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

Memorials are among the most conspicuous cultural creations where people are asked to encounter the past collectively and in public. They are simultaneously authoritative and contentious, fixed and labile, official and undependable, iconic and subject to iconoclasm, monumental and invisible. This seminar takes their measure historically and theoretically through a range of readings and close examination. Topics may include, but are not limited to memorials to traumatic events, counter-monuments, habits of form and placement, reconciliation, commemoration, the changing nature of time and death, heritage, patrimony, post-colonial memory, and public art. Readings may include selections of Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire, James Young on the Holocaust, Serguisz Michalski on the politics of European memorials, Françoise Choay on the idea of the monument, and Kirk Savage.

Repeat Rules