For course descriptions and information select from the following:
Architecture, Planning and Preservation (New York)
Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Paris)
Building New York
The Development of Paris
History of the American City
History of the European City
Design Studio (New York)
Design Studio (Paris)
Urban Studies Workshop
Freehand Drawing
Architecture, Planning, and Preservation : New York
Professors: Ms. Willis, Ms. Buttenweiser
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Architecture, Planning and Preservation: New York, the core course for the first session of the
Shape of Two Cities program, introduces students to the professional and theoretical issues
in the three disciplines. The lectures and reading focusing on history, theory, and politics,
accompanied by visits with contemporary practitioners in the three fields, examine the
interplay of forces that have shaped New York's built environment in the past and influence it
today. Specialists from the three fields will lecture in several classroom sessions, and field
trips to professional offices, public hearings, and development projects will expose students
to the dynamics of design, planning, and policy decisions.
Students work in teams to analyze and make recommendations for improving current projects
in New York City. Past classes have, for example, made proposals for the redevelopment of
the Coliseum at Columbus Circle, the rebuilding of historic Stone Street- one of lower
Manhattan's remaining cobbled streets originally laid out by the Dutch, and for solving the
"garbage crisis" once the city's major landfill has closed.
Lectures
� Visit Battery Park City and World Financial Center
� Visit the architectural office of Robert A.M. Stern and Associates
� Visit the offices of the Alliance for Downtown New York
� Preservation as a profession
Guest speaker: Vicki Weiner, Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation
� Visit the offices of the Central Park Conservancy.
� Visit Landmarks Preservation Commission and attend a public hearing on Certificates of
Appropriateness.
� Visit 14th Street Local Development Corporation
Readings
Jacobs, Jane. Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1961
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT 1960
Gutman, Robert. Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Princeton Architectural Press,
1988
Cuff, Dana. Architecture: The Story of Practice, Ch 2 & 4, "Beliefs and Practice," and "The
Making of an Architect"
MacLeod, Mary. "Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era," Assemblage 8, Feb 1989
Gratz, Roberta. The Living City, Epilogue
Costonis, John. Icons and Aliens: Aestetics and Environmental Change. Univ of Illinois, 1989
Cromley, Elizabeth. "Riverside Park and Issues of Preservation," Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 43, October 1984.
Diamondstein, Barbaralee. The Landmarks of New York. Abrams 1988.
Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Vintage, 1974.
Weiss, Marc. "The Politics of Real Estate Cycles"
Wilson, William A. "Moles and Skylarks" in Introduction to Planning History in the United
States, Donald Krueckeberg, ed.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. Oxford, 1978
Architecture, Planning, and Preservation : Paris
Professor : Mr. Quintard Hofstein
COURSE DESCRIPTION
To understand a city, it is mandatory to understand the elements that constitute its physical
context, its social, political and economical aspects, as well as its spatial characteristics.
Similar to the study of New York, it is important to understand the historical layers that have
had a direct bearing on the making of the plan of Paris. The city has evolved according to the
making and the displacement of concentric rings (enceintes), historical and physical layers
that aimed at controlling its political/ physical borders and its growth.
Geography and topography explain one part of the history, whereas the intricate successions
of political regimes focuses on the perpetual redefinition of its boundaries and the
re-qualification of its center.
Similar to the study of New York City, the description and the analysis will refer to those
important discoveries learned before: Poche, solid, void, border, center, perimeter, field,
space, territory, typology. For this as an important tool, and in order to understand the
various components of the making of the city, a parallel will be made with the two books
written by Klaus Herdeg, "Formal Structure in Indian Architecture," and "Formal Structure in
Turkish Architecture." These important works offer a planimetric reading of the solids and
voids of urban pieces, aiming at understanding their plastic integrity, their composition and
their relationship with the city at large.
The city of Paris will also be compared to the city of New York, its social making, its urban
characteristics, and the components of its urban space.
URBAN ANALYSIS
The composition of the Haussmanian block as compared with the typical New York block, the
system of streets, avenues, boulevards and faubourgs, the Parks system, the design of the
19th Century Garden and its poetical vision, the impact of Royal Plazas, all of these subjects
will not be studied as monuments but as active urban, social and spatial entities.
The focus does not stop at Paris proper, but aims at understanding the impact of the Villes
Nouvelles, Satellite Towns at the periphery of the city, the understanding of their urban
strategies, their development of the territory of the suburbs.
CLASS
Class time will be on the basis of lectures, group readings and group analysis of selected
themes, site visits with onsite sketching analysis, slide projection with group discussions
and interventions of guest lecturers.
ASSIGNMENTS
�Papers
Papers will be assigned at the conclusion of general themes, and will focus on the
understanding of the issues of urban space and the possibilities of its transformation. Papers
will be assigned on precise subjects.
�Sketching
Some analysis will be made on site: sketching will be used as one of many analytical tools.
On site sketching will be geared towards the understanding of key spaces, their compositional
and spatial qualities, and their principal characteristics.
The student will be encouraged to discover what are the principal ways to focus on the
understanding of a spatial composition. The idea of "knowing how to draw" will be explained
and qualified: It is not about the making of "postcard drawings", but rather analytical
sketches that display an understanding, an intellectual comprehension, an analytical vision.
�Photography
Photography can also be used as a tool towards the understanding of urban spaces. It also
involves composition, spatiality, and urban understanding, as well as another "eye" into the
city. The use of photography will be used as another tool for analysis, and perhaps projectual
ideas.
CLASS THEMES AND CURRICULUM
� The Plan. Analysis / Comparison: New York- Paris. Grids, Blocks, Measures.
The New York grid and the plan of Paris will be looked at with a focus on comparative
analysis: the Manhattan block and the Haussmanian counterpart, will generate an analysis
with direct bearings on Zoning, Local Codes, light and air, proportions and geometry.
� Urban Projects in Paris: visionary projects of the 19th and 20th Century.
Examples of visionary urban projects in Paris will be studied. From LeCorbusier's Plan
Voisin and its invention of an entire city in direct relationship with a typical unit, to the
Boulevard a Redents, Mallet Stevens Alley of the Champs Elysees, Paris is also the terrain for
Utopia, urban vision and social models. Utopia becomes the source for social imagination and
its proposition into an urban/ architectural proposition.
Texts from Walter Benjamin will be analyzed in class.
� Gardens and Parks
From the typical Haussmanian Parc des Buttes Chaumont, to the Parc de la Villette, the Parc
System offers a vision of composition and organization of relationships between urban spaces
and social needs, based on a plastic resolution of the idea of leisure in the city, and its direct
impact on architectural space.
"The development of the art of garden bears witness to the development of technology", the
idea of machine and nature offers a new vision in the making of spatial relationships.
Visits will be organized, and comparisons will be studied.
� Invention in Social Housing
What is the system of Zoning Districts like a "ZAC", Zone d'Amenagement Concertee. How is
it possible to regulate neighborhoods, qualify them with public programs and enhance their
urban qualities with the redefinition of Housing, the redefinition of an entire public domain.
Visits: Zac de Bercy, Surroundings of the "Tres Grande Bibliotheque", Zac Citroen.
