How do architecture, urbanism, and the environment reflect the dominant social, economic, and political changes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and how did its vast geopolitical shifts such as Imperialism, Fascism, the Cold War, Neoliberalism, the "War on Terror," and Nationalism reshape architecture culture? How might architecture culture respond and help construct its resistant variants, anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, decolonization, and making "quieter places" in Donna Haraway's sense? How do critical frameworks to rethink positivism, efficiency, standardization, and even utopian thinking become revised through the lenses of queer, postcolonial, critical race, and eco-feminist theory in postwar architectural production? And how do these frameworks allow us to conceive of more equitable ways of being in the world while thinking with a varied pasts? This course provides twelve discursive and theoretical frameworks to rethink architectural history in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Through twelve lectures the course traces critical questions confronting architectural modernity from the violence of settler colonialism to the possibilities of making kin. While we will trace instances of architecture, city planning, landscape and infrastructural developments that corresponded to dominant ways of conceiving modernity and its analog progress narratives, the course is mainly interested in considering resistant paradigms that elide attempts to speak of a unified or homogenous notion of modernity. The course will be active and interactive and will include building a collaborative dictionary of architectural terms.
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