The American Built Environment

This course is a survey of the built environment from North America’s first peoples to the rise of the McMansion. Though oriented towards future preservation practitioners, this class welcomes students from across Penn interested in architectural history, U.S. history, buildings, and landscapes. The organization, while broadly chronological, emphasizes themes around which important scholarship has gathered. Rather than utilize buildings or the works of major architects as a unit of analysis, this course explores the interplay between all human-initiated modifications to our shared environment. Our shared central purpose is to explore how the built environment acts as an agent in broader sociopolitical processes and how those same processes are reflected through our buildings and landscapes. To that end, this class will employ multiple methodological and disciplinary lenses borrowed from architecture, history, environmental history, city and regional planning, and historic preservation to explore the history of the built environment. Our class will also embrace the tension between “high style” and “vernacular” architectures while encouraging you to think critically about and beyond such categories. Finally, we will supplement our conversations in class with frequent trips to Philadelphia-area buildings and neighborhoods to further explore change and continuity in the history of the built environment. 

This course was formerly called American Architecture, the title was changed in Fall 2026.