Art History and Archaeology

AHIS UN1007 Introduction to the History of Architecture. 4.00 points.

This course is required for architectural history and theory majors, but is also open to students interested in a general introduction to the history of architecture, considered on a global scale. Architecture is analyzed through in-depth case studies of key works of sacred, secular, public, and domestic architecture from both the Western canon and cultures of the ancient Americas and of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic faiths. The time frame ranges from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern era. Discussion section is required

AHIS UN2405 TWENTIETH CENTURY ART. 4.00 points.

The course will examine a variety of figures, movements, and practices within the entire range of 20th-century art—from Expressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Constructivism to Pop Art, Surrealism to Minimalism, and beyond–situating them within the social, political, economic, and historical contexts in which they arose. The history of these artistic developments will be traced through the development and mutual interaction of two predominant strains of artistic culture: the modernist and the avant-garde, examining in particular their confrontation with and development of the particular vicissitudes of the century’s ongoing modernization. Discussion section complement class lectures. Course is a prerequisite for certain upper-level art history courses

AHIS UN2415 History Painting and Its Afterlives. 3.00 points.

This course will study the problematic persistence of history painting as a cultural practice in nineteenth century Europe, well after its intellectual and aesthetic justifications had become obsolete. Nonetheless, academic prescriptions and expectations endured in diluted or fragmentary form. We will examine the transformations of this once privileged category and look at how the representation of exemplary deeds and action becomes increasingly problematic in the context of social modernization and the many global challenges to Eurocentrism. Selected topics explore how image making was shaped by new models of historical and geological time, by the invention of national traditions, and by the emergence of new publics and visual technologies. The relocation of historical imagery from earlier elite milieus into mass culture forms of early cinema and popular illustration will also be addressed

AHUM UN2604 ARTS OF CHINA, JAPAN AND KOREA. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia

AHIS UN2622 Introduction to East Asian Art: China, Japan, and Korea. 4.00 points.

This lecture course, with two weekly lectures and additional section meetings, surveys the broad outlines of the artistic traditions of China, Korea, and Japan, introducing key concepts, such as multiplicity, impermanence, and transmediality, through a diversity of forms of visual expression in painting, sculpture, bronze, ceramics, lacquer, and architecture. The weekly lectures and discussions will explore interregional relations and influence in order to discover not only the features that make each geographical tradition distinct, but also closely interconnected. Among the key themes to be examined are the archaeology of ancient East Asia, the development of Buddhist art, the arts of landscape and narrative painting, woodblock prints, and finally East Asia after modernity

AHIS GU4027 Architecture in Western Europe 1066-1399. 3.00 points.

This course explores architecture in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. The time frame starts with the conquest of England in 1066 and ends with the appointment of Gothic experts in 1399 to advise on the construction of Milan Cathedral towards the end of the Middle Ages. The first historical event coincides with the creation of architecture of a bewildering scale while the second reflects the end of building without architectural treatises or architectural theory - in a modern sense. The course will also introduce students to new digital technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry for the study of medieval architecture. No preliminary knowledge of medieval history or architectural history is needed, and no knowledge of digital technologies or specific computer skills is expected. The monuments selected belong to a period that starts when architecture moved away from Roman antique models and ends just before the re-adoption of Classical standards in the Renaissance. In this course the originality of medieval architecture, its relationship with earlier and later monuments, and the dramatic effort involved in its creation will be discussed. Major themes of medieval society such as pilgrimages, crusades, piety, the cult of relics, and the social and intellectual context of the Middle Ages are also part of this lecture. In the first weeks, important concepts of medieval society and its architecture will be presented in combination with a number of new technologies recently adopted in the field. These introductory classes will offer the foundations needed to understand artistic and architectural developments in the Middle Ages. While the course will focus on architecture, different media are included when they provide valuable information on the artistic and cultural context to which buildings belong. New technologies serve as a basis for a critical discussion about the changes in method introduced by new media and technologies in the field of architectural history

AHIS GU4093 Sacred Space in South Asia. 3.00 points.

