STORIA DELL'ARCHITETTURA CONTEMPORANEA

ICAR/18 - 8 CFU - 2° Semester

Teaching Staff

PAOLA BARBERA


Learning Objectives

Course goals:

Achieve an appropriate knowledge about history of architecture of 19th and 20th cenntury (topics, architects, theories, buildings).

Develop methodological and analytical skills applicable to a wide range of topics, in order to be able to deal with other researchs in the following years.

Learn how to "read" an architecture, both form a material and constructive point of view and form a functional and formal perspective.



Detailed Course Content

The course aims to introduce the first year students to the basic information about modern and contemporary history of architecture, providing them with essential tools to understand different issues. The course faces the fundamental topics of 19th and 20th century, by means of both general frameworks and monographic approaches. Subjects, places, architects and architectures, debates, theories are intertwined and related with questions derived from the problems of contemporary practice.

 

 

Essential topics:
“Modern” and contemporary”, historiographical issues. Methodological tools: analysis of essential books and dictionaries. Architectural culture between the second half of the 18th century and the 19th century. Eclecticism and its roots: the Grand Tour, the archaeological discoveries. The 19th century and the debate on style. Industrial revolution and new materials. Industrial revolution and urban transformations. Political and social changes: the bourgeois city. At the turn of 20th century: art nouveau and the avantgardes; the problem of “ornament” (Sullivan, Loos) and the matter of “structural honesty” (Viollet le Duc, Perret). Towards the modern movement: architecture in Germany in the first part of 20th century. The American context and Frank Lloyd Wright. The Bauhaus. De Stijl and the Dutch architecture. Masters between the two world wars: Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Scandinavian context; Erik Gunnar Asplund and Alvar Aalto. Italy between the two world wars; the years of the reconstruction. Tradition and modernity; masters of modern movement after the second world war. Architecture of Louis Kahn. Topics and personalities: the debate between 1970-2000.



Textbook Information

1. K. Frampton, Modern Architecture: a Critical History, Thames and Hudson, London 1980 (fourth edition London 2007).

2. W.J.R. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, Phaidon, Oxdord 1982 (third edition London1996).

3. D. Watkin, A History of Western architecture, Barrie & Jenkins, London1986 (capthers on XVIII and XIX century).

4. K. Frampton, Studies in tectonic culture : the poetics of construction in nineteenth and twentieth century architecture, Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press,London 1995.




Open in PDF format Versione in italiano