Module Description (Updated 14 August 2018)
Between Order and Chaos: Architecture and Urbanism
This module focuses on a number of themes in architecture, urbanism, history, and historiography. It relates primarily to the Renaissance and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also touching on Greek Antiquity and the nineteenth century. The module begins by examining one of the major architectural events of the fifteenth century in Italy: the construction of the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence. It explores contemporary reactions to this vast structure, looking at the writings of Leon Battista Alberti and Giorgio Vasari among others. It then continues with a detailed examination of some of Alberti's writings, considering how he related architecture and urbanism to power and how his thought was caught between a belief in the ordering capacities of architecture and anxiety regarding the ruinous and fragmenting effects of time. The module then moves on to consider the reception of the Florentine Cupola (and the architectural Renaissance more broadly) in the modern period, touching on nineteenth-century writers such as Jules Michelet and John Ruskin, as well as twentieth-century architectural historians such as Nikolaus Pevsner, and architects such as Richard Rogers and Rem Koolhaas. It continues by examining a number of themes relating to the ordering and disordering tendencies of architecture, taking in topics such as giganticism, progress, fragmentation, wholeness, architectural mannerism, postmodernism, and deconstructivism. It will investigate a diverse range of structures that includes the Parthenon, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Philip Johnson's AT&T building, and the new Acropolis Museum.
Between Order and Chaos: Architecture and Urbanism
This module focuses on a number of themes in architecture, urbanism, history, and historiography. It relates primarily to the Renaissance and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, while also touching on Greek Antiquity and the nineteenth century. The module begins by examining one of the major architectural events of the fifteenth century in Italy: the construction of the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore (the Duomo) in Florence. It explores contemporary reactions to this vast structure, looking at the writings of Leon Battista Alberti and Giorgio Vasari among others. It then continues with a detailed examination of some of Alberti's writings, considering how he related architecture and urbanism to power and how his thought was caught between a belief in the ordering capacities of architecture and anxiety regarding the ruinous and fragmenting effects of time. The module then moves on to consider the reception of the Florentine Cupola (and the architectural Renaissance more broadly) in the modern period, touching on nineteenth-century writers such as Jules Michelet and John Ruskin, as well as twentieth-century architectural historians such as Nikolaus Pevsner, and architects such as Richard Rogers and Rem Koolhaas. It continues by examining a number of themes relating to the ordering and disordering tendencies of architecture, taking in topics such as giganticism, progress, fragmentation, wholeness, architectural mannerism, postmodernism, and deconstructivism. It will investigate a diverse range of structures that includes the Parthenon, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Philip Johnson's AT&T building, and the new Acropolis Museum.
- Module Supervisor: Caspar Pearson