Description
Few topics are more contentious than the fraught relationship between contemporary architecture and history. If this relation has at times been tumultuous and even oppositional, this course proposes that architects must become self-aware if architecture is to develop from its current state. That awareness necessarily begins with the history of the discipline of architecture. While various strands of disciplinary interrogation have recently arisen that take on this issue none has coagulated into more than a flirtation. After last century's disavowal of ?the styles?; after those same experiments were reinterpreted as ?physique/flesh? devoid of the ?morale/word?; after the stylistic historicism of ?the grays?; and after another much more mild cycle of disavowal over the past two decades, the question of a contemporary posture toward history is again worthy of consideration. Where, alternatively, progressivist dogma or casual disregard take the place of a serious or critical attitude towar