Selected topics in the history of architecture. For current offerings, see department website.

The future ain’t what it used to be. In the two centuries after the French Revolution, the future was everything—the promise of a radical break with the past and present, the possible dreamland of utopia or apocalypse. All aspects of modern society, from architecture and planning, industry and infrastructure, law and labor, technology and mass culture were “temporalized” sucked into the vortex of an envisioned future. In contrast, our experience seems to be dominated by stasis and presentism, an unending now. This course explores how the future was imagined at different moments of crisis from the Enlightenment’s invention of the “future” to the late twentieth century’s turn to presentism and nostalgia. Using a variety of case studies drawn from different sources (historiography, film, architecture and so on) and periods (around 1789, post-WWI, Depression, post-WWII, 1960s) it provides a sampling of possibilities and models for a final student project, an in-depth, original research paper. Several themes thread their way through the course, including the role of the “unbuilt” in architectural history and practice, the uses of the future in the construction of social and political communities, memorials and mythologies, the anticipation of urban ruin and the perplexing synchronicity of competing conceptions of past, present and future. We will explore how the future was embedded in concrete practices and experiences but also how the concept of the “future” itself was completely transformed. Readings are drawn from different disciplines, times and places but the course’s “home” positions are European/North American history and architecture. Student projects from other geographies and disciplines are welcome.

Repeat Rules