This seminar critically considers modern classicism not only as a compositional design method and as an evocation of precedents, but also as a language of clarity, reduction, and economy resistant to an unquestioned avant-gardist predilection for the “new.” Beginning with the fixed principles that were the legacy of nineteenth-century French and German Neoclassicism (unity, symmetry, proportion), the seminar continues up through the Rationalism and Formalism that followed the Second World War. Issues explored include the concepts of the ruin and monumentality; the Modern Movement’s analogies to the classical; and the representation of interwar national and political ideologies. Works studied include those by architects, literary/artistic figures, and theorists such as Richardson, Garnier, Perret, Le Corbusier, Rossi, Asplund, Lutyens, Terragni, Speer, Mies, SOM, Kahn, Valéry, Gide, de Chirico, Calvino, Rowe, Krier, Eisenman, Stern, Porphyrios, and Colquhoun.

All Semesters

3214b
Spring 2017
The Construction of Exactitude: Classicism and Modernism
Karla Britton
3214b
Spring 2016
The Construction of Exactitude: Classicism and Modernism
Karla Britton