“Sacred” space in the Indian subcontinent was at the epicenter of human experience. This course presents Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and Jain spaces and the variety of ways in which people experienced them. Moving from the monumental stone pillars of the early centuries BCE to nineteenth century colonial India, we learn how the organization and imagery of these spaces supported devotional activity and piety. We discuss too how temples, monasteries, tombs, and shrines supported the pursuit of pleasure, amusement, sociability, and other worldly interests. We also explore the symbiotic relationship between Indic religions and kingship, and the complex ways in which politics and court culture shaped sacred environments. The course concludes with European representations of South Asia’s religions and religious places

AHCE W4149 The Roman Art of Engineering: Traditions of Planning, Construction, and Innovation. 3.00 points.

Interdisciplinary study of ancient Roman engineering and architecture in a course co-created between Arts ＆ Sciences and Engineering. Construction principles, techniques, and materials: walls, columns, arches, vaults, domes. Iconic Roman buildings (Colosseum, Pantheon, Trajan’s Column) and infrastructure (roads, bridges, aqueducts, baths, harbors, city walls). Project organization. Roman engineering and society: machines and human labor; engineers, architects, and the army; environmental impact. Comparisons with current practice as well as cross-cultural comparisons with other pre-modern societies across the globe. A Columbia Cross-Disciplinary Course

AHIS UN3239 Medieval and Renaissance Venice. 4.00 points.

This undergraduate travel seminar investigates the architecture, urbanism, and visual culture of Venice from its origins in the early medieval period to the sixteenth century, with particular focus on major religious and civic monuments. While San Marco and the adjacent Palazzo Ducale will be a core concern, Venetian monuments large and small will receive attention. Further emphasis will be placed on saintly relics as markers of cultural and religious identity, the invention and visual manifestation of cult traditions, and changes in Venice’s sacred topography as a result of its expansions on the mainland and in the Eastern Mediterranean

AHIS UN3313 Women Painters in Europe, 1500-1750. 4 points.

Not offered during 2023-2024 academic year.

Histories of European Renaissance and Baroque art once narrated a story involving almost only male actors: it was men who made the period's paintings and sculptures, men who purchased them, and men who left their views on art for posterity. That characterization of the field is no longer quite so true, and one of the most significant changes in the field is that female painters now feature in every survey of the period. The aim of this course is to look comparatively at the painterly works produced by women across the early modern period and at the way those pictures have been treated in the scholarly literature from the last several decades.

AHIS UN3413 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CRITICISM. 4.00 points.

Prerequisites: junior or senior standing, and the instructor's permission.
This course examines a diverse selection of social and aesthetic responses to the impacts of modernization and industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe. Using works of art criticism, fiction, poetry, and social critique, the seminar will trace the emergence of new understandings of collective and individual experience and their relation to cultural and historical transformations. Readings are drawn from Friedrich Schiller's Letters On Aesthetic Education, Mary Shelley's The Last Man, Thomas Carlyle's "Signs of the Time," poetry and prose by Charles Baudelaire, John Ruskin's writings on art and political economy, Flora Tristan's travel journals, J.-K. Huysmans's Against Nature, essays of Walter Pater, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and other texts

AHIS UN3466 AIDS Is Contemporary. 4.00 points.

This seminar examines two intertwined propositions. One is the undisputable fact that the global HIV/AIDS pandemic is ongoing and that the disease continues to shape the way artists and activists grapple with public health, national policy, and medical injustice. The other is my own polemic-in-formation, which is that the eruption of AIDS in the 1980s was the threshold event that inaugurated what is now understood to be “the contemporary” within the art world. Rather than periodize the start of “the contemporary” with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, as has become conventional, we will investigate how the AIDS crisis precipitated a sudden urgency that more decisively marks this transition, in particular around the promiscuous inclusion of non-fine art forms such as demonstration posters, zines, and handmade quilts. We will read foundational texts on HIV/AIDS organizing and look at interventions with graphic design, wheat-pasting, ashes action protests, body maps, embroidery, performance-based die-ins, voguing, film/video, and photography. We will consider: the inextricability of queer grief, anger, love, and loss; lesbian care; the trap of visibility; spirituality and death; activist exhaustion; the role played by artists of color within ACT-UP; and dis/affinities across the US, Latin America, and South Africa. Our investigations will be bookended by two critical exhibitions, Witness: Against Our Vanishing (Artists Space, 1989) and Exposé-es (Palais de Tokyo, 2023). Authors and artists/collectives include: Aziz Cuchar, Bambanani Women’s Group, Felicano Centurion, Douglas Crimp, Ben Cuevas, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Darrel Ellis, fierce pussy, Elisabeth Lebovici, José Leonilson, Nicolas Moufarrege, Marlon Riggs, Matthew Wong, and the Visual AIDS archive. We will conclude with feminist, queer, and collaborative artistic work made during the (also ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic. In small groups, students will lead discussions of our texts and the final project will be a collectively curated virtual exhibition

