmodern Life of My Aunt] (2006, Directed by Ann Hui), and Suzhou he [Suzhou …
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The first part of this lecture investigates how Bombay was built and imagined as a cosmopolitan city through Hindi cinema, through the use of urban sites and architectural icons that are nodes within global architectural and urban histories. Bombay’s public spaces such as—Marine Drive, the Gateway of India, Maidans, bazaars, and parks— are landmarks that have come to represent the cosmopolitanism of the city. These landmarks are rendered cosmopolitan due to their complex…
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Part 2 of the lecture presents how the film Slumdog Millionaire represents the most recent phase of Bombay's globalization and its name change to Mumbai. Slumdog Millionaire is the life story of the Muslim protagonist Jamal who is a contestant on the TV show “Kaun Banega Crorepati,” [“Who wants to be a Millionaire”] in Mumbai. Jamal’s life and the story of the transition from Bombay to Mumbai are narrated in the film through a series of questions on the quiz show. The film …
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The history of Judaism in the land of Africa and Asia is a long and storied time, impacting many countries that are relatively close to the city of Jerusalem, and that which is even referenced in the Torah. Thus, the synagogues that have been established in this region range from some of the earliest built structures of its kind, to contemporary ones attempting to bring the structure into the 21st century. The contents of this section will be devoted to an investigation of…
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Judaism has long been a source of contention and extreme hostility throughout the history of Europe. Thus, the evolution of synagogues has been witness to times of construction, destruction, and revitalization throughout the continent. This lecture will focus on the development of synagogues across Europe over the last two millennia. Much of the information presented here will delve into the ethnic and racial diversity that has consumed Europe, the tension that has result…
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When examining the significance of synagogues in the Americas, it is of crucial importance to note that the timeline examined is drastically reduced compared to the aforementioned lectures. With that point in mind, the selection of the case studies below certainly provides much contextual information regarding the spread of Judaism, and the hubs of its observance in the Western Hemisphere. While half of the case studies presented here will come from the 20th century or lat…
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This lecture will begin with an introduction to historic patterns of building reuse in the pre-modern world, and then transition into the emergence of preservation as a global theoretical construct resulting in wide-ranging local and national policies. Examples of building reuse and preservation can be found throughout pre-modern history, illustrating practical rebuilding and reuse of materials and the historic practice of maintaining and repairing buildings as a common pat…
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The lecture will focus on sites in the region of North Africa and the Middle East that share aspects of their cultural histories and today face many of the same threats to their historic sites. This lecture will look at long-standing traditions and impacts of preservation and building reuse through historic patterns, the lens of colonization, the Muslim waaf system that inserts a complexity to preservation through a complex, long-established religious body having purview ov…
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This lecture will present some of the many diverse cultural heritage management systems that were used in African communities, formally or informally, including traditional rituals of reuse, religious influences, traditional building methods, poverty, and community influence, as well as continue to explore the context of colonialism on indigenous approaches to preservation and reuse. Themes: Traditional building methods; community preservation; economic development; p…
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The regions of West and South Asia have been critically valuable to both western and eastern civilizations due to the constant historic trade routes that brought economic viability and supporting settlements over thousands of years. In South Asia, historic sites are threatened by over -population and growing tourism pressures. Unresolved conflicts in West Asia that have plagued the area over the past several decades have made heritage concerns low among the region’s priori…
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This lecture picks up where the previous lecture leaves off. However, it is arranged thematically as well as chronologically. Its purpose is to introduce to students a whole host of other ways that architectural models have and can be used. Covered are representations of models being presented to kings and saints, the development of the working model in the Renaissance, discusses building models, city models, plaster casts, scale and full-size models, and extends discussions…
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This unit is intended to fill a perhaps the largest gap in education regarding architectural representations. These are the earliest architectural drawings. It looks at drawings from around 7000BCE to c. 200CE. It discusses drawings of architecture in relation to drawings for architecture. Ways of looking at and understanding drawings are emphasized. It also brings out issues in studying early architectural drawings and what can be gleaned from them. Their relationship to ma…
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This unit discusses architectural drawings from the middle ages to the present. It does so by focusing on support materials that influenced architectural representations in particular ways. The main sections deal with parchment, paper (this includes graph paper, blueprints, diazoprints), and early experiments in computer aided design. Through specific examples, students should understand that the materials that are used govern what can be produced and the practices of archit…
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This lecture traces the history of the development of perspectival representation and its spread. It initially focuses on Italy and follows the spread of perspective to China. This includes the missionary Matteo Ricci, the artists Castilione, the priest Giovanni Gheradini, the production of the first Chinese book on western perspective Shixue by Nian Xiyao. It also looks at the spread of perspective from China to Korea and Japan.
