My teaching encompasses a range of topics in architectural and urban history, with a focus on the social, cultural, and political history of the built environment. A common theme across my courses is the need to understand buildings, landscapes, and plans as both subjects meriting close analysis on their own terms and windows onto the broader histories that surround and shape them.
Select recent courses and brief descriptions follow:
RACE, SPACE, AND ARCHITECTURE
Race has fundamentally shaped the American built environment in the twentieth century. Likewise, space and architecture have profoundly shaped Americans’ understanding of race. This seminar considers race, space, and architecture as mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing phenomena, examining their intersection in urban form and spatial practices and their effects on the individuals who inhabit American cities. Topics studied include the racialization of public and private housing; race’s role in the training and practice of designers; social struggles over public and private space; environmental disparities; geographies of incarceration; the popular language of neighborhood change; and the reconstruction and transformation of urban places.
ARCHITECTURE OF PHILADELPHIA
Philadelphia offers a nearly unmatched physical record of American architectural and urban history. Even a cursory list touches on many of the major developments in the built environment over the last five centuries and beyond: William Penn’s Philadelphia Plan; Independence Hall; Eastern State Penitentiary; the Carl Mackley Houses; Levittown; Society Hill; and the Vanna Venturi House. This seminar turns to this history not only to understand the specific arc of architecture and planning in an influential metropolitan area, but also to understand how these examples can teach about broader themes in Philadelphia and beyond, including the history of land use and planning, the industrial and urban revolutions, social struggle and social change, public memory, and aesthetic and formal innovation. Through field trips, archival research, and engagement with interdisciplinary sources, students learn the foundational methods of architectural history, the questions that animate it, and the major cultural, political, and social forces that have shaped it.
MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM
This intensive honors seminar examines the broad array of designed and built works, makers, sites, and texts that constitute modern architecture and urbanism. Modernism shaped the built environment profoundly and in a multitude of ways that both designers and historians continue to grapple with. In so shaping the world, modernism followed a diverse range of paths determined by the aesthetic, technological, social, political, cultural, and environmental transformations of the long 20th century. A basic guiding assumption is that modernism was never only one thing and had different—even sometimes opposite—intentions, manifestations, and consequences in its different contexts. Yet the seminar follows one persistent question over time: how did modern architects and urbanists seek to create a better world? To understand the motivations behind, answers to, and consequences of this defining question, the seminar will center designed objects while asking how people have experienced modernism differently, depending on their identities, subject positions, geographic locations, and social roles.
ARCHITECTURE, CRIME, AND PUNISHMENT
Architects and planners have long sought to design a better world, but designers have also frequently been complicit in creating built environments focused on punishment, criminalization, and incarceration. This course takes this premise as a starting point to understand the role that the built environment has played in shaping ideas of crime and punishment, from Enlightenment-era systems of imprisonment to convict labor in the post-Civil War American South to the rise of mass incarceration. By seeking to better understand the significance of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning in the rise of the modern carceral state, the course addresses broader questions concerning the power of designed space and the power of designers to create a more just world.
Students in the fall 2018 Architecture of Philadelphia seminar visit the Vanna Venturi House in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. Photograph by Brian D. Goldstein.
On a spring 2019 visit to the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania, students in Modern Architecture and Urbanism view a plan representing activities at Swarthmore College, by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates. Photograph by Brian D. Goldstein.