AHIS UN3471 The Harlem Renaissance ＆ Black Modernism. 4.00 points.

The Harlem Renaissance marks a pivotal era in art history, where Black artists, writers, and intellectuals redefined cultural and artistic expression. This course, "The Harlem Renaissance ＆ Black Modernism," explores the dynamic factors that fueled this vibrant period, including the aftermath of the Reconstruction era, the Great Migration, and the influential contributions of key artists and thinkers. Throughout the course, we will examine the diverse artistic practices that emerged not only in Harlem but across broader networks in both the US and abroad, underscoring the movement's widespread impact. By situating the Harlem Renaissance within its broader contexts – such as histories of Black queer and feminist thought and transatlantic modernism — we will gain a deeper understanding of its lasting significance. Through weekly readings, discussions, and site visits, students will engage with the multifaceted legacy of the Harlem Renaissance and of Black modernist art more generally, analyzing their influence on contemporary discussions of art and culture. By the end of the course, students will have a comprehensive grasp of how this cultural renaissance shaped and continues to influence artistic production in ongoing ways

AHIS GU4574 Picturing a New World: Illustrated Manuscripts in Early Colonial Mexico and Peru. 4 points.

In this research seminar we will delve into the texts and images of four remarkable illustrated manuscripts created during the first century of the Spanish colonization of Mexico and Peru. Created by various agents—Spanish friars and indigenous authors and artists—these four bodies of work constitute some of the earliest and most important historical sources on the pre-Hispanic world of what is now Latin America, its history, and its traditions. But beyond their service as chronicles or ethnographies, these manuscripts can be examined as contested sites for the colonial negotiation of identity, culture, politics, and faith.

Our corpus includes the Mercedarian friar Martín de Murúa’s ca. 1590 and 1613 manuscripts on the history of the Incas and Peru, the native Andean author and artist Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s 1615 “New Chronicle and Good Government,” addressed to King Philip III in protest of Spanish colonial conditions in Peru, and the bilingual “Florentine Codex” compiled in Mexico in the 1570s by Nahua scribes and painters under the supervision of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún.

This bridge seminar is open to undergraduate and graduate students.

Enrollment is by application. Spanish reading ability is highly recommended.

AHIS GU4646 FOUCAULT AND THE ARTS. 4.00 points.

Michel Foucault was a great historian and critic who helped change the ways research and criticism are done today – a new ‘archivist’. At the same time, he was a philosopher. His research and criticism formed part of an attempt to work out a new picture of what it is to think, and think critically, in relation to Knowledge, Power, and Processes of Subjectivization. What was this picture of thought? How did the arts, in particular the visual arts, figure in it? How might they in turn give a new image of Foucault’s kind of critical thinking for us today? In this course, we explore these questions, in the company of Deleuze, Agamben, Rancière and others thinkers and in relation to questions of media, document and archive in the current ‘regime of information’. The Seminar is open to students in all disciplines concerned with these issues

AHIS GU4746 Architecture, Labor, Industry, and the (long) “American Century”. 4.00 points.