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This lecture draws on the work of the author and his book Drawing on Architecture: The Object of Lines. Its purpose is to provide a shortened form of the material for educators use in their lectures. It discusses architectural representations – primarily drawings, but also models – as objects imbedded in certain networks that influence the ways that these representations are perceived and understood. It was these networks that developed that naturalized drawings as the ferti…
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This lecture covers the oldest architectural models. It discusses a number of models around the eastern Mediterranean and the “fertile crescent” before moving to examples from the Americas, China, Japan, and Indonesia showing models that stretch across geography and time. Though different models were used very differently, they can most generally be said to occupy a traditional space between states – whether this is between life and death, between enlightenment and corporeal…
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This lecture provides a launching point into some of the issues involved with tracing an architectural history through the lens of climate. The lecture is divided into two parts. The first addresses the shifting concept of the “primitive” within architectural culture, especially as it was evoked as a symbol for ideas of naturalness and climatic adaptation. The second and third parts, revolving around two case studies, add to this historiographic narrative by introducing the …
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The records of non-western architecture prior to the 19th century are relatively scarce. This is because much of the continental land mass south of Europe’s Iberian region, and coastal North Africa remained unexplored territory to European explorers of the 16th and 17th century. Whilst in global history, from the 16th century, there is a marked increase in inter-continental trade, with new trading and communicating networks being established to support this, the built physic…
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This lecture is concerned with the development and exchange of ideas and principles that have informed the designs of towns, buildings and landscapes in former British colonial territories (late17thC – Mid 20C). We will be looking at what Georg Simmel called the ‘visible institutions of the state’ – that is, those buildings and projects that enabled the British Empire to exist - the very mechanisms for imperial advancement. We will be focusing primarily on four geographical …
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The purpose of this lecture is to demonstrate links between architecture and climate that developed from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. Part 1 begins by illustrating how attempts to treat and prevent tuberculosis, an urban disease, had a direct impact on the development of architectural typologies and forms. As the treatment of tuberculosis was closely linked to the environment and climate, architects around the world had to design buildings (in the main sana…
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This lecture discusses the importance of climate to the development of architectural modernism in the period surrounding World War II. Starting off with some of the basic climatic principles championed by Le Corbusier in the late 1920s, the lecture then discusses developments in Brazil and the United States. A primary focus is on the chains of influence and counter-influence between these different regions, and many others as well, that led to the refinement of the use of sh…
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This is the final lecture of the series. In this lecture, we examine a new technology – air-conditioning – and discuss its sociotechnical and architectural histories, i.e. how it shaped and was shaped by both the society and the built environment. Although this series of lectures is organized in a loosely chronological manner and air-conditioning appears to be the latest instalment in the history of climate control, I argue that the architectural history of air-conditioning …
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This lecture begins with an examination of brick and its development and history before Islam. Next, brickmaking and the use of brick is charted through the Islamic culture. The lecture concludes with contemporary uses of brick and the evocative meaning of such use. The history of brick architecture is the history of civilization. With the spread of Islam new urban centers were created, and the technology of making bricks, fired and glazed bricks, transported where Islam…
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One of the most ubiquitous and prolific decorative materials found throughout the history of Islamic art and architecture is the ceramic tile. Tiles in a variety of forms are found throughout the history of Islamic architecture including: those inherited from the Byzantines and Sassanians, the East Asian white porcelain tile, as well as luster tile and faience, to further developments such as overglazing and the discovery of fritware techniques and underglazing. While it is …
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The use of dressed stone in architecture signifies the knowledge of advanced stone working technology. The concept of shaping stones began with the invention of the first stone tools. Those stones were broken and sharpened using other stones through knapping. Stone that has been cut, shaped into a smoother planar form so that stones fit together are called dressed stone. The production of dressed stone requires knowledge about stone properties to determine, or invent, the ap…
