Courses

Architectural historians have long been interested in how changes in building materials, construction technologies, and methods of design and production shaped architecture from eighteenth century onward. By exploring how these shifts were tied to broader developments in society, from the so-called “Industrial Revolution” to the “Digital Revolution”, this work has transformed the way we look at the modern built environment. Yet this interest in the meaning embedded in building processes has less commonly reached back to architecture produced before industrialization. In response to this lacuna, this seminar will examine the social, cultural, economic, technological history of construction from antiquity to the sixteenth century. More than just a survey of practice, the course will attempt to understand how issues of technology, production, and facture equally shaped architecture with particular focus on Old Kingdom Egypt, Classical Greece, Imperial Rome, Byzantine Constantinople, Gothic France, fifteenth-century Florence, and sixteenth-century Rome. In doing so, we will examine how buildings were built, the acquisition and transformation of materials, the organization of labor, the economics of construction, structural innovation, technological change and mechanization, natural philosophy, processes of design, and the role of builders and architects.