From the industrial outposts up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States, across the Mississippi Delta, over the Great Lakes from Erie, Pennsylvania to Buffalo, Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago, over the western plains to Edmonton, Oklahoma City, Omaha, and from there to the technology centers of Vancouver, Seattle, and Silicon Valley, the sites of large-scale industry changed American society over two centuries. Just as gas flares mark subterranean oil deposits under the Texas plains, industrial buildings materialize complex networks of architecture, labor, and industry. They transform seemingly immaterial economic forces into concrete things through the labor of lots and lots of people. They are “fruiting bodies” that blossom from networks of money, labor, and natural resources, where human beings transform raw materials into consumer products. As industry moved across the North American continent, it took shape in buildings designed to optimize resources, improve manufacturing, and provide employment. From Amoskeag, New Hampshire to Silicon Valley, factories grew and changed in a continuous collective design process focused on throughput or flow. These buildings were also tied to urban development and large-scale housing; in studying industrial buildings, we also necessarily study cities, neighborhoods, and company towns. In addition, industrial buildings are meant to improve on the ones that came before them, and to give way to the optimizations of ones that come after. Factory design thus reflects a tangible belief in technical progress. Factories are embedded in society diachronically, across time, and synchronically, across space. They are not singularities; they are inherently relational buildings, like other forms of vernacular architecture. In classes that move chronologically through this terrain, we also focus on two questions: first, how has industrial architecture been situated within architectural history? Second, what happens when we study building design with the kind of heightened synchronic-diachronic awareness that industrial building demands? Industrial architecture is closely connected to capitalism. Studying it reveals architecture’s role in that social organization in a new light. We will survey and closely study buildings to address these and other questions

CLST GU4515 Connecting Histories: Roman Conquests and Coinage. 4.00 points.

Aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students, this course aims to introduce coinage and the study of coins as historical disciplines and to provide a survey of the production and use of coinage in the Roman world from the third century BCE to the 1st century CE, with specific emphasis on the Late Republican coinage and the local coinages issued in the early Roman provinces. Over the course of the second and first centuries BCE, Rome conquered most of the Mediterranean world in a whirlwind of military campaigns. However, despite the unrivaled military power achieved during the second and first centuries BCE, one of the most surprising factors in the development of Roman domination of the Mediterranean world is that the Romans conquered and ruled most of it without imposing their coinage on the conquered. Therefore, it becomes even more important to research how local coinages converged—at least partly—to create compatible monetary systems across the Roman Empire. The students will have direct access to the world-class numismatic collections at the American Numismatic Collection (over 300,000 Roman and Greek pieces) and to the Olcott collection of Roman coins housed in the RBML in Butler Library (over 4,000 Roman pieces)

AHIS UN2129 Before Rome: The Art and Architecture of Italy’s Peoples in the First Millennium BCE. 3.00 points.

This course explores the rich artistic traditions of the peoples living in Italy—the Etruscans, Italics, Greeks, Celts—from their emergence in the early first millennium BCE to their eventual absorption within the system of “Roman” art. While the arts of Etruria will form the backbone of the course, its conceptual focus will be on the densely entangled web that connected the diverse visual landscapes and creative practices of the Italian peninsula both to each other and to external centers of artistic production, from Cyprus and Carthage to Syria and the cultures of northern Europe. In addition to intercultural connectivity— imports and exports, convergences and divergences, parallels and unique features—special attention will be paid to the socio-political and religious dimensions of art and architecture. Both iconic and non-canonical objects will be examined, ranging from furniture and weaponry to anatomical votives and mythological paintings. This lecture is the first in a three-year cycle that also includes “Roman Art and Architecture” and “Rome Beyond Rome.”

AHIS UN2309 EARLY MODERN ARCHITECTURE (1550-1799). 3.00 points.

This course examines the history of early modern architecture from a European perspective outward. It starts with the time of Michelangelo and Palladio and ends in the late eighteenth century.  It addresses a number of transhistorical principal issues and analytical approaches while focusing on to a series of roughly chronological thematic studies. Travelling across courts, academies, streets, and buildings devoted to new institutions, this course examines the cultural, material, urban, social, and political dimensions of architecture, as well as temporal and geographic migrations of architectural knowledge. Topics will also include: the resurgence of interest in antiquity; the longue durée history of monuments; changes in building typology; the patronage and politics of architecture; technological developments and building practice; architectural theory, books, and the culture of print; the growth of capital cities; the creation of urban space and landscape; the formalization of architectural education; and the changing status of the architect.

AHIS UN2311 Baroque Imperial Spain (17th Century). 3 points.