� Defintions and examples of "Decentralization"
The phenomenon of decentralization, by restoring political autonomy to Local Regions and
their Government has favored a displacement of political center while being able of
generating local interventions and possible redefinition of spatial/ urban goals. Secondary
cities behaved like capitols, new centers, refocusing the energy on rehabilitation of new city
centers.
A visit of Euralille will be organized, and the urban space will be compared to Paris and
other French examples.
� Borders
The Borders of the city have been through history in constant redefinition and
transformation. We will examine the urban qualities of the urban territory between the
Petite Ceinture and the Peripherique: territory for the realization of public programs, schools,
day cares, sports and youth centers, as well as parks.
The borders continue to grow, and the definition of the "Grand Paris" reaches the suburbs
� The Territory of the Suburbs.
The suburbs offer a different urban landscape, another vision of the making of cities. Can a
city be made as a whole from a fictitious beginning where social standards are defined as a
starting proposition. What are the results where cars and other transportation networks
offer new accesses and new borders. A visit of Marne-la-Vallee and Gergy Pontoise with a
lecture by an invited urban planner will be organized.
Building New York
Professor : Mr. Dolkart
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to familiarize students with the history of the major building types
that comprise the physical fabric of New York City. We will use the development of building
types as a basis for looking at various New York neighborhoods and the ways in which they
have developed and changed.
We will discuss the physical and stylistic evolution of these building types and, through
walking tours in various New York neighborhoods, we will examine how these buildings work
within the evolving form of the city and its neighborhoods. Among other types of buildings,
we will study the development of residential architecture, particularly row houses,
townhouses, and multiple dwellings; the changing nature of commercial architecture from
modest low rise structures to great skyscrapers; and the evolution of public and institutional
architecture from the small buildings of the early city to some of the great architectural
complexes of America. We will also discuss contemporary issues in design, planning and
preservation as we discover the city.
Lectures and Tours
� Introduction: Development of New York. Row house architecture and the creation of
residential neighborhoods
� Brooklyn Heights tour
� Tenements and apartment houses in Hew York
� Lower East Side tour visit to Tenement Museum
� Morningside Heights tour
� Carnegie Hill tour
� Public architecture and public infrastructure
� Central Park tour
� Harlem tour
� Commercial Architecture I
� SoHo tour
� Commercial Architecture II
� Midtown tour with visits to Art Deco lobbies and Grand Central Terminal
Syllabus varies each semester. We have also toured Lower Manhattan, East Village, Gramercy
Park, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Chelsea, Theater District, etc. Choice often depends
upon projects in other classes and timely local issues.
Final Project
Each student must choose one square block in New York City and trace its growth,
development, and change from the time that it was initially built up through today. Issues
that you might consider include:
1. When did development begin?
2. What types of building were erected on the block?
3. Who were the architects and builders?
4. What were the original uses of the buildings?
5. How did development on this block relate to development in the surrounding area?
6. Why did this block develop as it did?, when it did?
7. How has the block changed since it was initially developed? Have the buildings
changed?, the uses changed?, the scale changed?, etc.
8. Has the change been for the better or for the worse?
9. Who was responsible for the changes?
10. How have the changes related to changes in the surrounding community?
There are other issues that you might wish to discuss. Those listed above are only
suggestions and you need not necessarily discuss them all. However, you must place your
block in some sort of context within the neighborhood or within the city.
Development of Paris
Professor : Mr. Salomon
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The development of cities is the consequence of multiple factors which include : the adaption
of human settlement to topography, hydrology and environmental features ; the impact of
historical trends and events ; the interplay of political forces and key actors : kings, city
government, municiple administrators, architects and planners, private developers and city
dwellers. But cities are also artifacts which can be described as works of art in terms of
their architecture, their morphology and spatial organization, the physical embodiment of
aesthetic, cultural and artistic values. The course on the Development of Paris will provide
an overview of the 2000 year history of the city seen as a matrix relating the evolutioon of
urban structure and architecture to social, political forces and intellectual history. The
course will be articulated around six major periods developed thematically:
LECTURES
� Gallo-Roman and Medieval period
Topography and origins; The Roman legacy; The mythical city of the Middle Ages ; reading
Victor Hugo; The Organic plan and the tripartite city. Fortifications, walls and containment;
Court and Garden ; the French Hotel; Baroque vs. Classic; The invention of public space; Early
development : the Ile St Louis; Domestic architecture and the private realm as abstract space
� XVI-XVII centuries
The open city; The imaginary city & the French Enlightenment; Urban Design and the forest
metaphor; Private places vs. public servitude; The new "lotissements"; The Turgot and
Verniquet maps
� XVIII century
The First Empire : Napoleon & Paris; Iron work and the Parisian arcade : reading Walter
Benjamin; Baron Haussmann and the invention of modern Paris; Nature and the city : Alphand's
"Les Promenade de Paris"; The Beaux-Arts school; The impact of new urban regulations; World
Exhibitions ; The Eiffel Tower reading Roland Barthe
� XIX century
Paris and the debate on the city; Haussmann vs. Camillo Sitte; Camillo Sitte vs. Le Corbusier;
Le Corbusier vs. Perret; Social Housing : the HBM; Modernism and the City : "l'Ecole de Paris" ;
Le Corbusier - Patout - Mallet Stevens, Chareau et al...; The new programs : mixed use vs.
single use and the development of public amenities.
� XX century up to 1945
1950's and 1960's social housing ; High rise developments ; the XVth, la Defense;
1970's : The new center of Paris: The Pompidou Museum; the Baltard pavilions destruction and
the underground Forum shopping mall; Malraux laws on historic preservation and the Marais
� After 1945
The monarchic heritage : the Grands Projets : IMA - LeLouvre etc...
New urban architecture planning and social housing : case studies : Parc de la Villette and Cite
de la Musique; Parc Andre Citroen, ZAC Seine-Rive-Gauche and the Bibliotheque Francois
Mitterand; ZAC de Reuilly; the Foundation Cartier; future trends
WALKS
6 walks and visits are planned both to illustrate each lecture and provide a cross section of
development within selcected areas of the city.
READINGS
-Text book: Anthony Sutcliffe Paris - An Architectural History. Yale University Press 1993
-Readers : books I, II, III including supplements
-Walter Benjamin "Paris, Capital of the XIX Century" in Illuminations.
-Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower
An exercise on observation, with a multi-media presentation by groups of two students, will be assigned for the second week of class
There will be mid-term and final exams based on the content of readings, lectures and walks.
Each student will write an approximately 15 page typed term paper. The subject should be either a thematic topic or a geographic area of the city to investigate across time. Many possibilities will be suggested in class. The paper should include:
-historical reference material such as copioes of old plans and viewess
-contemporary reference material such as slides, photos ad analytical drawings
-proper footnotes and bibliography
History of the American city
Professor : Ms. Wright
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Patterns of American Urban Life & Urban Design
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive "master plans" and banal,
unregulated "growth," of visions and incremental actions. They show the fusion, and often
the confrontation, of broad-based global trends and local particularities; of social change,
economic development, and resistance to those forces�all of which are manifest in patterns
of urban design.
Certain themes recur: the primacy of commercial development; public instituions efforts to
represent unity and progress; ethnic, class, and regional variations; separations between
public and private areas, between rich and poor, between center and periphery. Each of these
tendencies influences both the cultural values and the physical appearance of American cities.