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Stucco was first employed in Iran for the primary reason of a lack of building stone. It was used in this way to not only conceal the surface inconsistencies in brick, the dominant building material, but also as a transitional material between various wall surface media. Through decorative ornamentation and geometric patterning inconsistencies in the wall were covered. It soon became a dominant architectural feature firmly associated with the Abbasid caliphate. Howeve…
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It is well known that the pointed arch appears in buildings around the Mediterranean and Central Asia prior to even its adaption by Islam, much less its appearance at St. Denis, Paris in the 12th century. However, despite this, the origins of the pointed arch and the pointed ribbed vault and the paths they traveled across Eurasia before becoming an ‘Islamic’ or ‘Gothic’ architectural characteristic par excellence remain largely a mystery. The intent of this lecture is to ope…
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La historia de la arquitectura de ladrillo es la historia de la civilización. Con la expansión del Islam se crearon nuevos centros urbanos y se transportó la tecnología de fabricación de ladrillos, en particular ladrillos cocidos y vidriados, a los nuevos territorios. ¿Qué es ladrillo? ¿Qué hace que un ladrillo sea un ladrillo? Es un material de construcción hecho por el hombre, su componente principal es la arcilla que se extrae de la tierra. La selección de sus componen…
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Nuestra narrativa comienza aquí en la Gran Mezquita de Kairouan. Se presenta en una disposición típica de la llamada “planta en T." Tiene una pared exterior circundante con un gran patio y una sala de oración (hipóstila) que tiene varias naves en su profundidad. Las dos cúpulas sugieren un eje que alinea el robusto minarete cuadrado. En la culminación de este eje debajo de la última cúpula adyacente a la pared exterior está el mihrab - o nicho que indica a los fieles la dire…
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La piedra, junto con la madera, es uno de los materiales de construcción más antiguos que se obtienen fácilmente de la naturaleza. La primera herramienta humana fue de piedra lo que fue un logro tecnológico importante y de empoderamiento. En las cuevas, la piedra proporciona refugio y protección. La piedra es duradera, fuerte y difícil para darle forma. La dificultad en adquirirla, transportarla y moldearla la convierte en un material especial que tiende a la permanencia. Po…
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Los romanos usaban el estuco de forma bastante extensiva para los relieves escultóricos en las paredes interiores de los edificios. Era más barato y más rápido tallar estuco en lugar de piedra. “El estuco y el yeso tienen como base la materia prima de cal o yeso. La cal se produce a partir de la combustión de la piedra caliza a una temperatura de 880 ° C o de la quema de mármol a 1000 ° C. La piedra seca y quebradiza que resulta se convierte en una sustancia fluida y cremos…
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El propósito de esta clase de ninguna manera es probar o refutar ningún origen particular para el 'arco apuntado'. Esta idea, originada en los siglos XVIII-XIX permanece incompleta y muchas de las teorías que permanecen se han derivado a diversos temas y, a menudo, han caído en falacias o reduccionismos ad absurdum. Teorías sobre los orígenes del arco apuntado y la llamada "teoría gótico-sarracena de la arquitectura", por ejemplo, se han escrito en Europa desde al menos med…
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This lecture will introduce the theoretical basis to ‘chthonic’ work, in contrast with tectonic. Shown as residences, churches, shrines, meditation spaces, civic structures and tombs, rock-cut architecture occupies a central place in many global civilizations - even persisting into the present day in forms such as subway systems, underground market spaces, and the occasional itinerant work of architecture. In ‘rock-cut’ architecture, the structure is deeply integrated with…
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This lecture provides an interpretation of the Pharoanic architecture of the Nile River valley through the lens of the chthonic. Beginning with the Old Kingdom, this lecture argues that the iconic forms – from the mastaba to the stepped pyramid, and eventually to the great pyramid complexes of Cheops - are proto-chthonic ‘mountains’ created over burial sites: Pyramids as shaped mountains, in conversation/ on cross axis with the flowing water of the Nile. During the middle K…
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Concurrent developments in Mesopotamia display similar chthonic roots. Beginning with the ziggurat form as a ‘sacred mountain’ – a mass containing the source of all life, reaching towards the sky with labyrinth-like passages and openings. In Persia, this sensibility is evident in the Tomb of Cyrus outside of Pasargarde – an assembled stone mass that mimics the earlier ziggurats. Like the Egyptians, the Persians then transitioned to rock-cut tombs for Darius, Xerxes, and…
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The Persian Empire had a massive influence over the rising Mauryas in India. After the conquest of Persepolis by Alexander, the craftsmen and thinkers of Persia migrated East to India – taking their expertise and aesthetic ideology with them. Stone pillars with animal capitals transitioned directly, while other forms had a more tangential influence. The rock-cut tombs and treasuries of West Asia, may have been the direct precedent for the first Buddhist and Jain caityas a…
