Spring 2020

H+U+D ANCHOR INSTITUTION SEMINAR

Description:

This seminar will be organized around three distinct pathways. First, it will serve as an introduction to Jazz Studies and thus be attentive to the ways that jazz music has sparked an interdisciplinary conversation that is wide-ranging and ongoing. Second, we will be partnering with the African American Museum of Philadelphia to consider jazz within the realm of visual art. In light of efforts to map the “black interior,” how have visual artists (e.g. painters, sculptors, filmmakers, and photographers) sought to represent jazz? Third, we will endeavor to develop partnerships with the Philadelphia (and beyond) jazz community, especially as it pertains to creating and sustaining an archive that serves as way to understand jazz as an instrument of placemaking and also as a vehicle for jazz musicians to take ownership of their narratives. The seminar will meet at the African American Museum of Philadelphia and be team taught with members of the Museum staff. The course will culminate with a virtual exhibit of visual works and archival materials centering on Philadelphia’s jazz community and (if funding is available) a free concert to be held at AAMP. Undergraduates are welcome to register for the course with permission of the instructor

Spring 2020

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

Paris, Ville-Lumiere, has long been renowned for its urbanity, architecture, and city design. This class will trace the people, ideas, and projects that contributed to this reputation, through an exploration of the city’s built environment as expressed in literature and urban planning projects of the 19th and 20th centuries. Literary readings, including texts by Hugo, Baudelaire, Zola, and Breton, will be studied in conjunction with historical writings and projects ranging from works by Napoleon III and Haussmann to Mitterrand and Sarkozy. The course includes a field trip to France’s capital city during Penn’s Spring Break. Student travel expenses will be subsidized by the Mellon Foundation-sponsored Humanities + Urbanism + Design Project.

Instructors:

Eugenie Birch, Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research and Education and Chair of the Graduate Group in City and Regional Planning (Design) and Andrea Goulet, Professor of Romance Languages (SAS)

Spring 2020

H+U+D CITY SEMINAR

Description:

This is a primarily an art and planning course that centers on the representation of the oriental, specifically the Chinese, in both its historical and present contexts. The localization of the Chinese throughout the Americas within Chinatown precincts were also subject to representational imaginings that were negotiated through the lens of civic planning. This course will study the often fraught negotiation between representation and planning. The hyper-urbanization of China over the past several decades has radically altered traditional conceptions of public space in China. Mass migration from rural to urban areas has meant very high population densities in Chinese cities. Traditional courtyards surrounded by housing and other modestly scaled buildings are rapidly disappearing, incongruent with the demands of heated property development Moreover, Chinese cities have comparatively little public green space per resident compared to equivalents in the West. Zoning in Chinese cities is also much more varied for any given area than what one would find in cities such as New York, Paris, and London. Intensifying density of urban areas precludes the construction of large public squares. Furthermore, large public squares tend to be either intensively congested and overcrowded or underused due to their oversight by government that render such spaces somewhat opprobrious in terms of use.

Historically, the urban courtyards of temples, native place associations, and provincial guilds served as public spaces of gathering. They were also sites of festivals and the conducting of neighbourhood and civic business. These spaces have become increasingly privatized or commodified with entrance fees. The air-conditioned concourses of enclosed shopping malls or busy outdoor market streets have become de facto public spaces in China where collective window shopping or promenading is the primary activity rather than bodily repose as one might find in a public space in a large Western city.

The seminar/studio will investigate the meaning of the term public in the constitution of Chinese space, audience and critical voice through firstly the enclave of Chinatown and secondly through examples from China. The course will look into the changing conceptualization of public space in Chinatown as it has declined in its traditional form and become reinvented in the form of high-end shopping centered districts. This flux has its roots in post 1979 China as well as the post 1997 reversion of Hong Kong to China. As such, the course will examine the situation of rapid urbanization in China and the concomitant relationship to new Chinese (and Asian) districts in the North American urban and suburban landscape ie Vancouver, Toronto, Arlington (Virginia), Oakland, Los Angeles valley and Queens (Flushing), New York. In what ways can artists and designers respond to and challenge these conceptualizations of the old and the new within the context of urban change? What of the changing formations of the Chinese subject through the experiences of embodiment? How is public space produced through an ethnically bracketed bodily presence. Findings will be translated by the student as tools for design and public art imaginings This course will include a week s trip to San Francisco to study how intense growth in the city has all but usurped old Chinatown while new and more vibrant Chinese centers have emerged in multiple other districts within the city and the suburbs

Instructors:

Ken Lum, Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor and Chair of Fine Arts (Design), and Chi-Ming Yang, Associate Professor of English and Associate Chair of English (SAS)

Spring 2020

H+U+D PROBLEMATICS SEMINAR

Description:

A survey of the literature of urbanism from the late eighteenth century to the present. The discussion of original texts will be emphasized.  Students will be responsible for guiding one day of class discussion and writing two papers: (1) a 3-page essay that links one of the texts to current urban issues (due March 4) and (2) a 10-page final essay that analyzes the discussion of an important topic (for instance, monumentality, social sustainability, nature) in at least three of the readings (due May 8). More guidance for the papers will be provided separately.

Instructors:

David B. Brownlee,  Shapiro-Weitzenhoffer Professor, History of Art (SAS), and Zhongjie Lin, Associate Professor, City and Regional Planning (Design)

 Day/Time:

Wednesdays 2-5 PM