This course will move between the national or global scale of particular cities and groups of
buildings. Against a backdrop of political and social condtions, as well as a larger cultural
milieu, we will focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities;
the role of infrastructure and centrifugal forces; the emergence of new building types, styles,
and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period anmd
contemporary analyses. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each
student�s research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
LECTURE TOPICS
� Introduction: Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the role of region, the distinctiveness of
place, and the pattern of cultural norms.
� Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; European continuities, prototypes, and
experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies; the Puritan "city on a hill";
conformity and social control through formal design; the breakdown of formal and social
control in the 18th century.
� The Emergence of a Civic Culture and an Urban Hierarchy
National Survey Land Ordinance; L'Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's plan
for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; the role of monumental architecture; the
dissemination of the grid, the town square, and the democratic political system; early mill
villages and the model industrial town of Lowell.
� Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the Park system; nature in the city; unity and diverstiy in American park design;
the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan Plan for Washington, D.C. and the
progressives' civic cneters; themes and variations on a type.
� Housing Reform and Residewntial Segregation
Model workers' housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural
profession; the "project" as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public
housing; cultural preferneces versus discriminatory segregation.
� The Evolution of the Suburbs
Residential models for family and community life; stages of suburbanization; building
controls and restrictive covenants; the success of "alternative" models; the dominat role of
transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes.
� The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
Professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of
density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; the design
implications of the automobile ; the slab city and the spread city of the Regional Plan
Association of New York; regulating the free market.
� Commerce as the Basis of Urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street;
Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of "cities-within-cities"; the shopping
center and its expansion as commercial and public space.
� Pragmatic Modernism
Private enterprise and public controls; the International Style and American anti-orthodoxy:
the Siedlung and the tower-in-the-park; model communities of the New Deal; Robert Moses as
Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City and Kahn's Philadelphia.
� Development and Decentralization in the Post-war Era
The Federal Highway Act and the Urban Reneweal Act; luxury apartments and convention
centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and "new humanism" in design; "new towns
in town" and outside; "cleaning up" hisotric districts.
� Fragmentation and Pluralism in the Late 20th Century
Megastructures and grandiose visions; attacks on modernism and the discovery of "context";
neo-traditional urbanism; community design centers and politicized planning; theme parks,
historic districts, and gated communities; the urbanized suburb and the downtown mall;
images and realities of violence.
History of the European City
Professor : Ms. Britton
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
Back to main page
Forward to more class info
Professors: Ms. Willis, Ms. Buttenweiser
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Architecture, Planning and Preservation: New York, the core course for the first session of the
Shape of Two Cities program, introduces students to the professional and theoretical issues
in the three disciplines. The lectures and reading focusing on history, theory, and politics,
accompanied by visits with contemporary practitioners in the three fields, examine the
interplay of forces that have shaped New York's built environment in the past and influence it
today. Specialists from the three fields will lecture in several classroom sessions, and field
trips to professional offices, public hearings, and development projects will expose students
to the dynamics of design, planning, and policy decisions.
Students work in teams to analyze and make recommendations for improving current projects
in New York City. Past classes have, for example, made proposals for the redevelopment of
the Coliseum at Columbus Circle, the rebuilding of historic Stone Street- one of lower
Manhattan's remaining cobbled streets originally laid out by the Dutch, and for solving the
"garbage crisis" once the city's major landfill has closed.
Lectures
� Visit Battery Park City and World Financial Center
� Visit the architectural office of Robert A.M. Stern and Associates
� Visit the offices of the Alliance for Downtown New York
� Preservation as a profession
Guest speaker: Vicki Weiner, Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation
� Visit the offices of the Central Park Conservancy.
� Visit Landmarks Preservation Commission and attend a public hearing on Certificates of
Appropriateness.
� Visit 14th Street Local Development Corporation
Readings
Jacobs, Jane. Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1961
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT 1960
Gutman, Robert. Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Princeton Architectural Press,
1988
Cuff, Dana. Architecture: The Story of Practice, Ch 2 & 4, "Beliefs and Practice," and "The
Making of an Architect"
MacLeod, Mary. "Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era," Assemblage 8, Feb 1989
Gratz, Roberta. The Living City, Epilogue
Costonis, John. Icons and Aliens: Aestetics and Environmental Change. Univ of Illinois, 1989
Cromley, Elizabeth. "Riverside Park and Issues of Preservation," Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 43, October 1984.
Diamondstein, Barbaralee. The Landmarks of New York. Abrams 1988.
Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Vintage, 1974.
Weiss, Marc. "The Politics of Real Estate Cycles"
Wilson, William A. "Moles and Skylarks" in Introduction to Planning History in the United
States, Donald Krueckeberg, ed.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. Oxford, 1978
Architecture, Planning, and Preservation : Paris
Professor : Mr. Quintard Hofstein
COURSE DESCRIPTION
To understand a city, it is mandatory to understand the elements that constitute its physical
context, its social, political and economical aspects, as well as its spatial characteristics.
Similar to the study of New York, it is important to understand the historical layers that have
had a direct bearing on the making of the plan of Paris. The city has evolved according to the
making and the displacement of concentric rings (enceintes), historical and physical layers
that aimed at controlling its political/ physical borders and its growth.
Geography and topography explain one part of the history, whereas the intricate successions
of political regimes focuses on the perpetual redefinition of its boundaries and the
re-qualification of its center.
Similar to the study of New York City, the description and the analysis will refer to those
important discoveries learned before: Poche, solid, void, border, center, perimeter, field,
space, territory, typology. For this as an important tool, and in order to understand the
various components of the making of the city, a parallel will be made with the two books
written by Klaus Herdeg, "Formal Structure in Indian Architecture," and "Formal Structure in
Turkish Architecture." These important works offer a planimetric reading of the solids and
voids of urban pieces, aiming at understanding their plastic integrity, their composition and
their relationship with the city at large.
The city of Paris will also be compared to the city of New York, its social making, its urban
characteristics, and the components of its urban space.
URBAN ANALYSIS
The composition of the Haussmanian block as compared with the typical New York block, the
system of streets, avenues, boulevards and faubourgs, the Parks system, the design of the
19th Century Garden and its poetical vision, the impact of Royal Plazas, all of these subjects
will not be studied as monuments but as active urban, social and spatial entities.
The focus does not stop at Paris proper, but aims at understanding the impact of the Villes
Nouvelles, Satellite Towns at the periphery of the city, the understanding of their urban
strategies, their development of the territory of the suburbs.
CLASS
Class time will be on the basis of lectures, group readings and group analysis of selected
themes, site visits with onsite sketching analysis, slide projection with group discussions
and interventions of guest lecturers.
ASSIGNMENTS
�Papers
Papers will be assigned at the conclusion of general themes, and will focus on the
understanding of the issues of urban space and the possibilities of its transformation. Papers
will be assigned on precise subjects.
�Sketching
Some analysis will be made on site: sketching will be used as one of many analytical tools.
On site sketching will be geared towards the understanding of key spaces, their compositional
and spatial qualities, and their principal characteristics.
