Introductory description

This module intends to provide students with a basic knowledge of the ways in which architecture (as design, planning, and ideology) became one of the delegated fields in which a social, political, or cultural idea of the future could be articulated and implemented from the age of Industrial Revolution to the present day. The module will show how the ideas of theorists and visionaries ended up influencing the form of the everyday built environment around the world. The course will start by exploring the way that rapid urbanisation and industrialisation led many to seek alternative ways of living, whether by looking towards an idealised often-rural past. The course will cover many of the most influential and radical urban theorists of the last 200 years, and will show how their ideas informed the creation of new communities around the globe. The course will end by asking how useful Utopian ideas are for solving the many challenges that face urban populations today.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Introduction

Medievalism: Pugin, Ruskin, & Morris

The Return to Nature: Villages of Vision

Industrial Model Villages: Saltaire, Port Sunlight, and Leverville

Garden Cities and New Towns;

Reading Week

Modernism and Housing: the Bauhaus and Corbusier

Non-Plan, plotlands, and the suburb

Megastructures

The end of the future?

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Command a working knowledge of the architectural history of the period.
• Read and interpret maps and architectural plans.
• Demonstrate knowledge of relationships between architectural form and function.
• Situate buildings and urban developments within their historical, social and political contexts.
• Present an argument, initiate and sustain group discussion through intelligent questioning and debate at an appropriate level
• Ability to undertake research and to write up the results in the form of a well-structured argument at an appropriate level
• Familiarity with essential ICT skills
• Ability to collaborate effectively with others
• Show understanding of diverse viewpoints
• Ability to find, select, organize and synthesize evidence
• Ability to formulate a sustained argument
• Think conceptually and independently at an appropriate level
• Employ sophisticated conceptual and visual analysis
• Demonstrate bibliographical skills at an appropriate level
• Produce critical analysis of cultural artefacts in their context

Indicative reading list

Reyner Banham, Megastructure, Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London, 1976)

Ricky Burdett, Shaping Cities in an Urban Age (London, 2018)

Gillian Darley, Villages of Vision, A Study of Strange Utopias (London, 2007)

Paul Dobraszcyck, Future Cities: Architecture and the Imagination (London, 2019)

Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in hte Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier (Boston, 1982)

Hall, Peter, Cities of Tomorrow (London, 2002).

Meacham, Standish, Regaining Paradise, Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (New Haven and London, 1999)

Douglas Murphy, Last Futures: Nature, technology and the end of architecture (London, 2016)

Muthesius, Stefan, The Postwar University, Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven and London, 2000)

Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia, An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago, 2016)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

• Command a working knowledge of the architectural history of the period
• Read and interpret maps and architectural plans
• Demonstrate knowledge of relationships between architectural form and function
• Situate buildings and urban developments within their historical, social and political contexts
• Employ sophisticated conceptual and visual analysis
• Produce critical analysis of cultural artefacts in their context

Transferable skills

• initiate and sustain group discussion through intelligent questioning and debate at an appropriate level
• ability to undertake research and to write up the results in the form of a well-structured argument at an appropriate level
• familiarity with essential ICT skills
• ability to collaborate effectively with others
• show understanding of diverse viewpoints
• ability to find, select, organize and synthesize evidence
• ability to formulate a sustained argument
• think conceptually and independently at an appropriate level
• Demonstrate bibliographical skills at an appropriate level