The course will survey Baroque art in Hapsburg Spain, considered in the wide geographical context of the extended and dispersed dominions of the different crowns of the Spanish monarchy, which connected the Iberian Peninsula with Italy, Flanders and the New World. It will concern visual art in its various media, mainly painting, sculpture and architecture, but also tapestries, prints, armor, goldsmithery and ephemeral decoration, among others. Works of the main artists of the period will be introduced and analyzed, giving attention to the historical and cultural context of their production and reception. The course will particularly focus on the movement of artists, works and models within the Spanish Hapsburg territories, in order to understand to what extent visual arts contributed to shaping the political identity of this culturally composite empire.

AHIS UN2409 Nineteenth-Century Architecture. 4.00 points.

This course revisits some of the key moments in the architecture of the nineteenth century with the goal of understanding the relationship between these developments and a global modernity shaped by old and new empires. In doing so, it assumes a particular methodological stance. Rather than attempting to be geographically comprehensive, it focusses on the interdependencies between Europe and its colonies; instead of being strictly chronological, it is arranged around a constellation of themes that are explored through a handful of projects and texts. Reading of primary sources from the period under examination is a crucial part of the course. Students will have the opportunity to hone their critical skills by reading, writing, and conducting research toward a final paper. Discussion section required

AHIS UN2425 Visual Activism. 4.00 points.

How has visual culture played a role within the social movements of the last several decades, such as #BlackLivesMatter and Extinction Rebellion? How, we might ask, is activism made visible; how does it erupt (or disappear) with collective fields of vision? Drawing upon Black South African queer photographer Zanele Muholi’s term “visual activism” as a flexible rubric that encompasses both formal practices and political strategies, this lecture class interrogates contemporary visual cultures of dissent, resistance, and protest as they span a range of ideological positions. We will examine recent developments in and around recent intersections of art and politics from around the world, looking closely at performances, photographs, feminist dances, graffiti, murals, street art, posters, pussy hats, and graphic interventions, with a special focus on tactics of illegibility and encodedness. Topics include visual responses to structural racisms, global climate change, indigenous land rights, state violence, gentrification, forced migration, and queer/trans issues

AHIS UN2600 THE ARTS OF CHINA. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

An introduction to the arts of China, from the Neolithic period to the present, stressing materials and processes of bronze casting, the development of representational art, principles of text illustration, calligraphy, landscape painting, imperial patronage, and the role of the visual arts in elite culture.

AHUM UN2604 ARTS OF CHINA, JAPAN AND KOREA. 3.00 points.

CC/GS/SEAS: Partial Fulfillment of Global Core Requirement

Introduces distinctive aesthetic traditions of China, Japan, and Korea--their similarities and differences--through an examination of the visual significance of selected works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and other arts in relation to the history, culture, and religions of East Asia

AHIS UN2702 PRE-COLUMBIAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE. 3.00 points.

The Western Hemisphere was a setting for outstanding accomplishments in the visual arts for millennia before Europeans set foot in the so-called “New World.” This course explores the early indigenous artistic traditions of what is now Latin America, from early monuments of the formative periods (e.g. Olmec and Chavín), through acclaimed eras of aesthetic and technological achievement (e.g. Maya and Moche), to the later Inca and Aztec imperial periods. Our subject will encompass diverse genre including painting and sculpture, textiles and metalwork, architecture and performance. Attention will focus on the two cultural areas that traditionally have received the most attention from researchers: Mesoamerica (including what is today Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras) and the Central Andes (including Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia). We will also critically consider the drawing of those boundaries—both spatial and temporal—that have defined “Pre-Columbian” art history to date. More than a survey of periods, styles, and monuments, we will critically assess the varieties of evidence—archaeological, epigraphic, historical, ethnographic, and scientific—available for interpretations of ancient Latin American art and culture

AHIS GU4089 NATIVE AMERICAN ART. 3.00 points.

This course looks closely at objects and images produced by Native North Americans across history. Grounding our study in essays and guest lectures from Native scholars, we will investigate the significance of the works and how and to whom meaning is communicated. Beginning with an introduction that links aesthetics and worldview using the conventional organizing principle of the culture area, we quickly move on to case studies that take up key issues that persist for Native people living under settler colonialism today, including questions of sovereignty, self-expression, transformation and representation. Along the way, we will also tackle historiographic questions about how knowledge about Native art has been produced in universities and museums and how Indigenous people have worked to counter those discourses

AHIS UN3105 Sacred Spaces ＆ Divine Images Transformed. 4.00 points.

