Spring 2018

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

This seminar will challenge students to encounter and interpret the city around them in unconventional ways.  At a time when public commemoration has vigorously and sometimes violently re-entered our country’s public discourse, we wish to re-examine how monuments, memory, politics, and our senses shape our understandings of Philadelphia’s past, present, and possible futures.  Our focus is on two intertwined themes: How we remember and What we remember.  Treating monuments, films, and historical texts as key forms of interpretation – the building blocks of an official if unstable “public past,” we will likewise attend to the “backdrop” of such written and built statements: everyday urban and domestic life as well as more public histories that have remained silent or risen to the surface at key moments.

Instructors:

David Barnes, History and Sociology of Science, School of Arts and Sciences, and Aaron Wunsch, Historic Preservation/Landscape Architecture, School of Design

Spring 2018

H+U+D PROBLEMATICS SEMINAR

Description:

The premise of this interdisciplinary seminar is that the combination of design and environmental humanities will allow us to develop a complex sense of the interplay of infrastructure and affect in the lived and built environment of coastal cities already contending with sea level rise. Ranging temporally (from Mesopotamia to the dystopian futures of climate fiction) and geographically (from Venice and Rotterdam, from New York and New Orleans, to Jakarta and Dhaka, for example), the seminar explores an array of exemplary historical and present-day sites of delta urbanism as portrayed through views coming from the literary and design communities. We will engage directly with notable experts of design and water management (some of whom will be invited to the seminar) as well as works of literature, philosophy, history, and film.

Instructors:

Eugenie Birch, City and Regional Planning, School of Design and Simon Richter, Germanic Languages and Literatures, School of Arts and Sciences

Spring 2018

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

This seminar will discuss the cultural politics of memory as they develop through the spatial and sonic atmosphere of Berlin. As a city rich in history, and focused on the future, Berlin is a laboratory for how exploration of the recent past is re-scripting the near future. The city becomes a palimpsest—sonically, visually, and spatially—that is available for investigation and interpretation as a means to understand historical patterns and their relationship to novel practices and methods in the present.

The course will be centered around an analysis of both the cultural resonance of memory and also the role of history in future imaginaries. Media –in particular sonic and spatial – cultures will form a prism through which to understand cities, urban practices, and the transformation of the environment. Two of the main threads of this analysis involve the economics of real estate—as evidenced in the transformation from squatting culture to collective inhabitation—and the push towards energy efficiency in buildings and urban space, as evidenced in both regulatory and creative efforts towards refining practices of ecological design and construction. Both these threads are bound up with an increasing attentiveness to the role of sound in urban life: the emergence of techno in Berlin during the 1970s and 1980s was not only a soundtrack to but also an agent of transformation in the evolution of alternative spatial practices during that period, while more recent practices of ecological design sit alongside Berlin’s atypical sensitivity to urban sound design.

Instructors:

Daniel Barber, Architecture, School of Design, and Naomi Waltham-Smith, Music, School of Arts and Sciences

Spring 2018

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

This interdisciplinary seminar is about twentieth-century New York as both fact and idea: as a real city that came into its own over the course of the last century; and as a corresponding set of images, ideas, and cultural practices—an urban imaginary—in which modernity’s new contents and contexts were experienced, represented, and enacted. The seminar is constructed in part as an argument among four visionary thinkers whose differing theories of the city were shaped by their responses to New York’s development: Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), Robert Moses (1888–1981), Jane Jacobs (1916–2006), and Rem Koolhaas (1944–). We debate the respective hypotheses of this quartet of influential “urban intellectuals” and the central concerns that preoccupied them, from questions of large-scale infrastructure, urban renewal, public space, and environmental sustainability to issues of symbolic representation, identity, and complexity. We also study New York’s rise and role as a leading art center and a dynamic laboratory for new aesthetic ideas. New York has been called the capital of the twentieth century. In revisiting the architecture and art of this emblematically modern city, we also aim to reflect on its future in the twenty-first century.

The class will make two trips to New York to visit current exhibitions and selected sites. It will also make use of an important documentary resource, the Lewis Mumford Papers housed at the Kislak Center. Readings will be supplemented with slide talks and several film screenings.

Instructors:

Joan Ockman, Senior Lecturer, Architecture, School of Design, and Lee Ann Custer, PhD Candidate, History of Art, School of Arts and Sciences