ALD4100H S
Instructor: John Harwood
Meeting Section: L0101
Monday, 9:00AM - 12:00PM

This seminar is grounded in a simple but confounding hypothesis: the production of a rational, caring, healthy, nurturing architecture proceeds in the first instance from a concept of what today is called “horror.”

Whether one is attempting to produce social housing, psychiatric or physical hospitals, banks, schools, municipal or federal government buildings, libraries, clinics, community centres, public parks, mass transit systems, etc.—i.e. any form of architectural or infrastructural “public good”—one is doing so in order to forestall the contemplation of, and/or confrontation with, some “unthinkable” problem. The positive image of the architecture produced to maintain the aforementioned institutions always already proceeds from the basic and terrifying idea that, were we to not produce them, we (and this we is problematic) would be inundated by a social, economic, environmental, or even psychic disaster waiting to happen. Modern architecture, in other words, is one borne of a profoundly negative anxiety—ergo this anxiety is difficult to identify or to assign particular properties.

Beginning with the first efforts—produced in the wake of the “discovery of the new world” in early modernity and the shocking spread of a global state of war in the 17th century—and proceeding up through the late 20th century (the dread of atomic warfare, identification of endemic diseases, mass media-produced panics), this course will explore the basic aesthetic and moral concepts that motivate changes in architecture’s priorities as a profession and discipline. Beginning with the concepts of “other,” “foreign,” “savage,” “sublime,” “wild,” and “backward”—all of which are to be found as foundational concepts in Enlightenment thought and served as the guiding lights of the proponents of the “Scientific Revolution”—up through more contemporary terms such as “alienation,” “blight,” “disease,” “subversion,” “corruption,” “disappearance,” “disaster,” “catastrophe,” etc.—this course will seek to allow students to explore in deep historical terms the organizing principles and motivations of what they hope to accomplish through design or scholarship.

[Content/Trigger Warning: This course will ask students to view and read various media that will (or at least should be) deeply uncomfortable for any person. That said, nothing presented in the course will be anything other than the content of conventional mass media or scholarly media. There will be no effort made to shock or hurt students; instead, the aim is to discuss historical and theoretical concepts. If a reading or viewing is unsuitable to someone, every effort will be made to find an alternative text or broadcast that is suitable for that individual.]