Concentration on specific problems or works in a particular area of art history. Assigned readings, discussion, and a substantial paper. For specific topics and enrollment, see listings outside 416 Doe Library.

Sometimes buildings provide sure traces of human activity; sometimes they are emblems of human activity unconnected to what they represent, except via the imagination,” Robin Evans once wrote of the peculiar nature of architecture as an artistic form, of how it simultaneously invites and rejects speculations on morphological basis. That writing about architecture is a supple art which thrives in the interstices, between “the working of stone, steel, or cement” and a projection of meaning from the outside, was certainly not lost on Zhu Qiqian (1872–1964), founder of the Society for the Study of Chinese Architecture. In what was to become the published manifesto of the Society in 1929, Zhu goes to great length to articulate how technical knowledge and the historical reconstruction of collective imagination are both integral to the study of architecture. To him, the essential feature of Chinese architecture as a scholarly subject is its link to the wider constellation of humanistic disciplines. In this seminar, we will examine how and to what effect architecture conversely served as the heuristic devices with which intellectual problems were worked out, and religious questions posed: the modular system in a construction manual sheds light on a period model of thinking about how the state should regulate and mobilize its populace; the perennial debates over the design of the ritual structure Luminous Hall (mingtang) are shown to crystalize the synergy and contradictions of various systems of correlative thinking—cosmological, numerological, and morphological—that provided the frames of reference as well as fault lines for conceptualizing ritual; a study of early Buddhist architecture in China reveals the highly adaptable nature of the timber framework to housing larger-than-life icons, whilst being transformed into an ornamental vocabulary in the same process. Through a series of case studies, we shall discover architecture (realized or imagined) in China, when subjected to the right set of questions, discloses knowledge in areas well beyond the scope of an engineering problem. This course fulfills the following Major requirements: Geographical area (B) and Chronological period (I), (II) or (III), based on the topic of the final research paper or project.

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