The course surveys architectural and planning related practices and writings from the end of the 19th century and until the beginning of the 3rd millennia. We will analyze the emergence of the modern movement as a multi-sited and faceted international phenomena and relative to a series of turns that characterized the period: a turn towards rationalization, optimization and standardization of the building, its modes of fabrication and design, as much as of labor and the household; a turn towards the city, the territory, the environment and distinct global framings of the world in the context of events such as the Soviet revolution, world wars, colonialism and de-colonization; and a turn towards the management of social welfare, minority groups and race. We will ask how architectural and planning practices and writings reflected distinct aspects of the historical reality, but not less, how they responded, imagined and took part in shaping new forms of life and association for individuals and social groups. Finally, the course will reconstruct concepts, media and strategies that were advanced along the period and that define a field of disciplinary-professional knowledge, a field that in turn can serve for renewed relations with the past, present and future of the profession.

Visual Culture has emerged as a study field in its own right in the late 1970s, in the midst of a crisis in academic research and the collapse of Modernist distinctions and hierarchies. Moreover, images of all kind – from painting, photography and film to virtual reality – were becoming part and parcel of the everyday, and technological developments were facilitating the design of instruments enhancing man's visual capacity and simplifying the production and consumption of images. The need to understand the meaning of images and their effect on the individual and on society at large lies at the heart of this area of research. In this course we will study key texts written by prominent thinkers such as Marx, Freud and Foucault, whose views and notions have contributed significantly to the understanding of fundamental processes in visual culture. With their help we will forge the analytical means and concepts that can provide contemporary producers and consumers of images with a critical view. We will discuss, among other matters, issues of surveillance and control, spectacle and consumerism, psychoanalysis and gender relations, post-colonialism and globalization.

The link between art and society has been discussed through diverse and contrasting approaches. Art and artistic quality have been defined as the product of a complex institutional configuration operating through experts and authorities independently of any necessary and fixed qualities or characteristics inherent to the work; art and its nature have been defined as the product of processes of socialization (learning and initiation) that make it possible to identify an object as a work of art, “make it speak” and reveal its supposedly hidden significance and meaning; art has been defined as a means for instigating a systematic institutional critique of the modes of production and representation of the artistic object and sphere, as well exposing hidden structures, dominant forces, foundational narratives, categorizations, classifications, and “silenced” voices; in other contexts it has been defined as a form of encounter, convergence, thinking and debating that functions as a site of (mental and practical) potential that touches on ideas and conceptions rooted outside distinctly artistic contexts (for example: society, politics, ecology and so on) and conventional “logical”, “objective” and “linear” patterns of inquiry. The course will be dedicated to these interrelations, to the socio-historical conditions that have structured them and to the licenses and restrictions they entail – in the field of plastic art in particular and culture in general.