ARTH 153. Modern Architecture and Urbanism: Honors Seminar

This honors seminar examines the broad array of designed and built works, makers, sites, and texts that constitute modern architecture and urbanism. Students will interpret the many facets of modernism through key historical readings-both primary and secondary, canonical and revisionist; analysis of examples; and consideration of their makers, both well-known and less so. A guiding assumption is that modernism was never only one thing and had different-even sometimes opposite-intentions, manifestations, and consequences in different contexts. Yet we will follow one persistent question as a link across the semester: how did modern architects and urbanists seek to create a better world? The motivations behind and answers to this defining question of modernism were never consistent across our period of study. While centering designed objects, then, we will interrogate how people have experienced modernism differently, depending on their identities, subject positions, geographic locations, and social roles.
Prerequisite: Two courses in art history or permission of instructor.
Arts and Humanities.
2 credits.
Eligible for GMST
Spring 2025. Goldstein.
Catalog chapter: Art History
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/art-history

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