Modern Architecture and Planning in the 20th Century

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.