ARC3934/5933: Special Topics Projects and Polemics
ARC3934/5933: Special Topics – Projects and Polemics
Fall 2008
Florida International University School of Architecture
Professor David Rifkind [
Engineering & Computer Science Room 134, Wednesday, 2:00 - 4:30PM
Office hours, room PCA383b, Monday and Thursday, 1:30-4:00
Special Topics – Projects and Polemics examines the debates that animated modern architecture from the early nineteenth century to the recent past. The seminar runs in parallel with the global architecture history survey (ARC 2701/5711) and examines the correspondences between modern architecture and the discipline’s historical roots.
The course focuses on close readings of primary sources from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment, historical analyses of these works, modernist theory written in response to or against these precedents, and contemporary architectural theory which sheds light on the polemical origins of architectural practices.
Requirements: Students will lead discussions in class, and pursue a semester-long written research project. Each student will lead two of the weekly discussions, and will prepare a series of analyses of a work of architecture or design.
For each weekly discussion, one or several students will present the assigned reading. Students are expected to distill the text’s arguments into a five-minute presentation, and to prompt the class with three or more penetrating questions that generate an illuminating conversation about the work under discussion. Each student will have at least two opportunities to present during the semester
The analytical project will focus on a single work of architecture or design (including landscapes, interiors, cities and objects) chosen by each student in consultation with the instructor. The first assignment calls for three rough models and a written description (600 words) of the building. The second assignment builds on the first, and involves three drawings (plan, section and perspective) and an analytical response to the building (900 words). The third assignment comprises a 1,500-word interpretive essay. The fourth assignment is a presentation model and a catalog entry (900 words) appropriate to an exhibition.
Goals: Students will hone their ability to read architects’ theoretical statements and historians’ analyses critically. The course stresses analysis and interpretation of both texts and designed works. Students will gain an intimate understanding of some of the key works of architectural theory and history from the last two centuries.
Sessions and readings
1 [8.27]no class
2 [9.3]Greece and its legacy
Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, Boston, 1983. Chapter 8: Space and Social Organization in Ancient Greece, pp. 212-234.
Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Poetry Language Thought, pp.145-161.
Jeffrey Hurwit, The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles, New York, 2004. ch. 3: “Pericles, Athens, and the Building Program,” pp.87-105.
3 [9.10]Antiquity and Modernity: the lesson of Rome
Charles W. Moore, “Hadrian’s Villa,” Perspecta, Vol. 6, (1960), pp. 16-27.
Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, “The Lesson of Rome,”
Kurt Forster, “Antiquity and Modernity in the La Roche/Jeaneret Houses of 1923,” Oppositions 15/16 (Winter/Spring 1979), 131-153.
William J. R. Curtis, “Authenticity, Abstraction and the Ancient Sense: Le Corbusier’s and Louis Kahn’s Idea of Parliament,” Perspecta, Vol. 20 (1983), pp. 181-194.
4 [9.17]Monumentality and ephemerality in West African architectures
Labelle Prussin, African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, and Gender, Washington, 1995.
Jean-Louis Bourgeois, “The History of the Great Mosques of Djenné,” African Arts, Vol. 20, No. 3, (May, 1987), pp. 54-92.
5 [9.24]Gothic and Gothic Revival
Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, excerpts from “On the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis, 1140-44,” in Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St-Denis and its Art Treasures. Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of Saint-Denis and Its Art Treasures, trans. and ed. Erwin Panofsky, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1946.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,Contrasts. (1836), excerpted in Harry Francis Mallgrave, ed., ArchitecturalTheory, v.I, 383-385.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. (1841), excerpted in Harry Francis Mallgrave, ed., ArchitecturalTheory, v.I, 385-386Oxford: St. Barnabas, 1969.
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin,An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. (1843), excerpted in Abigail Harrison-Moore and Dorothy Rowe, eds., Architecture and Design in Europe and America, 1750-2000, 208-214.
6 [10.1]Symbolic geometry and the Renaissance
Karl Lehmann, "The Dome of Heaven," Art Bulletin 27 (1945), pp. 1-27.
Colin Rowe, “The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa” (1947), in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and other Essays. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976, pp. 1-27. [on reserve]
Rudolph Wittkower, “The Centrally Planned Church and the Renaissance,” in Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, New York, 1949, pp.3-32 (also recommended: 101-154).
first assignment due
7 [10.8]Bodies and architectures
Erwin Panofsky, “The Neo-Platonic Movement and Michelangelo,” in Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York, 1939.
Deborah Fausch, “The Knowledge of the Body and the Presence of History – Toward a Feminist Architecture,” Architecture and Feminism, Princeton, 1996, pp. 38-59.
Diana Agrest, “Architecture from Without: Body, Logic, and Sex,” in Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. 1965-1995, pp. 541-553.
8 [10.15]Orientalism and modernism
Edward Said, Orientalism, pp. 1-15, 49-73, 201-211.
Homi K. Bhabha, “Commitment to Theory” in The Location of Culture, 1994, pp.19-39
Zeynep Celik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,” Assemblage 17 (April 1992), pp. 59-77.