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The main theme is the concept of the ‘chthonic-ecology’, where the body of the earth is understood as a living system - soil, earthquakes, snow, water, sun, air interdependencies - that can be characterized as ecology in the modern sense of the word. This is chthonic architecture not as the ‘rock-cut’, as in Afro-Eurasia, but the chthonic as a complete understanding of landscape and the environment: a chthonic ecology. The lecture begins with the chthonic forms of the Puebl…
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This lecture explores the unexpected appearance of rock-cut architecture in more modern context. As we have seen, the chthonic idea flourished as architecture in pre-modern times. With the onset of modernity, the longstanding separation of the native ground from the capital-A architecture became dominant, particularly with the ascent of the functionalist, materialist and tectonic contentions of architecture. As per the expectations of the European Enlightenment, the empowere…
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This lecture addresses the question of the ‘beginnings’ of South Asian civilization. It locates the migrations out of Africa that ‘settled’ South Asia, and then traces the context of the art and architecture of the cave dwellers, with focus on Bhimbetka, a centrally located pre-historic site (this section can be presented in context with the GAHTC lecture module on the Architecture of the First Societies, by M. Jarzombek). The lecture then moves to the contexts of the establ…
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This lecture focuses on the Aryas, and in particularly their metaphysics as manifested in their architecture. The lecture begins with a discussion of the controversial Arya Migration Theory, and its racist sub-texts, and attempts to distinguish that from the globally situated understanding of the migratory influences on cultural development, in particular in South Asia. This leads to a discussion of the making of Arya cities in the Gangetic plain, and what connects and disti…
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This lecture is the first of two parts that explore the forms of Buddhist architecture, their relationship to trade, and their proliferation in the Asian world. In this sequence, this lecture discusses the establishment of Buddhist architecture under Emperor Asoka in the 3rd century BCE, and its spread in South Asia and south East Asia. The main architectural object of discussion is the ‘stupa’. The lecture begins with the rise of the Mauryan Empire and its relationship …
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This lecture combines two topics – a. the institutional transmission of Buddhist thought from centers of intellectual production in India, and b. the role of the Caitya in the transmission of Buddhism into East Asia, along the trade routes. The lecture begins by establishing the mahavihara, the Buddhist ‘university’ that was a systematic site for the production and teaching of advanced Buddhist knowledges. From here the lecture moves to the study of the practical institut…
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This lecture is dedicated to the development of Hinduism in the Guptan period in South Asia. This development took place in the context of the ongoing spread of Buddhism throughout Asia, which has been covered in other lectures. Usually, the Guptans are held responsible for the ‘demise’ of Buddhism in India, its home of origin. By contrast this lecture will argue that the Guptas, who were generous patrons of the Buddhists in their realms, sought to revive Hinduism, in harmon…
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This lecture explores the development of the temple concept in the South Asian world affected by the Guptan invention of the structural, in particular focus on the peninsular Indian kingdoms of the Pallavas and the Chalukyas. In the process of ‘adopting’ the Guptan institution of the Hindu temple, these kingdoms did not simply cut-and-paste the new orthodoxy, nor did they produce a regional adaptation, in the sense that they ‘localized’ principles that were abstract and clai…
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This lecture focuses the relationship between Hindu temples and administrative systems. It begins with a discussion of the polity and architecture of the Rajputs of northern India, the ‘new’ kings, converted from first-societies practices into ‘caste’ Hindus. We study the new manuals of temple building – the Vastu-Shastras – and some of their famous architectural creations. The Bay of Bengal/SE Asian geo-sphere around the year 1000CE. The Bay of Bengal and the Indian Oce…
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This is a discussion of the Khmer socio-economic matrix in terms of its innovation of Cholan kovil practices. It outlines the hydro engineering and the social systems that were integrated by the Khmer to create a uniquely powerful polity in SE Asia. The main case study is Vrah Vishnulok (Angkor Wat), which can be understood as a spatialization of Mouth Meru, here adapted to the local geographical conditions.
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This lecture addresses the so-called establishment of Islam in South Asia. While colonial texts usually identify the invasions of Mohammand Ghazni and Ghori around 1000CE as the beginning of Islam in India, this lecture contends that these are colonial projections, and that the actual story of Islam and south Asia goes back to the older ongoing trade between West Asia and South Asia. This lecture then examines the architecture of the Delhi Sultanates, a series of short lived…
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The concept of this lecture is to discuss the Mughal tomb. It focuses on the Taj Mahal and its precedents.