This seminar will explore the profound transformation of art and architecture connected to the religious practices of both polytheists and monotheists that occurred across the Middle East when much of the region was under Roman rule. Sacred spaces we will focus on include the Temples of Bel and Baalshamin at Palmyra (destroyed in 2015) and Jupiter Heliopolitanus at Baalbek, the recently discovered synagogues at Migdal (Magdala), and the temples, housechurch, and synagogue at Dura-Europos. We will delve into topics such as possible cult continuity between the Iron Age and the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the creation of new deities, the roles of priests, aniconism and figural sculpture, and the construction and adornment of buildings to meet the specific needs of the cults of various deities, Judaism, and Christianity. We will explore and challenge traditional categories such as “Roman” and “provincial” art/architecture. Key questions to consider include the following: how were individuals/communities’ personal, civic, and religious identities expressed in art/architecture that was influenced by interaction with Roman culture broadly, but also highly localized? The approach is interdisciplinary: we will study architecture, sculpture, mosaics, wall paintings, votive dedications, and inscriptions, and read Jane Lightfoot’s 2003 translation of Lucian’s De Dea Syria (On the Syrian Goddess). Discussion of current and future responses to the destruction of archaeological sites and monuments and looting, as well as the intertwining of cultural and humanitarian crises, will also form an important part of the course and prepare students to engage in contemporary debates. Our visit to the Yale University Art Gallery will provide students with the outstanding opportunity to examine sculptures and wall paintings from Dura-Europos first-hand and give presentations in the gallery

AHIS UN3318 Books and Architecture. 4 points.

This seminar investigates architectural books as both carriers of knowledge and objects. Through the analysis of books, prints and drawings, as well as of their production, circulation and reception, this course explores how different figures have thought, discussed and written about architecture in Europe from the mid-Sixteenth Century to the end of the Eighteenth Century. The objects of investigation include architectural treatises, but also prints and books of various natures that contain architectural information. By questioning the stability of these media, the seminar aims to explore their mutability over time and place. It explores how these objects' meanings were shaped by their makers, by the material manipulations of their owners, and by their physical proximity to other works on desks and library shelves. The seminar examines architectural theory’s relationships with practice and with contemporary debates on society, as well as fields of knowledge such as literature, music, philosophy and science. It aims to understand how media have shaped the migration of architectural knowledge, the construction of Western architectural canons, and the developments of the architect’s profession. At the same time, the object-based analysis of the rare books kept at the Avery Library will allow the class to address questions related to architectural representation, different architectural media, and printing technology. Students will learn how to deal with the complex relationships between texts and images, between drawings and prints, and between the ‘architecture’ of a book and its content. 

AHIS UN3402 Introduction to Design History. 4.00 points.

This course offers an introduction to the history of design from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first century, with emphasis placed on the twentieth century. Attention will be paid to a wide range of design specializations, including industrial design and product design, fashion and textile design, automotive design, and graphic design. Proceeding in roughly chronological order, it will explore key themes in the history of design, including matters of taste and etiquette, social reform, the production of value, design education, branding and marketing, and recent trends in sustainable, speculative, and digital design. The course also considers the relationship between design and other modes of material production, including architecture, fine art, and craft

AHIS UN3410 APPROACHES TO CONTEMPORARY ART. 4.00 points.

This course examines the critical approaches to contemporary art from the 1970s to the present. It will address a range of historical and theoretical issues around the notion of the contemporary (e.g. globalization, participation, relational art, ambivalence, immaterial labor) as it has developed in the era after the postmodernism of the 1970s and 1980s

AHIS UN3429 American Architecture: Skyscrapers ＆ Urbanism. 4.00 points.

This course will examine the distinctly American invention of the building type the “skyscraper” and its evolution and impact from the 1870s to today. We will approach the subject through a range of lenses – historiographical, critical, and methodological – exploring tall buildings and their history as objects of design, products of technology, sites of construction, investments in real estate, and places of work and residence. Throughout, the urban dimension will be key in our critical analysis. Classroom sessions, for the most part, will be organized as lectures and discussions of assigned readings. There will also be sessions outside the classroom, including a visit to the drawing collection of Avery Architectural ＆ Fine Arts Library and to The Skyscraper Museum, as well as a walking tour of Midtown Manhattan

AHIS UN3791 Epic India: The Rama Story in Visual Art. 4.00 points.