9 [10.22]Colonial identities and post-colonial histories
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988).
Sibel Bozdogan, “Architectural History in Professional Education: Reflections on Postcolonial Challenges to the Modern Survey,” JAE 52, No.4 (May 1999), pp. 207-216.
Jyoti Hosagrahar, “Mansions to Margins: Modernity and the Domestic Landscapes of Historic Delhi, 1847-1910,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 60, No. 1. (Mar., 2001), pp. 26-45.
second assignment due
10 [10.29]Theorizing the Baroque
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, ch.5 “Perspective, Gardening, and Architectural Education,” Cambridge, 1983, pp.165-201.
Anthony Vidler, “Skin and Bones. Folds from Leibniz to Lynn” Warped Space, pp.219-233.
11 [11.5]Antiquity and Modernity in Japanese architecture
Marc Treib & Ron Herman, “The Japanese Garden in Cultural Context,” in A Guide to the Gardens of Kyoto, Tokyo, 1980.
Kenzo Tange, “Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture,” Katsura Imperial Villa (Electa Architecture distributed by Phaidon Press, 2005): 359-386.
Tadao Ando, “Toward New Horizons in Architecture” in Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, New York, 1996, pp. 456-61.
Tadao Ando, “From Self-Enclosed Modern Architecture Towards Universality,” The Japan Architect (May 1982), pp. 8-12.
12 [11.12]Antiquity and Modernity in Enlightenmentarchitecture
Claude Perrault, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns After the Method of the Ancients, trans. Indra Kagis McEwen, Santa Monica, 1993.
Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture (Essai sur l’architecture, 1753). trans. Wolfgang and Anni Herrmann. Los Angeles, 1977.
Etienne-Louis Boullée, Architecture. Essai sur l’art, c.1780. translated as Architecture, Essay on Art in Helen Rosenau, Boullee and Visionary Architecture, New York, 1976, pp.81-116.
Alan Colquhoun, “Three Kinds of Historicism,” Oppositions 26 (Spring 1984), pp. 29-39. [first published in Architectural Design 53, 9/10 (1983)] [Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989):]
third assignment due
13 [11.19]Ruins
Andreas Huyssen, “Nostalgia for Ruins,” Grey Room 23, Spring 2006, pp. 6–21.
Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: its character and its origin” Oppositions 25 (1982): 20-51.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, “Opinions on Architecture,” in Observations on the Letter of Monsieur Mariette..., introduction by John Wilton-Ely; translation by Caroline Beamish and David Britt, Los Angeles, 2002, pp.2-83, 102-114.
14 [11.26]Reason, City, Landscape
John Reps, The Making of Urban America, Princeton, 1965, pp. 147-203.
Richard Guy Wilson, “Jefferson’s Lawn: Perceptions, Interpretations, Meanings,” in Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village: The Creation of an American Masterpiece, Charlottesville, 1993, pp.47-73.
Aldo Rossi, “An Analogical Architecture,” in Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture. 1965-1995, pp. 345-52.
15 (12.3)final class
fourth assignment due
ARC3934/5933: Special Topics – Projects and Polemics
Fall 2008
Florida International University School of Architecture
Professor David Rifkind [
Engineering & Computer Science Room 134, Wednesday, 2:00 - 4:30PM
Office hours, room PCA383b, Monday and Thursday, 1:30-4:00
Analytical Project
The analytical project will focus on a single work of architecture or design (including landscapes, interiors, cities and objects) chosen by each student in consultation with the instructor.
The first assignment calls for three rough models and a written description (600 words) of the building. The first model should depict the project at such a scale that it fits within a 12” cube. The second model should depict the project in context at one tenth the scale of the first model. The third model should depict a key detail of the project at ten times the scale of the first model. The goal is to explore the project through modeling, so focus on the most important aspects of context and detail when making the second and third models.
The written description should emphasize the most significant aspects of the project. Use complete sentences, and remember to situate the project in its historical and cultural contexts. What purpose does it serve? Who built it, and for whose use? When and where was it built (or designed), and what aspects of its materiality or construction methods are significant to understanding the work?
The second assignment builds on the first, and involves three drawings (plan, section and perspective) and an analytical response to the building (900 words). The drawings should depict the most significant plan of, and section through, the building, as well as the perspective (or multiple vignettes, if necessary) that best help you understand its spatial qualities, relationship to context, and other significant aspects.
The accompanying paper should analyze the building by examining its key formal gestures and spatial relationships in relation to its programmatic function, theoretical ambitions, cultural context and other significant factors.
The third assignment comprises a 1,500-word interpretive essay. This paper expands on the analytical essay and offers a cogent argument which puts forth well-considered interpretations of the project, based on rigorous analyses drawn from close observation.
The fourth assignment is a presentation model and a catalog entry (900 words) appropriate to an exhibition. The model, which can be interpretive or analytical, is intended to explain the project to an audience, in concert with the accompanying catalog entry.