Art and Archaeology

Scholars have long recognized the importance of the theme of antiquarianism in Chinese art. However, recent scholarly interest in the issues associated with copying, replication and multiple temporalities in art provides new perspectives on and approaches to this old theme and greatly enriches related discussions on it. This seminar takes a new look at the recurring tendency of antiquarianism in Chinese art by engaging with four important mediums (painting, calligraphy, bronzes and ceramics) and their frequent incidents of transmediality.

A research seminar in selected areas of aesthetics, art criticism, and architectural theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries on the notion of representation in art and architecture. This seminar is given to students in the doctoral program at the School of Architecture and to doctoral candidates in other departments.

This seminar examines the theoretical and practical intersections between architecture and woven materials across time, focusing on three key moments: the imagined origins of architecture in a non-Western, a-historical past: textiles' place in transforming built architecture; and twentieth-century experiments in which the figure of cloth allowed for expressing ideas that often exceeded what standing material realities were then possible for architects.

This course covers various topics related to the history and theory of architecture.

An overview of the major themes running through modern architecture in the twentieth century. The seminar is based on a close reading of selected buildings and texts both by prominent and less prominent figures of the modern movement and its aftermath. Special emphasis is given to the historiography and the history of reception of modern architecture, as well as the cultural, aesthetic and scientific theories that have informed modern architectural debates, including organicism, vitalism, functionalism, structuralism, historicism and their opposites.

The study of the arts at the intersection of the disciplines.

Explores the critical transformation in the relationship between interior and exterior space in modern architecture, which is most evident in domestic space. Domestic space ceases to be simply bounded space in opposition to the outside, whether physical or social. An analysis of modern houses is used as a frame to register contemporary displacements of the relationship between public and private space, instigated by the emerging reality of the technologies of communicaton, including newspaper, telephone, radio, film, and television.

A study of the archaeology of the Greek house (Early Archaic huts through Hellenistic palaces). Emphasis on the close reading of archaeological sites and assemblages and the integration of literary with material evidence. Topics include the discovery of houses, the identification of farms, the integration of the house with urban plans and natural landscapes, the organization and use of space, gender, domestic economies, and religious practice. Attention devoted to social, political, and regional dynamics; to the concept of the "private" in ancient Greece; and to questioning the heuristic value of the term "house".