HAU33010 and HAU33012 Architecture and the City

This course is about ‘urbanism’, the study of cities. But what exactly is a city? How did it occur and evolve? Architectural history concerns more than individual buildings, their style, material, form, and construction. The broader context within which a building sits; the spatial conversation between buildings within public space; the design of streets, transport, and services; the cultural, economic, political, and biological processes of people that inhabit and negotiate these spaces, have all played a vital part in the discourse of architectural history. This course explores architecture’s intersection with the idea of the ‘city’ in its various guises, from its earliest history in the Near East to our present-day globalism. Students will examine the city as form, system, infrastructure, theatre, allegory, ecology, utopia, a cradle of society, an engine of capital, political surface, producer of national identity, colonial instrument, sustainer of inequality, and technological wonder.