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These lectures revisit architectural histories (itihasas) of the Indian Subcontinent from multidisciplinary, cross-geographical, and interpretive perspectives, supported by a new body of scholarship and archaeological data. The word for “history” in Sanskrit is itihasa, which has traditionally meant “that’s what happened” or “so indeed it was.” Yet, iti (as in itihasa) is often used in a Sanskrit sense of “end quote.” Itihasa, therefore, in its traditional usage has often be…
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This lecture examines Mughal architecture, one of the most vibrant and dynamic architectural eras in India. The Mughal dynasty was established in 1526 CE by Babur, descendant of the Timurid Mongols. A Muslim dynasty of Turkic-Mongol origin, the Mughals ruled most of northern India from the early 16th to the mid-18th century. During its imperial rule stretching over more than two centuries, the Mughal Empire created a spectacular body of mausoleums, mosques, palaces, and gard…
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This lecture focuses on the early colonial era of the British Raj and explains how British artists in the 18th and 19th centuries imagined India in ways that were complicit with imperial domination and the creation of Britain’s image of India. After the East India Company’s victory over the Nawab of Bengal in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, British artists eager to “discover” the newly conquered territory in the East had begun arriving in India. Among them were such renowned …
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A “Global” History of South Asia (3000 BCE – 2000 CE) This lecture examines how the British Raj employed the language of architecture during its colonial rule of India to project an image of Britain as the leader of the “civilized” world and assert the authority of the empire. In many ways, the colonial administration viewed architecture as an integral part of its ideological approach of “civilizing mission.” However, a singular narrative of the architecture of empire didn’…
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This lecture examines the how the newly minted nations of India and Pakistan negotiated the questions of national identity and modernism through the language of architecture. In the wake of the Indian Partition in 1947, these nations looked both outward and inward for inspiration, marked by an urge to construct an image of progress, modernity, and nationalism. But, as Salman Rushdie’s celebrated novel, Midnight’s Children (1981), reveals how the traumatic experience of birth…
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El concepto de esta clase es discutir la tumba Mogola. Se enfoca en el Taj Mahal y sus precedentes.
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Esta clase aborda la cuestión de los "comienzos" de la civilización del sur de Asia. Localiza las migraciones fuera de África que se "asentaron" en el sur de Asia, y luego rastrea el contexto del arte y la arquitectura de los habitantes de las cavernas, centrándose en Bhimbetka, un sitio prehistórico céntrico (esta sección se puede presentar en contexto con el módulo GAHTC sobre la Arquitectura de las Primeras Sociedades, por M. Jarzombek). Luego, la clase pasa a los context…
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Esta clase se centra en los Arios, en particular su metafísica y como se manifiesta en su arquitectura. La clase comienza con una discusión sobre la controvertida Teoría de la Migración Aria, y sus subtemas racistas, e intenta distinguir ello de la comprensión globalmente situada de las influencias migratorias sobre el desarrollo cultural, en particular en el sur de Asia. Esto lleva a una discusión sobre la construcción de las ciudades Arias en la llanura del Ganges, y lo qu…
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Esta clase es la primera de dos partes que exploran las formas de la arquitectura budista, su relación con el comercio y su proliferación en el mundo asiático. En esta secuencia, esta clase trata acerca del establecimiento de la arquitectura budista bajo el emperador Asoka en el siglo tercero antes de Cristo, y su difusión en el sur de Asia y el sudeste asiático. El principal objeto arquitectónico de discusión es la 'estupa'. La clase comienza con el surgimiento del Imper…
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Esta clase combina dos temas: a. la transmisión institucional del pensamiento budista desde los centros de producción intelectual en India, y b. el papel de la Chaitya en la transmisión del budismo al este de Asia, a lo largo de las rutas comerciales. La clase comienza estableciendo el mahavihara, la "universidad" budista que era un sitio sistemático para la producción y enseñanza de conocimientos budistas avanzados. Desde aquí, la clase pasa al estudio de las institucion…
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Esta clase está dedicada al desarrollo del hinduismo en el período Gupta en el sur de Asia. Este desarrollo tuvo lugar en el contexto de la expansión del budismo en toda Asia, que se ha tratado en otras clases. Por lo general, se ha entendido que los Gupta son responsables de la "desaparición" del budismo en la India, su hogar de origen. En contraste, esta clase explica que los Gupta, que fueron generosos mecenas de los budistas en sus reinos, buscaron revivir el hinduismo, …
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Esta clase explora el desarrollo del concepto de templo en el mundo del sur de Asia afectado por la invención Gupta, en particular el enfoque en los reinos indios peninsulares de los Pallava y los Chalukya. En el proceso de 'adoptar' la institución Gupta del templo hindú, estos reinos no simplemente “cortaron y pegaron” la nueva ortodoxia, ni produjeron una adaptación regional, en el sentido de que 'localizaron' principios que eran abstractos y universales. Este no es un mod…
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Esta clase enfoca la relación entre los templos hindúes y los sistemas administrativos. Comienza con una discusión sobre la política y la arquitectura de los rajput del norte de la India, los "nuevos" reyes, surgidos de las prácticas de las primeras sociedades hindúes de "castas". Estudiamos los nuevos manuales de construcción de templos, los Vastu-Shastras, y algunas de sus famosas creaciones arquitectónicas. La geoesfera asiática de la Bahía de Bengala / SE alrededor d…
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Esta clase es una discusión de la matriz socio-económica de los Jemer en términos de su innovación de las prácticas Kovil Chola. Describe la ingeniería hidráulica y los sistemas sociales que fueron integrados por los jemeres para crear una política única y poderosa en el sudeste asiático. El estudio de caso principal es Vrah Vishnulok (Angkor Wat), que se puede entender como una espacialización de Monte Meru, aquí adaptada a las condiciones geográficas locales.
