Theory and method in the study of architecture and art

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

MIT students were required to obtain permission of the instructor.

This seminar is open to graduate students, and is intended to offer a synoptic view of selected methodologies and thinkers in art and architectural history (with many theorists from other fields). The syllabus outlines the structure of the course and the readings and assignments for each week; the goal is to become aware of the apparatuses of discourse, and find your own voice within them.

The conjoined disciplines of art and architectural history periodically surge into "crisis." In art history these crises are well-known: The demise of formalism as a guiding tenet, or connoisseurial appreciation as a general guide, plunged the field into productive confusion during the 1970s when the battle raged between "social histories of art" or "revisionism" and more internal approaches; in the late 1990s the debate was staged between "visual studies" versus "normative art history;" in the '00s anthropology, post-coloniality, and globalism pressured the field. At present, German scholars are attempting to formulate a new "Bildwissenschaft," or "image science," from the shards of '30s European theory destroyed under fascism; Anglo-Americans are touting "new materialisms" and "thing theory." While we cannot be exhaustive, we will take on many of these dynamics as themselves worthy of study, with particular focus on the new methodologies that have emerged over the past two decades. The ultimate goal is to bring students closer to discovering their own individual voices as writers of theoretically and critically-informed histories.

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