ARC3303H F
Instructor: Eric Beck Rubin
Meeting Section: L0101
Monday & Wednesday 9:30am - 12:30pm

This seminar looks at renovation in the broadest sense of the word – etymologically, historically, in practice and theory – through architecture, literature, music and art. Renovations can take the form of built and proposed work, can be permanent or temporary, synthetic or antithetical, destructive or conservative – ironic, parodic or dead serious. In all cases they are an ongoing dialogue between different cultures, and this seminar examines the nature and implications of that dialogue in its various guises.

Case studies include (but are not limited to) Venturi Scott Brown’s Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery, Eileen Grey’s E-1027 and Le Corbusier’s ‘renovations’ to it, the Gare St Lazare and Monet’s Gare St Lazare paintings, Alberti’s San Francesco di Rimini, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin, the reconstruction of Dresden, Han van Meegeren’s ‘Biblical Vermeers’, and the Pantheon by Soufflot, with readings by Beatriz Colomina, Jean Baudrillard, Claire Colebrook, Anthony Vidler, Abbé Laugier, Raymond Queneau, Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin, among others.

Student participation in class discussion and the presentation of case studies is at the heart of the course. Please come to the first class having read and considered, from the point of view of ‘renovation’, the short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ by Jorge Luis Borges, which can be found here.