architecture - Sam Fox School - Washington University in St. Louis

HISTORY OF ARCHITECTURE IN SOUTH AMERICA A46 523D ARCH
This course is a survey of the history of architecture and urbansim in South America and it is organized
around two main questions. In an attempt to tell the story of modern architecture from the Argentine
capital, the first question deals with the relationship between urban culture and modernization. As the
first Latin American metropolis, Buenos Aires rapidly became a laboratory for a myriad of urban and
architectural ideas. In this process, however, the expansion remained faithful to certain urban typologies
derived from the Mediterranean world. Addressing this particular tension, the course concentrates on
the urban evolution of Buenos Aires in a period that extends from 1870 to 2000, examining the changing
relationship between buildings and urban tissue. The second question refers to the role played by South
America in the architectural scene between 1930 and 1960, a period in which the subcontinent became
an experimentation field for architectural modernism, especially in connection with the ideas of Le
Corbusier. This part of the course will then offer the opportunity to study the work of relevant architects
of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Getting to know the buildings designed by Amancio Williams, Eladio
Dieste, Oscar Neimeyer and Clorindo Testa will allow us to discover an agenda of problems and possibilities
associated with the emergence of modernism, which, in turn, contributed to the consolidation of cultural
identities throughout the region. This course is available only to students enrolled in the Buenos Aires
Semester Abroad program. Fulfills History/Theory elective requirement. 3 units
SECT 01: This course is only for those students participating in the Buenos Aires Study Abroad
Program.
01 TBA Williams
LAND ARCH URB: LANDSCAPEARCHITECTUREURBANISM A46 525K ARCH
New Disciplinary Dynamics : Blurs and Exchanges. Over the past decade, the various professions engaged
in the construction of the built environment have been investigating (both in theory and practice) a
specific and deliberate blurring, hybridization, and expansion of the traditional semantic and historical
categories of landscape, architecture, and urbanism in an attempt to confront changing situations,
environments, and cultures. Across geographical and cultural boundaries, the proliferation of projects
(speculative and built) and essays appearing in recent years makes this phenomenon more than a passing
trend or the product of individual reflection. Architecture, for example, as a conventional discipline
with its own tasks, internal logic, and modus operandi has become so heterogeneous that it can no longer
adequately authenticate its products from within the limits of its historical category. The same holds
true of the allied fields of landscape and urbanism. Strict disciplinary boundaries are no longer capable
of attending to the complexity of contemporary demands produced by mobility, density, de-urbanization,
hybrid programs, changing uses, and ecological concerns. The contemporary world forcibly imposes the
need for greater flexibility and indeterminacy and for new techniques of practice that are anticipatory,
receptive to change, and capable of opening an aperture to the future. This course will explore these
disciplinary slippages and hybrid contacts between until now distinct categories through essays and
built or speculative works. Fulfills History/Theory elective. Fulfills Urban Issues elective. 3 units.
01 W 9:00a-12:00p Daskalakis
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