The student will be encouraged to discover what are the principal ways to focus on the
understanding of a spatial composition. The idea of "knowing how to draw" will be explained
and qualified: It is not about the making of "postcard drawings", but rather analytical
sketches that display an understanding, an intellectual comprehension, an analytical vision.
�Photography
Photography can also be used as a tool towards the understanding of urban spaces. It also
involves composition, spatiality, and urban understanding, as well as another "eye" into the
city. The use of photography will be used as another tool for analysis, and perhaps projectual
ideas.
CLASS THEMES AND CURRICULUM
� The Plan. Analysis / Comparison: New York- Paris. Grids, Blocks, Measures.
The New York grid and the plan of Paris will be looked at with a focus on comparative
analysis: the Manhattan block and the Haussmanian counterpart, will generate an analysis
with direct bearings on Zoning, Local Codes, light and air, proportions and geometry.
� Urban Projects in Paris: visionary projects of the 19th and 20th Century.
Examples of visionary urban projects in Paris will be studied. From LeCorbusier's Plan
Voisin and its invention of an entire city in direct relationship with a typical unit, to the
Boulevard a Redents, Mallet Stevens Alley of the Champs Elysees, Paris is also the terrain for
Utopia, urban vision and social models. Utopia becomes the source for social imagination and
its proposition into an urban/ architectural proposition.
Texts from Walter Benjamin will be analyzed in class.
� Gardens and Parks
From the typical Haussmanian Parc des Buttes Chaumont, to the Parc de la Villette, the Parc
System offers a vision of composition and organization of relationships between urban spaces
and social needs, based on a plastic resolution of the idea of leisure in the city, and its direct
impact on architectural space.
"The development of the art of garden bears witness to the development of technology", the
idea of machine and nature offers a new vision in the making of spatial relationships.
Visits will be organized, and comparisons will be studied.
� Invention in Social Housing
What is the system of Zoning Districts like a "ZAC", Zone d'Amenagement Concertee. How is
it possible to regulate neighborhoods, qualify them with public programs and enhance their
urban qualities with the redefinition of Housing, the redefinition of an entire public domain.
Visits: Zac de Bercy, Surroundings of the "Tres Grande Bibliotheque", Zac Citroen.
� Defintions and examples of "Decentralization"
The phenomenon of decentralization, by restoring political autonomy to Local Regions and
their Government has favored a displacement of political center while being able of
generating local interventions and possible redefinition of spatial/ urban goals. Secondary
cities behaved like capitols, new centers, refocusing the energy on rehabilitation of new city
centers.
A visit of Euralille will be organized, and the urban space will be compared to Paris and
other French examples.
� Borders
The Borders of the city have been through history in constant redefinition and
transformation. We will examine the urban qualities of the urban territory between the
Petite Ceinture and the Peripherique: territory for the realization of public programs, schools,
day cares, sports and youth centers, as well as parks.
The borders continue to grow, and the definition of the "Grand Paris" reaches the suburbs
� The Territory of the Suburbs.
The suburbs offer a different urban landscape, another vision of the making of cities. Can a
city be made as a whole from a fictitious beginning where social standards are defined as a
starting proposition. What are the results where cars and other transportation networks
offer new accesses and new borders. A visit of Marne-la-Vallee and Gergy Pontoise with a
lecture by an invited urban planner will be organized.
Building New York
Professor : Mr. Dolkart
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to familiarize students with the history of the major building types
that comprise the physical fabric of New York City. We will use the development of building
types as a basis for looking at various New York neighborhoods and the ways in which they
have developed and changed.
We will discuss the physical and stylistic evolution of these building types and, through
walking tours in various New York neighborhoods, we will examine how these buildings work
within the evolving form of the city and its neighborhoods. Among other types of buildings,
we will study the development of residential architecture, particularly row houses,
townhouses, and multiple dwellings; the changing nature of commercial architecture from
modest low rise structures to great skyscrapers; and the evolution of public and institutional
architecture from the small buildings of the early city to some of the great architectural
complexes of America. We will also discuss contemporary issues in design, planning and
preservation as we discover the city.
Lectures and Tours
� Introduction: Development of New York. Row house architecture and the creation of
residential neighborhoods
� Brooklyn Heights tour
� Tenements and apartment houses in Hew York
� Lower East Side tour visit to Tenement Museum
� Morningside Heights tour
� Carnegie Hill tour
� Public architecture and public infrastructure
� Central Park tour
� Harlem tour
� Commercial Architecture I
� SoHo tour
� Commercial Architecture II
� Midtown tour with visits to Art Deco lobbies and Grand Central Terminal
Syllabus varies each semester. We have also toured Lower Manhattan, East Village, Gramercy
Park, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Chelsea, Theater District, etc. Choice often depends
upon projects in other classes and timely local issues.
Final Project
Each student must choose one square block in New York City and trace its growth,
development, and change from the time that it was initially built up through today. Issues
that you might consider include:
1. When did development begin?
2. What types of building were erected on the block?
3. Who were the architects and builders?
4. What were the original uses of the buildings?
5. How did development on this block relate to development in the surrounding area?
6. Why did this block develop as it did?, when it did?
7. How has the block changed since it was initially developed? Have the buildings
changed?, the uses changed?, the scale changed?, etc.
8. Has the change been for the better or for the worse?
9. Who was responsible for the changes?
10. How have the changes related to changes in the surrounding community?
There are other issues that you might wish to discuss. Those listed above are only
suggestions and you need not necessarily discuss them all. However, you must place your
block in some sort of context within the neighborhood or within the city.
Development of Paris
Professor : Mr. Salomon
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The development of cities is the consequence of multiple factors which include : the adaption
of human settlement to topography, hydrology and environmental features ; the impact of
historical trends and events ; the interplay of political forces and key actors : kings, city
government, municiple administrators, architects and planners, private developers and city
dwellers. But cities are also artifacts which can be described as works of art in terms of
their architecture, their morphology and spatial organization, the physical embodiment of
aesthetic, cultural and artistic values. The course on the Development of Paris will provide
an overview of the 2000 year history of the city seen as a matrix relating the evolutioon of
urban structure and architecture to social, political forces and intellectual history. The
course will be articulated around six major periods developed thematically:
LECTURES
� Gallo-Roman and Medieval period
Topography and origins; The Roman legacy; The mythical city of the Middle Ages ; reading
Victor Hugo; The Organic plan and the tripartite city. Fortifications, walls and containment;
Court and Garden ; the French Hotel; Baroque vs. Classic; The invention of public space; Early
development : the Ile St Louis; Domestic architecture and the private realm as abstract space
� XVI-XVII centuries
The open city; The imaginary city & the French Enlightenment; Urban Design and the forest
metaphor; Private places vs. public servitude; The new "lotissements"; The Turgot and
Verniquet maps
� XVIII century
The First Empire : Napoleon & Paris; Iron work and the Parisian arcade : reading Walter
Benjamin; Baron Haussmann and the invention of modern Paris; Nature and the city : Alphand's
"Les Promenade de Paris"; The Beaux-Arts school; The impact of new urban regulations; World
Exhibitions ; The Eiffel Tower reading Roland Barthe
� XIX century
Paris and the debate on the city; Haussmann vs. Camillo Sitte; Camillo Sitte vs. Le Corbusier;
Le Corbusier vs. Perret; Social Housing : the HBM; Modernism and the City : "l'Ecole de Paris" ;
Le Corbusier - Patout - Mallet Stevens, Chareau et al...; The new programs : mixed use vs.
single use and the development of public amenities.
