Spring 2018

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

This interdisciplinary seminar is about twentieth-century New York as both fact and idea: as a real city that came into its own over the course of the last century; and as a corresponding set of images, ideas, and cultural practices—an urban imaginary—in which modernity’s new contents and contexts were experienced, represented, and enacted. The seminar is constructed in part as an argument among four visionary thinkers whose differing theories of the city were shaped by their responses to New York’s development: Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), and Rem Koolhaas (1944–). We debate the respective hypotheses of this quartet of influential “urban intellectuals” and the central concerns that preoccupied them, from questions of large-scale infrastructure, urban renewal, public space, and environmental sustainability to issues of symbolic representation, identity, and complexity. We also study New York’s rise and role as a leading art center and a dynamic laboratory for new aesthetic ideas. New York has been called the capital of the twentieth century. In revisiting the architecture and art of this emblematically modern city, we also aim to reflect on its future in the twenty-first century.

The class will make two trips to New York to visit current exhibitions and selected sites. It will also make use of an important documentary resource, the Lewis Mumford Papers housed at the Kislak Center. Readings will be supplemented with slide talks and several film screenings.

Instructors:

Joan Ockman, Senior Lecturer, Architecture, School of Design, and Lee Ann Custer, PhD Candidate, History of Art, School of Arts and Sciences