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Esta clase aborda el llamado establecimiento del Islam en el sur de Asia. Mientras que los textos coloniales generalmente identifican las invasiones de Mohammand Ghazni y Ghori alrededor de 1000 DC como el comienzo del Islam en la India, esta clase sostiene que estas son proyecciones coloniales, y que la historia real del Islam y el sur de Asia se remonta al comercio entre Occidente Asia y Asia del Sur. Esta clase luego examina la arquitectura de los Sultanatos de Delhi, una…
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Early Islamic water architecture made an extensive use of existing traditions prior to the conquest, which originated from two main sources, the Orient and the Mediterranean Basin. All along Maghreb’s shores Islam developed a unique water architecture tradition combining know how imported from the three neighboring continents of the Mediterranean basin, Africa, Asia (mainly Mesopotamia and Persia) and Europe (mainly Greece and Roman empire). Islam rulers proved their powerfu…
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With the long history of roman civilization in the region, particular typologies of hydraulic systems and related architectural facilities were introduced in Maghreb and south Europe during the Muslim conquest. From ingrutatti to khettara and from souterazi to aqueduct, hydraulic architecture in this region shows deep integration and testifies intense transmission flows between eastern and western technologies and architecture during the Islamic period. This lecture is dedic…
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At the scale of the architectural edifices, water had also particular roles in space making. These roles were varying in degrees, from functional to aesthetical functions. In both religious buildings and private houses, public spaces and courtyards, water fountains and basins showed the pivotal role that water played in spatial organization of these places. This role became more visible in gardens and palaces, where architecture was totally integrated to water. The lecture …
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This lecture explores the connection between single-family home ownership and the ideals of democratic capitalism through the development, proliferation and eventual exportation of the American minimum house. The content introduces the development of the American minimum house and related economy housing programs in the US in the post-World War II period as part of a broader campaign of housing reform and political activism among capitalist builders and within US housing pol…
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This lecture discusses pandemics in the context of rapid modernization and industrialization in an interconnected globe, and the beginning of modern epidemiology. John Snow, Joseph Bazalgette & Edwin Chadwick improved the urban sanitation of London in the mid 19th century during the “Great Stink.” Florence Nightingale as the founder of modern nursing fundamentally changed care practices. Cholera and the Spanish flu mirrored expanding global networks, yet revealed distinct…
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We identify and discuss the contribution of world exhibitions and fairs to global production and consumption of good and commodities as it relates to the emergence of new spaces of display and commercial collectivity. Case studies range from the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of London (1851) to the urban department stores of Europe (Innovation by Victor Horta in Brussels and Schocken by Erich Mendelsohn in Germany) and suburban shopping malls in the post world war t…
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We identify modes of knowledge creation and dissemination in different media over time. Whereas travel was the most important source of direct learning during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the proliferation of printed matter and photography expanded the possibilities of learning from afar and was eventually even more radically transformed by the advent of the digital revolution. When travel was not possible, the plaster cast functioned as a surroga…
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As education moved from in-situ learning to spaces of collectivity, so too did opportunities for architects and students of architects to converge into the transcultural classroom. If colonialism promoted exchanges between nations, it was not until nationalism asserted itself that institutions began to formalize education. Together with the increased media, this lead to the rise of greater networks of collaboration and the rise of the international competition.
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Here, the question is: How can construction practices be regarded as global processes? We identify and analyze a series of producers of products alongside the emergence of new construction techniques and technologies. This lecture aims at illustrating the increasingly complex circulation of different materials and methods that go against the grain of the traditional vernacular ideal of sourcing local materials that has recently re-gained momentum within the ‘green’ and envir…
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Dramatically increased mobility throughout the last century has generated both increased dialogue and new types of buildings that have accommodated new forms of transport ranging from air and train to automobiles. This phenomenon has given way to a number of diverse types of buildings including the Motel, Hotel, Airport, and Train Stations.