� XX century up to 1945
1950's and 1960's social housing ; High rise developments ; the XVth, la Defense;
1970's : The new center of Paris: The Pompidou Museum; the Baltard pavilions destruction and
the underground Forum shopping mall; Malraux laws on historic preservation and the Marais
� After 1945
The monarchic heritage : the Grands Projets : IMA - LeLouvre etc...
New urban architecture planning and social housing : case studies : Parc de la Villette and Cite
de la Musique; Parc Andre Citroen, ZAC Seine-Rive-Gauche and the Bibliotheque Francois
Mitterand; ZAC de Reuilly; the Foundation Cartier; future trends
WALKS
6 walks and visits are planned both to illustrate each lecture and provide a cross section of
development within selcected areas of the city.
READINGS
-Text book: Anthony Sutcliffe Paris - An Architectural History. Yale University Press 1993
-Readers : books I, II, III including supplements
-Walter Benjamin "Paris, Capital of the XIX Century" in Illuminations.
-Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower
An exercise on observation, with a multi-media presentation by groups of two students, will be assigned for the second week of class
There will be mid-term and final exams based on the content of readings, lectures and walks.
Each student will write an approximately 15 page typed term paper. The subject should be either a thematic topic or a geographic area of the city to investigate across time. Many possibilities will be suggested in class. The paper should include:
-historical reference material such as copioes of old plans and viewess
-contemporary reference material such as slides, photos ad analytical drawings
-proper footnotes and bibliography
History of the American city
Professor : Ms. Wright
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Patterns of American Urban Life & Urban Design
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive "master plans" and banal,
unregulated "growth," of visions and incremental actions. They show the fusion, and often
the confrontation, of broad-based global trends and local particularities; of social change,
economic development, and resistance to those forces�all of which are manifest in patterns
of urban design.
Certain themes recur: the primacy of commercial development; public instituions efforts to
represent unity and progress; ethnic, class, and regional variations; separations between
public and private areas, between rich and poor, between center and periphery. Each of these
tendencies influences both the cultural values and the physical appearance of American cities.
This course will move between the national or global scale of particular cities and groups of
buildings. Against a backdrop of political and social condtions, as well as a larger cultural
milieu, we will focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities;
the role of infrastructure and centrifugal forces; the emergence of new building types, styles,
and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period anmd
contemporary analyses. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each
student�s research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
LECTURE TOPICS
� Introduction: Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the role of region, the distinctiveness of
place, and the pattern of cultural norms.
� Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; European continuities, prototypes, and
experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies; the Puritan "city on a hill";
conformity and social control through formal design; the breakdown of formal and social
control in the 18th century.
� The Emergence of a Civic Culture and an Urban Hierarchy
National Survey Land Ordinance; L'Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's plan
for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; the role of monumental architecture; the
dissemination of the grid, the town square, and the democratic political system; early mill
villages and the model industrial town of Lowell.
� Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the Park system; nature in the city; unity and diverstiy in American park design;
the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan Plan for Washington, D.C. and the
progressives' civic cneters; themes and variations on a type.
� Housing Reform and Residewntial Segregation
Model workers' housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural
profession; the "project" as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public
housing; cultural preferneces versus discriminatory segregation.
� The Evolution of the Suburbs
Residential models for family and community life; stages of suburbanization; building
controls and restrictive covenants; the success of "alternative" models; the dominat role of
transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes.
� The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
Professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of
density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; the design
implications of the automobile ; the slab city and the spread city of the Regional Plan
Association of New York; regulating the free market.
� Commerce as the Basis of Urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street;
Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of "cities-within-cities"; the shopping
center and its expansion as commercial and public space.
� Pragmatic Modernism
Private enterprise and public controls; the International Style and American anti-orthodoxy:
the Siedlung and the tower-in-the-park; model communities of the New Deal; Robert Moses as
Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City and Kahn's Philadelphia.
� Development and Decentralization in the Post-war Era
The Federal Highway Act and the Urban Reneweal Act; luxury apartments and convention
centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and "new humanism" in design; "new towns
in town" and outside; "cleaning up" hisotric districts.
� Fragmentation and Pluralism in the Late 20th Century
Megastructures and grandiose visions; attacks on modernism and the discovery of "context";
neo-traditional urbanism; community design centers and politicized planning; theme parks,
historic districts, and gated communities; the urbanized suburb and the downtown mall;
images and realities of violence.
History of the European City
Professor : Ms. Britton
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
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Forward to more class info
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Architecture, Planning and Preservation: New York, the core course for the first session of the
Shape of Two Cities program, introduces students to the professional and theoretical issues
in the three disciplines. The lectures and reading focusing on history, theory, and politics,
accompanied by visits with contemporary practitioners in the three fields, examine the
interplay of forces that have shaped New York's built environment in the past and influence it
today. Specialists from the three fields will lecture in several classroom sessions, and field
trips to professional offices, public hearings, and development projects will expose students
to the dynamics of design, planning, and policy decisions.
Students work in teams to analyze and make recommendations for improving current projects
in New York City. Past classes have, for example, made proposals for the redevelopment of
the Coliseum at Columbus Circle, the rebuilding of historic Stone Street- one of lower
Manhattan's remaining cobbled streets originally laid out by the Dutch, and for solving the
"garbage crisis" once the city's major landfill has closed.
Lectures
� Visit Battery Park City and World Financial Center
� Visit the architectural office of Robert A.M. Stern and Associates
� Visit the offices of the Alliance for Downtown New York
� Preservation as a profession
Guest speaker: Vicki Weiner, Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation
� Visit the offices of the Central Park Conservancy.
� Visit Landmarks Preservation Commission and attend a public hearing on Certificates of
Appropriateness.
� Visit 14th Street Local Development Corporation
Readings
Jacobs, Jane. Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1961
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT 1960
Gutman, Robert. Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Princeton Architectural Press,
1988
Cuff, Dana. Architecture: The Story of Practice, Ch 2 & 4, "Beliefs and Practice," and "The
Making of an Architect"
MacLeod, Mary. "Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era," Assemblage 8, Feb 1989
Gratz, Roberta. The Living City, Epilogue
Costonis, John. Icons and Aliens: Aestetics and Environmental Change. Univ of Illinois, 1989
Cromley, Elizabeth. "Riverside Park and Issues of Preservation," Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 43, October 1984.
Diamondstein, Barbaralee. The Landmarks of New York. Abrams 1988.
Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Vintage, 1974.
Weiss, Marc. "The Politics of Real Estate Cycles"
Wilson, William A. "Moles and Skylarks" in Introduction to Planning History in the United
States, Donald Krueckeberg, ed.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. Oxford, 1978
Lectures
� Visit Battery Park City and World Financial Center
� Visit the architectural office of Robert A.M. Stern and Associates
� Visit the offices of the Alliance for Downtown New York
� Preservation as a profession
Guest speaker: Vicki Weiner, Greenwich Village Society
for Historic Preservation
� Visit the offices of the Central Park Conservancy.
