Environmental Aesthetics
EPFL history and theory course AR-505 Modernity, Architecture and the Environment.
Architecture Master 1 and 3, 2h weekly × 12 weeks, 2022–present.
Architecture Master 1 and 3, 2h weekly × 12 weeks, 2022–present.
“Happy are those ages”, said Georg Lukács, “when the starry sky is the map of all possible paths—ages whose paths are illuminated by the light of the stars. Everything in such ages is new and yet familiar, full of adventure and yet their own.” The world and the self are sharply distinct but never strangers, every action feels complete in sense and for the senses, abstract reason and sensuous experience are one.1
Modernity, on the other hand, is an age of separations. Separations and alienations that make the world appear abstracted from human subjectivity—we say “appear” because it could be argued that this abstraction is an illusion, the visible fragment of a whole whose ties with the rest are unreadable. As has often been stated, never has the world been so densely connected, so thoroughly humanized, so artificially ours, and yet even the objects and institutions of our making appear technocratic, conventional, and estranged.
“By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” said Charles Baudelaire in 1863, “the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”2 For Lukács, modernity signalled this historical loss of totality, a severance between the individual and the universal that art should attempt to (re)mediate. In this wishful reconciliation, modern art would become “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.”3
This course maps a narrative of architectural modernism from the problematic tensions it engendered between buildings and their environments. Each class pairs an architect with a concept of environmental mediation, from around 1848 to postmodernity. The sequence is organized in four periods: Revolutionary Utopia, Heroic Internationalism, Postwar Welfare, and Neoliberal Disenchantment.
Throughout the course, students will consider the following questions: how should architecture reflect society’s relation to the environment; how should it constitute a critique of said relation; and how should it predict/project a collective ideal?
- Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 29.
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Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (New York: Phaidon, 1995), 15.
- Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 88.
I. Revolutionary Utopia
1. Fourier and the Co-op Panopticon
2. Morris and the Artisan Cottage
3. Geddes and the Valley Section
II. Heroic Internationalism
4. Wright and the Prairie Bungalow
5. Taut and the City Crown
6. Ginzburg and the Social Condenser
III. Postwar Welfare
7. Smithsons and the Habitat Threshold
8. Rossi and the Analogous Type
9. Siza and the Proletarian Island
IV. Neoliberal Disenchantment
10. Banham and the Gizmo Bubble
11. Venturi & Scott Brown and the Bill-ding-board
12. Koolhaas and the Schizoid Skyscraper