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The building industry has increased relied upon labor moved across geographies that reveals the economic disparities between regions and cities of the global north and south. These exchanges reveal the paradoxes between the virtual and real insofar as the needs of actually building in specific places go counter to the global circulation of ideas and capital.
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This course serves as an introductory course to the history of ancient built environments. We will become familiar with the language of built environments including the vocabularies of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. We will also be introduced to ideas that have shaped the cultures we know today, from the Western Culture of Europe to that of China, India, and some of the many cultures of the African continent. This is a survey course and an introduct…
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Today's monuments range geographically from Korea to France, England, Ireland and Egypt, and in date from the 5th to the 1st millennia BCE. What unifies them is their use of stone - used for a range of building types that speak to a human desire to provide enduring monuments on the landscape. While we may have monuments that have endured from very early dates, we don't always have full knowledge of why they were built or what purpose they served. Our earliest examples tod…
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Lecture 3 continues an examination of materials and explores the broader context within individual monuments were sited, looking at the settlements that preceded the emergence of cities, which will be the topic of Lecture 4. With these we address several among the sites of the world's earliest civilizations, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and Mesoamerica.
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While small villages comprised the earliest settlements, we can also identify the beginnings of early urban settlements if we define urban as a center of population, commerce, and culture - a town of significant size and importance. We can recognize these settlements as constituting a series of networks, from social networks and governmental systems to modes or systems of commerce, trade, and production. A city is the result of urbanization, which can be thought of as a pro…
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This is the first of two lectures that focus on architecture and ritual, exploring the ritual spaces and architectural forms that developed along with enduring religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism. These religions both originated in the Indian subcontinent and were later exported along trade routes, taking hold across Asia. Both symbolically and architecturally, the religious monuments we'll now explore demonstrate strong ties to the landscapes of their settings.
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This lecture is the first of a sequence of two lectures that focus on the building of empire, looking at the empires established in Rome, China and Central (or Meso-) America. We will look at the architectural forms and effects on the built environment of these political systems. In the case of Rome and China we are discussing vast territorial holdings and long durations - and we have a great deal of information about each of these empires. The situation in Central Americ…
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This lecture will focus on the building of empires, how were the empires manifested in the built environment? We have looked at Rome and then moved to Meso or Central America, where we will pick up today and finally to China. These were distinct empires, sharing characteristics but as with all of the built environments we have studied, there are specific response to place, to landscape, to environment, to culture, and to practices including trade, politics, and power. Th…
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This lecture will focus on the question of how did secular developments and trade influence the form of cities in the later medieval period? The increasing importance of cities as places of trade, commerce, defense, and culture is a development that parallels the rise of Gothic architecture in Europe. A part of the rise of the city reflects the growing significance of building and environments that are not tied to the church or to religious institutions but instead serve …
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Gothicness surrounds the transformation of ribs from singular to multiple. Nowhere is this more distilled than in the column pier. The story of Pierness follows a progression from few to many through three distinct typologies—column, clustered column, and compound pier; however, this story is peppered with intrigue. The details, figuration, and configuration of gothic piers reflect larger architectural conditions. This lecture briefly outlines how these transformations manif…
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A springer is the first stone above a column in an arch, and the springing point is the moment of transition between the logic of support and that of load. The concept of the springing point is open to expansion; for instance, it may refer to a branching moment from primary to tierceron ribs in a vault (see Vaultness), or countless other examples where few need to multiply into many. Because the springing is fundamentally a transition moment, it encompasses the continual str…
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A logical progression of vault typologies is as follows—Barrel, Groin, Rib, Liernes, Fan. But while 'progression' implies a direction and single endpoint, our story of Vaultness is cyclical. Pre-Gothic vaults are created by extruding an arch into a continuous surface (barrel) or by extruding in perpendicular directions (groin). Both are constructed in a manner similar to a masonry wall—homogenous stone from end to end. The groin is the intersection cusp between the two extru…
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This lecture introduces both the notion and the dynamics of heritage as a global movement. Starting with Rem Koolhaas’ provocative statement “preservation is overtaking us”, the lecture aims to show why heritage has become an important topic for architects and architectural historians. For this the lecture focuses on three different forces: urbanization, tourism and identity.