� Visit Landmarks Preservation Commission and attend a public hearing on Certificates of
Appropriateness.
� Visit 14th Street Local Development Corporation
Readings
Jacobs, Jane. Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1961
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT 1960
Gutman, Robert. Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Princeton Architectural Press,
1988
Cuff, Dana. Architecture: The Story of Practice, Ch 2 & 4, "Beliefs and Practice," and "The
Making of an Architect"
MacLeod, Mary. "Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era," Assemblage 8, Feb 1989
Gratz, Roberta. The Living City, Epilogue
Costonis, John. Icons and Aliens: Aestetics and Environmental Change. Univ of Illinois, 1989
Cromley, Elizabeth. "Riverside Park and Issues of Preservation," Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 43, October 1984.
Diamondstein, Barbaralee. The Landmarks of New York. Abrams 1988.
Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Vintage, 1974.
Weiss, Marc. "The Politics of Real Estate Cycles"
Wilson, William A. "Moles and Skylarks" in Introduction to Planning History in the United
States, Donald Krueckeberg, ed.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. Oxford, 1978
Readings
Jacobs, Jane. Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage, 1961
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. MIT 1960
Gutman, Robert. Architectural Practice: A Critical View. Princeton Architectural Press,
1988
Cuff, Dana. Architecture: The Story of Practice, Ch 2 & 4, "Beliefs and Practice," and "The
Making of an Architect"
MacLeod, Mary. "Architecture and Politics in the Reagan Era," Assemblage 8, Feb 1989
Gratz, Roberta. The Living City, Epilogue
Costonis, John. Icons and Aliens: Aestetics and Environmental Change. Univ of Illinois, 1989
Cromley, Elizabeth. "Riverside Park and Issues of Preservation," Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 43, October 1984.
Diamondstein, Barbaralee. The Landmarks of New York. Abrams 1988.
Caro, Robert. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Vintage, 1974.
Weiss, Marc. "The Politics of Real Estate Cycles"
Wilson, William A. "Moles and Skylarks" in Introduction to Planning History in the United
States, Donald Krueckeberg, ed.
Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. Oxford, 1978
Professor : Mr. Quintard Hofstein
COURSE DESCRIPTION
To understand a city, it is mandatory to understand the elements that constitute its physical
context, its social, political and economical aspects, as well as its spatial characteristics.
Similar to the study of New York, it is important to understand the historical layers that have
had a direct bearing on the making of the plan of Paris. The city has evolved according to the
making and the displacement of concentric rings (enceintes), historical and physical layers
that aimed at controlling its political/ physical borders and its growth.
Geography and topography explain one part of the history, whereas the intricate successions
of political regimes focuses on the perpetual redefinition of its boundaries and the
re-qualification of its center.
Similar to the study of New York City, the description and the analysis will refer to those
important discoveries learned before: Poche, solid, void, border, center, perimeter, field,
space, territory, typology. For this as an important tool, and in order to understand the
various components of the making of the city, a parallel will be made with the two books
written by Klaus Herdeg, "Formal Structure in Indian Architecture," and "Formal Structure in
Turkish Architecture." These important works offer a planimetric reading of the solids and
voids of urban pieces, aiming at understanding their plastic integrity, their composition and
their relationship with the city at large.
The city of Paris will also be compared to the city of New York, its social making, its urban
characteristics, and the components of its urban space.
URBAN ANALYSIS
The composition of the Haussmanian block as compared with the typical New York block, the
system of streets, avenues, boulevards and faubourgs, the Parks system, the design of the
19th Century Garden and its poetical vision, the impact of Royal Plazas, all of these subjects
will not be studied as monuments but as active urban, social and spatial entities.
The focus does not stop at Paris proper, but aims at understanding the impact of the Villes
Nouvelles, Satellite Towns at the periphery of the city, the understanding of their urban
strategies, their development of the territory of the suburbs.
CLASS
Class time will be on the basis of lectures, group readings and group analysis of selected
themes, site visits with onsite sketching analysis, slide projection with group discussions
and interventions of guest lecturers.
ASSIGNMENTS
�Papers
Papers will be assigned at the conclusion of general themes, and will focus on the
understanding of the issues of urban space and the possibilities of its transformation. Papers
will be assigned on precise subjects.
�Sketching
Some analysis will be made on site: sketching will be used as one of many analytical tools.
On site sketching will be geared towards the understanding of key spaces, their compositional
and spatial qualities, and their principal characteristics.
The student will be encouraged to discover what are the principal ways to focus on the
understanding of a spatial composition. The idea of "knowing how to draw" will be explained
and qualified: It is not about the making of "postcard drawings", but rather analytical
sketches that display an understanding, an intellectual comprehension, an analytical vision.
�Photography
Photography can also be used as a tool towards the understanding of urban spaces. It also
involves composition, spatiality, and urban understanding, as well as another "eye" into the
city. The use of photography will be used as another tool for analysis, and perhaps projectual
ideas.
CLASS THEMES AND CURRICULUM
� The Plan. Analysis / Comparison: New York- Paris. Grids, Blocks, Measures.
The New York grid and the plan of Paris will be looked at with a focus on comparative
analysis: the Manhattan block and the Haussmanian counterpart, will generate an analysis
with direct bearings on Zoning, Local Codes, light and air, proportions and geometry.
� Urban Projects in Paris: visionary projects of the 19th and 20th Century.
Examples of visionary urban projects in Paris will be studied. From LeCorbusier's Plan
Voisin and its invention of an entire city in direct relationship with a typical unit, to the
Boulevard a Redents, Mallet Stevens Alley of the Champs Elysees, Paris is also the terrain for
Utopia, urban vision and social models. Utopia becomes the source for social imagination and
its proposition into an urban/ architectural proposition.
Texts from Walter Benjamin will be analyzed in class.
� Gardens and Parks
From the typical Haussmanian Parc des Buttes Chaumont, to the Parc de la Villette, the Parc
System offers a vision of composition and organization of relationships between urban spaces
and social needs, based on a plastic resolution of the idea of leisure in the city, and its direct
impact on architectural space.
"The development of the art of garden bears witness to the development of technology", the
idea of machine and nature offers a new vision in the making of spatial relationships.
Visits will be organized, and comparisons will be studied.
� Invention in Social Housing
What is the system of Zoning Districts like a "ZAC", Zone d'Amenagement Concertee. How is
it possible to regulate neighborhoods, qualify them with public programs and enhance their
urban qualities with the redefinition of Housing, the redefinition of an entire public domain.
Visits: Zac de Bercy, Surroundings of the "Tres Grande Bibliotheque", Zac Citroen.
� Defintions and examples of "Decentralization"
The phenomenon of decentralization, by restoring political autonomy to Local Regions and
their Government has favored a displacement of political center while being able of
generating local interventions and possible redefinition of spatial/ urban goals. Secondary
cities behaved like capitols, new centers, refocusing the energy on rehabilitation of new city
centers.
A visit of Euralille will be organized, and the urban space will be compared to Paris and
other French examples.
� Borders
The Borders of the city have been through history in constant redefinition and
transformation. We will examine the urban qualities of the urban territory between the
Petite Ceinture and the Peripherique: territory for the realization of public programs, schools,
day cares, sports and youth centers, as well as parks.