The epic story of Rama (Ramayana) is one of the most influential tales of the Indian subcontinent. It has been told and experienced in a stunning range of media across time and space: from epic verse and lyric poetry to painting, narrative sculpture, film, graphic novels, and puppet theater. While Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana of ca. 500 BCE is acknowledged as the first, writers have recounted the tale in the polyglot array of Indic languages, from Kashmiri to Telugu, and infused it with the values and interests of their own time and place. The story’s flexibility and capaciousness has encouraged social contestation and given voice to the concerns of disenfranchised social groups, including women and Dalits. This seminar will examine a generous array of South Asia’s visual Ramayana traditions from the ancient to the modern, encompassing temple relief sculpture, painted courtly manuscripts, and comic book and film Ramayanas. Reading a selection of primary texts alongside we consider this tale’s immense capacity to represent the gamut of human experience, both private and public, and its continued resonance for artists, writers, performers, and their publics

AHIS GU4518 Greek Sanctuaries. 4.00 points.

In every culture there exist highly specific features, which, in their interplay, create its quintessence. In terms of Greek antiquity, temples are generally considered one of these significant cultural parameters. One easily tends, however, to forget that temples are simply a small part – and not even an essential one – of so-called sacred or religious spaces. It is the sanctuary with its precinct wall, temples, sacred groves, divine images, offerings, and – above all – the altar or altars that constitutes the central and transcendent spatial element of ancient Greek religion. Nevertheless, despite their primarily religious function, Greek sanctuaries were never simply cultic spaces; every single one of them was to various degrees an integral part of its social, political, and economic context. The occasionally problematic interpretive model of the “polis religion” makes it absolutely clear that Greek sanctuaries cannot be studied and properly understood, if they are not examined beyond the constraints of religion. Aim of the seminar is to understand the forms and functions of architecture and dedicatory objects in Greek sanctuaries while analyzing these religious, social and political spaces as the centers in which Greek aesthetics, Greek identity, and ultimately Greek culture were shaped

AHIS GU4741 Art and Theory in a Global Context. 4.00 points.

What is “globalization”? How does it change the way we think about or show art today? What role does film and media play in it? How has critical theory itself assumed new forms in this configuration moving outside post-war Europe and America? How have these processes helped change with the very idea of ‘contemporary art’? What then might a transnational critical theory in art and in thinking look like today or in the 21st century? In this course we will examine this cluster of questions from a number of different angles, starting with new questions about borders, displacements, translations and minorities, and the ways they have cut across and figured in different regions, in Europe or America, as elsewhere. In the course of our investigations, we will look in particular at two areas in which these questions are being raised today -- in Asia and in Africa and its diasporas. The course is thus inter-disciplinary in nature and is open to students in different fields and areas where these issues are now being discussed

AHIS GU4946 Historicism ＆ Restoration in European Arch.. 4.00 points.

The aim of this seminar is to explore the relationship between changing theories of historical change and the practice of architecture in the long nineteenth century from the ideas of progress that animated architectural theory and design in the European Enlightenment to the critiques of historicism and of revivalism in the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. It is the hypothesis of this seminar that during the period one of the dominant themes of architectural form making was the notion that all understanding is historically conditioned, that an understanding of the past evolution of architectural form was necessary to defining current practices and preparing for the future, increasingly a subject of anxiety in this crucial period industrializing modernity. This relationship between theory and practice will not be considered uniquely in the realm of the history of ideas, however. Rather we will strive to “historicize historicism,” and to examine the political, social and economic stakes and settings of historicist architectural practices primarily in France, Britain, and Germany. Issues of nationalism, colonialism, the discourses of progress, of natural science, and of evolution must necessarily overlap with our joint research. A key theme that runs throughout the course is the relationship between ideas of defining an appropriate historically based style for modern practice and the rise of a culture of restoration (rather than repair) of the newly defined category of the historical monument. As a result the course will be punctuated by a series of pairs that look at a single practitioner’s practices between newly conceived construction and restoration