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The aim of this lecture is to explore the emergence of preservation and conservation as public policy activities in Europe. Following the argument that preservation is a modern undertaking, it shows how preservation practices emerged from both the political and the industrial revolution. The lecture is divided in five parts. The first part introduces the topic by questioning the universality of preservation. The second part discusses the interest in documenting antiquity in …
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This lecture explores the internationalization of the preservation movement as a “modern cult” (Riegl). It is organized into three parts: the first part deals with the global expansion of the “cult” in the context of World Fairs. The second part addresses responses to WWI in terms that addressed issues related to technology and functionality in the realm of architecture and preservation. The third part focuses on the “Salvage of Abu Simbel” – the celebrated showcase of UNESC…
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This lecture discusses the political dimension of the UNESCO World Heritage Convention as a legal contract between the UNESCO and the individual member states that have signed the convention. The first part explains the background of the convention. The second part explains how the convention actually works. The third part addresses the challenges the World Heritage Convention is facing.
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This lecture discusses the tensions and frictions that arise when heritage infringes upon the life of those living in and with heritage sites. At the center stands the conflict between object-focused experts and the national government issuing the laws regulating preservation, and the local communities where preservation is enacted. In other words, as much as heritage can be a matter of national pride it can also be a source of conflict over ownership. Once again the questi…
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This lecture will address issues surrounding architectural materiality, and the way in which materiality is factored in into strategies of architectural preservation that are filtered through memory. Many of these themes also relate to the rather ambiguous concept of authenticity, particularly with regards to the role that materiality plays in the establishment of what might be considered the “genuine” or the “original” character of an architectural form. This module will fo…
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This lecture will address issues surrounding the immaterial and the question of “intangible” heritage with regards to how conceptual, not physical, elements such as memory, orality, and historical practice play a role in strategies of architectural preservation. Many of these themes also (again) access the rather ambiguous concept of authenticity, particularly with regards to the role that the proceedings of the 1994 Nara Conference played in highlighting the necessity of br…
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The lecture focuses on the different forms, types and value criteria when discussing heritage and preservation. Is “value” rooted in the architectural object or in the quality of the relationships enabled by the object? Or is “value” first and foremost an economic asset that needs to be judged in terms of the amount of revenue that a particular heritage is able to generate? Since heritage is a heterogeneous concept, it is not surprising that the notion of value in heritage p…
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This lecture will address issues surrounding the multiple and entangled functions of heritage in cases where issues of trauma, disenfranchisement, and oppression make up a large part of a structure’s narrative. It will focus specifically on the politics of cultural identity, recognition, and social remembrance and how heritage conservation, especially with regards to “difficult heritage,” can never just be concerned with the preservation of the physical structure, but also a…
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This lecture looks at the relationship between heritage and property on a national, global and local level. In doing so, it seeks to explore the relationship between heritage and the power of control. Ownership of heritage gives the right to control access to places, as well as and the information people are allowed to know once they are at a particular site. We will look into several key concepts and ideas including repatriation, the right to preserve a particular version o…
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This lecture will address issues surrounding architectural mimicry, and the roles this approach to structural form plays in reimagining heritage, tradition, and authenticity. It also provokes discussions concerning the idea of architectural heritage as not only unique and one-of-a-kind, but also fundamentally place-based with its originality fundamentally embedded in a specific time / place matrix as a requirement for the establishment of what might be considered the “genuin…
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This final lecture considers both heritage and its documentation, specifically around 20 and 21st century “digital heritage” and digital capture technologies. We will look at the emergence of “digital heritage”, the most recent UNESCO category of heritage with its own unique form of conservation and preservation. Two case studies will be able to address several themes, including memory, authenticity, and preservation.
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Columbus’ infamous voyage to the Americas took place by the end of the 15th century, an event often lauded as a “discovery” and the beginning of a new age. However, if we tell the stories of global human interaction as one beginning with the European “Age of Exploration,” we miss the dynamic shifts that were taking place technologically, economically, and culturally elsewhere in the world that make up the fabric or serve as catalysts for global expansion. These lectures aim …
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By the 17th century, the Eurasian world from Japan to Western Europe was a contiguous economic power bloc connected by well-established cross-country and coastal trade. From one end to the other, wealth and ideas traveled in the baggage or minds of traders, migrants, and armies. This was the Old-World order that was now increasingly undermined by the newly arising and more efficient ocean trade. Eventually by the 19th century, the advantages of the ocean routes, the unpreced…
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By the early 18th century, the Eurasian Power Bloc became increasingly marginal to the new maritime port economy that was set up and controlled by Western European colonial powers. This maritime colonial project was a global phenomenon intrinsically linked with the institutionalization of race-based slavery. At the foundation of this global system were sites of fortified enclosure and of labor. Both the fort and the plantation greatly transformed the social, cultural, and en…
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