Elective course 3: History of architecture

IMMEDIATE HISTORY OF A FIN DE SIÈCLE : CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE ON SHOW

Combining the history of ideas and the history of objects, this course offers a critical history of contemporary architecture seen through a particular prism: the major exhibitions that marked the last third of the 20th century, from the mid-1960s to the turn of the 21st century. Particularly numerous during this period, these exhibitions provide a privileged observation ground for the debates and discourses, trends and turning points, ephemeral fashions and more structural transformations that have animated this field, and from which today’s architecture is, in fact, heir. In particular, the course addresses the question of postmodernism as a passing architectural fashion, and postmodernity as a more chronic historical condition. By means of a critical, and therefore highly thematized, history, this course attempts to explore certain recurring features of architects’ relationship to this “postmodern condition”. The cross-cutting themes of this course are: the relationship to modernity (or at least to its rhetoric); the relationship to time (the present, history, memory, fashion, etc.); the autonomy or heteronomy of architecture; architecture as a product and architecture as a profession.

Oral examination

Couvert, Fabienne, Exposer l’architecture: le musée d’architecture en question, Rome, Diagonale, 1997.

Davallon, Jean (dir.), Claquemurer pour ainsi dire tout l’univers. La mise en exposition, Paris, Editions du Centre Georges-Pompidou / CCI, 1986.

Davallon, Jean, “L’architecture, objet d’exposition?”, in Phyllis Lambert, Guy Doré, Etienne de Cointet (dir.), L’architecture. Collection /Recherche /Programmes, Villeurbanne, Programme Rhône-Alpes recherches en sciences humaines, 1996, pp. 71-87.

Davallon, Jean, L’Exposition à l’œuvre. Stratégies de communication et médiation symbolique, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1999.

Forty, Adrian, “Ways of Knowing, Ways of Showing: A Short History of Architectural Exhibitions”, in Penny Sparke, Deyan Sudjic (eds.), Representing Architecture. New Discussions: Ideologies, Techniques, Curation, London, Design Museum,2008, pp. 42-61.

Chaplin, Sarah and Stara, Alexandra (eds.), Curating Architecture and the City, London / New York, Routledge, 2009

Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending et al (eds.), Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, Zurich, Lars Müller Publishers,2014.

Chabard, Pierre, “Du dessin à l’image : crises à la surface de l’architecture”, in Soline Nivet and Lionel Engrand (eds.), Architecture 80, une chronique métropolitaine : les voies de la postmodernité (1980-1990), Paris, Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 2011, pp. 106-119.

Chabard, Pierre, ” Entre collection et médiation : stratégies institutionnelles autour de l’architecture au début des années 1980 “, Les Cahiers du MNAM, n°129, automne 2014, pp. 50-63.

Chabard, Pierre, ” Ce que l’exposition fait à l’architecture : le cas du CCI dans les années 1980 “, in Stéphane DORÉ, Frédéric HERBIN (dir.), L’objet de l’exposition : l’architecture exposée, Bourges, Ensa Bourge, 2015, pp.22-29.

See also the many special issues of magazines devoted to architectural exhibitions: Faces, n°53, winter 2003-2004, Log, n°20, autumn 2010, Oase, n°88, november 2012, Colonnes, n°30, july 2014, Les Cahiers du MNAM, n°129, autumn 2014

LANGUAGE OF TEACHING: French
LANGUAGES OF COMMUNICATION: French, English and Spanish
Recent years (with more intense, longer and more numerous heat waves), and the recent confinements resulting from the pandemic, remarkably underline the importance of gardens for the inhabitants of the urban world. While they help to cool cities, they also play a definite social role, often representing for many city dwellers the only contact with some form of nature.

The historic garden, an architectural and plant composition, is an expression of a people’s culture at a given time. They are part of our heritage.
Climate change linked to global warming is having an impact on gardens, highlighting their fragility and, along with other factors (conflicts, construction projects), threatening their preservation. To help preserve them, it’s essential to know their history and characteristics.
This knowledge is also essential for anyone wishing to create new gardens: the garden accompanies architecture, extends the city, transforms it, and the architect can draw valuable lessons from the study of gardens in terms of spatial planning and staging.

This course is designed to provide a basic understanding of the history of gardens and urban planting, with two objectives:
– to develop a spirit of curiosity by approaching a field of study that invites us to (re)discover the relationships between the garden and society, between the garden and the city, and the many forms of plant presence in the city
– to combine several modes of exploration: direct observation and fieldwork during visits, reading literary or historical texts, analysis of graphic or pictorial representations.

Continuous assessment: attendance and participation; a short writing exercise to tell the story of a garden.
Final written exam in two parts: the first part will cover the whole course through a series of questions requiring short answers; the second part, in the form of an essay, will go into greater depth on a cross-cutting subject, drawing on the lectures, readings and visits made.

To avoid overloading students, they will be asked to complete just one short exercise, an illustrated personal account of a garden that is important to them.
Regular, attentive attendance is expected, as well as reading the documents available in the Course Drive and taking part in at least one of the October visits.

A general bibliography is provided at the beginning of the semester, along with information on resource sites and websites. A detailed bibliography accompanies each course.

COURSE TITLE

MULTIDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES TO ARCHITECTURE. LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI, ARCHITECT AND INTELLECTUAL

The optional course (M1, S7) taught by A. Brucculeri, whose content is likely to evolve over the course of the academic year, is intended to feed into the 2025-26 academic year an investigation, through history, of the origins of the multidisciplinary construction of architecture, a question of sensitizing students to the temporal thickness, between past and present, of such a theme. With this in mind, we feel it would be interesting and useful to re-interrogate the career of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472), the founding figure of the architect-intellectual, by first placing his career in perspective : in relation to the contemporary evolution of the idea of the architect-intellectual; in relation to the conception of inter- and trans-disciplinarity in architecture and architectural history today; in relation to the historical and critical approach that mobilizes, in our own time, the work of L.B. Alberti.

Partial

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY ON L.B. ALBERTI

Massimo BULGARELLI, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). Architettura e storia, Milan, Electa, 2008.
Howard BURNS, Leon Battista Alberti, in Francesco Paolo Fiore (ed.), Storia dell’architettura italiana. Il Quattrocento, Milan, Electa, 1998, p. 114-165
Françoise CHOAY and Michel PAOLI, Alberti : humaniste et architecte, Paris, Musée du Louvre-ENSBA, 2006.
Francesco FURLAN, Studia Albertiana. Lectures et lecteurs de L.B. Alberti, Paris-Turin, J. Vrin-Nino Aragno Editore, 2003.
Francesco FURLAN, Pierre LAURENS and Sylvain MATTON (dir.), Leon Battista Alberti, actes du congrès international, Paris, 10-15 avril 1995, Paris, J. Vrin-Nino Aragno Editore, 2000, 2 vols.
Manfredo TAFURI, Interpreting the Renaissance. Princes, Cities, Architects, New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 2006, trans. of Ricerca del Rinascimento. Principi, città, architetti, Turin, Einaudi, 1992, chapter I on Alberti and the Rome of Pope Niccolò V.
Robert TAVERNOR, On Alberti and the art of building, New Haven-London, Yale University Press, 1998.
Rudolf WITTKOWER, Les principes de l’architecture de la Renaissance, Paris, Ed. de la Passion, 1996, trans. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London, Warburg Institute, 1949, chapters on Leon Battista Alberti.

DETAILED BIBLIOGRAPHIES WILL BE PROVIDED THROUGHOUT THE COURSE.