“New York is the perfect model of a city,” stated Lewis Mumford, “not the model of a perfect city.” This seminar counterposes the urban and architectural ideas of four thinkers who possessed radically different perspectives on the modern city and brought them to bear on the emblematic twentieth-century metropolis, New York City. Our protagonists are Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), and Rem Koolhaas (1944–). We discuss the issues that variously engaged them—and at times pitted them against each other—as they strove to envision and reshape New York’s built future over the course of a century of constant urban changes, social and economic challenges, and cultural transformations. From Mumford’s prophetic environmentalism and “sidewalk criticism” to Moses’s “expressway world,” from Jacobs’s neighborhood activism and battles against urban renewal to Koolhaas’s “delirious” architectural imaginary, the course places their ideas into historical context and reassesses their legacies to the twenty-first century. More generally, by revisiting New York City’s modern development we aim to reflect on its evolution today. What “usable past” (to quote Mumford again) can we discover in a city once celebrated as the capital of the twentieth century? Is New York still a testing ground for new urban experiences and ideas? What sort of city has it become? Concerned equally with the material history of New York’s built environment and with its theoretical discourse, class sessions revolve around discussions of key texts by and about Mumford, Moses, Jacobs, and Koolhaas, supplemented by slide lectures, films, and case-study presentations. Students are encouraged to undertake original research, including in the Mumford archives at the Kislak Center in Van Pelt Library, and to make trips into New York to inform their presentations and term paper.
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