Spring 2025
This course proposes an alternative to the understanding of architecture’s history as a linear sequence of stages of development of mostly Western civilisations (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, etc…) with a series of questions located in different regions and times, suggesting amultiplicity of potential origins. How, when, where, who, and most importantly; why do we begin to question architecture’s relationship to its own past? Is there a year zero, an origin or a beginning of architecture? Moreover, can we even think of ourselves as human beings without architecture? At least since the Renaissance, a persistent feature of modern architecture has been an obsession with its origins. Generations of architectural thinkers over the past five hundred years have sought to find the essence of architecture in its origins. Hoping ot illuminate or reorient the present, they have juxtaposed it with fabricated ideas of a distant past. In close dialogue with experts working in complementary fields, this course is designed to open and broaden our understanding of the past by interrogating it ni relation to what is meaningful in our present and, in so doing, broadening what we can imagine as possible futures. Asking about the beginnings of architecture will do little to help us uncover its supposed essence. Instead, this course offers to open a pluralistic historical record by exposing students ot the view of several experts ni earlier stages of humanity. By so doing, students will be confronted with critical questions about different notions of what society, ecology, technology, and politics have been, are, and could be.
