ARC3309H F
Instructor: Peter Sealy
Meeting Section: L9101
Synchronous
Friday, 9:00AM - 12:00PM

Do the meanings associated with architectural forms remain stable across different historic periods and geographic locations? Or are they malleable, shifting, and open to successive re-interpretations? Architects and historians have long wrested with these questions, which get to heart of architecture not only as an aesthetic project, but as a political, economic, and cultural one.

In this seminar, we will study this question through a series of case studies which will delve into the relationship between classical architecture and slave-owning societies. While the course will focus largely upon North America, its scope will be global. The classical architecture of ancient Greece has been the subject of numerous appropriations over the last 2500 years, beginning with its adoption by the Roman Empire, then renaissance Italy, and later as a worldwide phenomenon imbricated with European colonial and commercial projects. Cities as diverse as Toronto, Moscow, Washington, and Beijing bear witness to its frequent usage.

Many of those societies most closely tied to classicism denied human freedom through enslavement. Periclean Athens, republican Rome, renaissance Italy, and the antebellum American south were all slave societies which gained renown for the refinement of their public and private classical buildings. Enshrined upon the American five-cent coin as a symbol of the United States’ cultural ambitions, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate is now being recognized by scholars and a wider public as a site of exploitation, unfreedom, and rape.

While classicism is often associated with enslaving Western power structures, it has sometimes been adopted by emancipated persons of colour in countries such as Haiti and Liberia. The work of Black architects such as Julian Abele in the classical tradition will also be examined. These examples complexify too-simplistic notions of formal association and suggest the need for more nuanced readings of form and meaning.

Students in this seminar will be expected to complete assigned readings and to participate on a weekly basis both orally in seminar and through the submission of weekly captioned images. During the course, students will write two essays of approximately 2,500 words each in response to questions posed by the professor.