Topics in Architecture: Building Life: Architecture, Technology, Historiography

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological theories and architectural practices in the 19th and 20th c., this course focuses on the entanglement of architectural historiography with the historicization of design technology. It examines the historical treatment of buildings as prosthetic or organic tools and the reinvention of building practices as biological processes and anthropological techniques. Seminars probe the periodization of historical time in terms of progress and obsolescence informing early histories of modern architecture and design.