The borders continue to grow, and the definition of the "Grand Paris" reaches the suburbs
� The Territory of the Suburbs.
The suburbs offer a different urban landscape, another vision of the making of cities. Can a
city be made as a whole from a fictitious beginning where social standards are defined as a
starting proposition. What are the results where cars and other transportation networks
offer new accesses and new borders. A visit of Marne-la-Vallee and Gergy Pontoise with a
lecture by an invited urban planner will be organized.
Building New York
Professor : Mr. Dolkart
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to familiarize students with the history of the major building types
that comprise the physical fabric of New York City. We will use the development of building
types as a basis for looking at various New York neighborhoods and the ways in which they
have developed and changed.
We will discuss the physical and stylistic evolution of these building types and, through
walking tours in various New York neighborhoods, we will examine how these buildings work
within the evolving form of the city and its neighborhoods. Among other types of buildings,
we will study the development of residential architecture, particularly row houses,
townhouses, and multiple dwellings; the changing nature of commercial architecture from
modest low rise structures to great skyscrapers; and the evolution of public and institutional
architecture from the small buildings of the early city to some of the great architectural
complexes of America. We will also discuss contemporary issues in design, planning and
preservation as we discover the city.
Lectures and Tours
� Introduction: Development of New York. Row house architecture and the creation of
residential neighborhoods
� Brooklyn Heights tour
� Tenements and apartment houses in Hew York
� Lower East Side tour visit to Tenement Museum
� Morningside Heights tour
� Carnegie Hill tour
� Public architecture and public infrastructure
� Central Park tour
� Harlem tour
� Commercial Architecture I
� SoHo tour
� Commercial Architecture II
� Midtown tour with visits to Art Deco lobbies and Grand Central Terminal
Syllabus varies each semester. We have also toured Lower Manhattan, East Village, Gramercy
Park, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Chelsea, Theater District, etc. Choice often depends
upon projects in other classes and timely local issues.
Final Project
Each student must choose one square block in New York City and trace its growth,
development, and change from the time that it was initially built up through today. Issues
that you might consider include:
1. When did development begin?
2. What types of building were erected on the block?
3. Who were the architects and builders?
4. What were the original uses of the buildings?
5. How did development on this block relate to development in the surrounding area?
6. Why did this block develop as it did?, when it did?
7. How has the block changed since it was initially developed? Have the buildings
changed?, the uses changed?, the scale changed?, etc.
8. Has the change been for the better or for the worse?
9. Who was responsible for the changes?
10. How have the changes related to changes in the surrounding community?
There are other issues that you might wish to discuss. Those listed above are only
suggestions and you need not necessarily discuss them all. However, you must place your
block in some sort of context within the neighborhood or within the city.
Development of Paris
Professor : Mr. Salomon
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The development of cities is the consequence of multiple factors which include : the adaption
of human settlement to topography, hydrology and environmental features ; the impact of
historical trends and events ; the interplay of political forces and key actors : kings, city
government, municiple administrators, architects and planners, private developers and city
dwellers. But cities are also artifacts which can be described as works of art in terms of
their architecture, their morphology and spatial organization, the physical embodiment of
aesthetic, cultural and artistic values. The course on the Development of Paris will provide
an overview of the 2000 year history of the city seen as a matrix relating the evolutioon of
urban structure and architecture to social, political forces and intellectual history. The
course will be articulated around six major periods developed thematically:
LECTURES
� Gallo-Roman and Medieval period
Topography and origins; The Roman legacy; The mythical city of the Middle Ages ; reading
Victor Hugo; The Organic plan and the tripartite city. Fortifications, walls and containment;
Court and Garden ; the French Hotel; Baroque vs. Classic; The invention of public space; Early
development : the Ile St Louis; Domestic architecture and the private realm as abstract space
� XVI-XVII centuries
The open city; The imaginary city & the French Enlightenment; Urban Design and the forest
metaphor; Private places vs. public servitude; The new "lotissements"; The Turgot and
Verniquet maps
� XVIII century
The First Empire : Napoleon & Paris; Iron work and the Parisian arcade : reading Walter
Benjamin; Baron Haussmann and the invention of modern Paris; Nature and the city : Alphand's
"Les Promenade de Paris"; The Beaux-Arts school; The impact of new urban regulations; World
Exhibitions ; The Eiffel Tower reading Roland Barthe
� XIX century
Paris and the debate on the city; Haussmann vs. Camillo Sitte; Camillo Sitte vs. Le Corbusier;
Le Corbusier vs. Perret; Social Housing : the HBM; Modernism and the City : "l'Ecole de Paris" ;
Le Corbusier - Patout - Mallet Stevens, Chareau et al...; The new programs : mixed use vs.
single use and the development of public amenities.
� XX century up to 1945
1950's and 1960's social housing ; High rise developments ; the XVth, la Defense;
1970's : The new center of Paris: The Pompidou Museum; the Baltard pavilions destruction and
the underground Forum shopping mall; Malraux laws on historic preservation and the Marais
� After 1945
The monarchic heritage : the Grands Projets : IMA - LeLouvre etc...
New urban architecture planning and social housing : case studies : Parc de la Villette and Cite
de la Musique; Parc Andre Citroen, ZAC Seine-Rive-Gauche and the Bibliotheque Francois
Mitterand; ZAC de Reuilly; the Foundation Cartier; future trends
WALKS
6 walks and visits are planned both to illustrate each lecture and provide a cross section of
development within selcected areas of the city.
READINGS
-Text book: Anthony Sutcliffe Paris - An Architectural History. Yale University Press 1993
-Readers : books I, II, III including supplements
-Walter Benjamin "Paris, Capital of the XIX Century" in Illuminations.
-Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower
An exercise on observation, with a multi-media presentation by groups of two students, will be assigned for the second week of class
There will be mid-term and final exams based on the content of readings, lectures and walks.
Each student will write an approximately 15 page typed term paper. The subject should be either a thematic topic or a geographic area of the city to investigate across time. Many possibilities will be suggested in class. The paper should include:
-historical reference material such as copioes of old plans and viewess
-contemporary reference material such as slides, photos ad analytical drawings
-proper footnotes and bibliography
History of the American city
Professor : Ms. Wright
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Patterns of American Urban Life & Urban Design
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive "master plans" and banal,
unregulated "growth," of visions and incremental actions. They show the fusion, and often
the confrontation, of broad-based global trends and local particularities; of social change,
economic development, and resistance to those forces�all of which are manifest in patterns
of urban design.
Certain themes recur: the primacy of commercial development; public instituions efforts to
represent unity and progress; ethnic, class, and regional variations; separations between
public and private areas, between rich and poor, between center and periphery. Each of these
tendencies influences both the cultural values and the physical appearance of American cities.
This course will move between the national or global scale of particular cities and groups of
buildings. Against a backdrop of political and social condtions, as well as a larger cultural
milieu, we will focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities;
the role of infrastructure and centrifugal forces; the emergence of new building types, styles,
and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period anmd
contemporary analyses. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each
student�s research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
LECTURE TOPICS
� Introduction: Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the role of region, the distinctiveness of
place, and the pattern of cultural norms.
� Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; European continuities, prototypes, and
experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies; the Puritan "city on a hill";
conformity and social control through formal design; the breakdown of formal and social
control in the 18th century.
� The Emergence of a Civic Culture and an Urban Hierarchy
National Survey Land Ordinance; L'Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's plan
for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; the role of monumental architecture; the
dissemination of the grid, the town square, and the democratic political system; early mill
villages and the model industrial town of Lowell.
� Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the Park system; nature in the city; unity and diverstiy in American park design;
the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan Plan for Washington, D.C. and the
progressives' civic cneters; themes and variations on a type.
� Housing Reform and Residewntial Segregation
Model workers' housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural
profession; the "project" as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public
housing; cultural preferneces versus discriminatory segregation.
� The Evolution of the Suburbs
Residential models for family and community life; stages of suburbanization; building
controls and restrictive covenants; the success of "alternative" models; the dominat role of
transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes.
� The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
Professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of
density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; the design
implications of the automobile ; the slab city and the spread city of the Regional Plan
Association of New York; regulating the free market.
� Commerce as the Basis of Urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street;
Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of "cities-within-cities"; the shopping
center and its expansion as commercial and public space.
� Pragmatic Modernism
Private enterprise and public controls; the International Style and American anti-orthodoxy:
the Siedlung and the tower-in-the-park; model communities of the New Deal; Robert Moses as
Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City and Kahn's Philadelphia.
� Development and Decentralization in the Post-war Era
The Federal Highway Act and the Urban Reneweal Act; luxury apartments and convention
centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and "new humanism" in design; "new towns
in town" and outside; "cleaning up" hisotric districts.
� Fragmentation and Pluralism in the Late 20th Century
Megastructures and grandiose visions; attacks on modernism and the discovery of "context";
neo-traditional urbanism; community design centers and politicized planning; theme parks,
historic districts, and gated communities; the urbanized suburb and the downtown mall;
images and realities of violence.
History of the European City
Professor : Ms. Britton
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
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Forward to more class info
COURSE DESCRIPTION
To understand a city, it is mandatory to understand the elements that constitute its physical
context, its social, political and economical aspects, as well as its spatial characteristics.
Similar to the study of New York, it is important to understand the historical layers that have
had a direct bearing on the making of the plan of Paris. The city has evolved according to the
making and the displacement of concentric rings (enceintes), historical and physical layers
that aimed at controlling its political/ physical borders and its growth.
Geography and topography explain one part of the history, whereas the intricate successions
of political regimes focuses on the perpetual redefinition of its boundaries and the
re-qualification of its center.
Similar to the study of New York City, the description and the analysis will refer to those
important discoveries learned before: Poche, solid, void, border, center, perimeter, field,
space, territory, typology. For this as an important tool, and in order to understand the
various components of the making of the city, a parallel will be made with the two books
written by Klaus Herdeg, "Formal Structure in Indian Architecture," and "Formal Structure in
Turkish Architecture." These important works offer a planimetric reading of the solids and
voids of urban pieces, aiming at understanding their plastic integrity, their composition and
their relationship with the city at large.
The city of Paris will also be compared to the city of New York, its social making, its urban
characteristics, and the components of its urban space.
URBAN ANALYSIS
The composition of the Haussmanian block as compared with the typical New York block, the
system of streets, avenues, boulevards and faubourgs, the Parks system, the design of the
19th Century Garden and its poetical vision, the impact of Royal Plazas, all of these subjects
will not be studied as monuments but as active urban, social and spatial entities.
The focus does not stop at Paris proper, but aims at understanding the impact of the Villes
Nouvelles, Satellite Towns at the periphery of the city, the understanding of their urban
strategies, their development of the territory of the suburbs.
CLASS
Class time will be on the basis of lectures, group readings and group analysis of selected
themes, site visits with onsite sketching analysis, slide projection with group discussions
and interventions of guest lecturers.
ASSIGNMENTS
�Papers
Papers will be assigned at the conclusion of general themes, and will focus on the
understanding of the issues of urban space and the possibilities of its transformation. Papers
will be assigned on precise subjects.
�Sketching
Some analysis will be made on site: sketching will be used as one of many analytical tools.
On site sketching will be geared towards the understanding of key spaces, their compositional
and spatial qualities, and their principal characteristics.
The student will be encouraged to discover what are the principal ways to focus on the
understanding of a spatial composition. The idea of "knowing how to draw" will be explained
and qualified: It is not about the making of "postcard drawings", but rather analytical
sketches that display an understanding, an intellectual comprehension, an analytical vision.
�Photography
Photography can also be used as a tool towards the understanding of urban spaces. It also
involves composition, spatiality, and urban understanding, as well as another "eye" into the
city. The use of photography will be used as another tool for analysis, and perhaps projectual
ideas.
CLASS THEMES AND CURRICULUM
� The Plan. Analysis / Comparison: New York- Paris. Grids, Blocks, Measures.
The New York grid and the plan of Paris will be looked at with a focus on comparative
analysis: the Manhattan block and the Haussmanian counterpart, will generate an analysis
with direct bearings on Zoning, Local Codes, light and air, proportions and geometry.
� Urban Projects in Paris: visionary projects of the 19th and 20th Century.
Examples of visionary urban projects in Paris will be studied. From LeCorbusier's Plan
Voisin and its invention of an entire city in direct relationship with a typical unit, to the
Boulevard a Redents, Mallet Stevens Alley of the Champs Elysees, Paris is also the terrain for
Utopia, urban vision and social models. Utopia becomes the source for social imagination and
its proposition into an urban/ architectural proposition.
Texts from Walter Benjamin will be analyzed in class.
� Gardens and Parks
From the typical Haussmanian Parc des Buttes Chaumont, to the Parc de la Villette, the Parc
System offers a vision of composition and organization of relationships between urban spaces
and social needs, based on a plastic resolution of the idea of leisure in the city, and its direct
impact on architectural space.
"The development of the art of garden bears witness to the development of technology", the
idea of machine and nature offers a new vision in the making of spatial relationships.
Visits will be organized, and comparisons will be studied.
� Invention in Social Housing
What is the system of Zoning Districts like a "ZAC", Zone d'Amenagement Concertee. How is
it possible to regulate neighborhoods, qualify them with public programs and enhance their
urban qualities with the redefinition of Housing, the redefinition of an entire public domain.
Visits: Zac de Bercy, Surroundings of the "Tres Grande Bibliotheque", Zac Citroen.
� Defintions and examples of "Decentralization"
The phenomenon of decentralization, by restoring political autonomy to Local Regions and
their Government has favored a displacement of political center while being able of
generating local interventions and possible redefinition of spatial/ urban goals. Secondary
cities behaved like capitols, new centers, refocusing the energy on rehabilitation of new city
centers.
A visit of Euralille will be organized, and the urban space will be compared to Paris and
other French examples.
� Borders
The Borders of the city have been through history in constant redefinition and
transformation. We will examine the urban qualities of the urban territory between the
Petite Ceinture and the Peripherique: territory for the realization of public programs, schools,
day cares, sports and youth centers, as well as parks.
The borders continue to grow, and the definition of the "Grand Paris" reaches the suburbs
� The Territory of the Suburbs.
The suburbs offer a different urban landscape, another vision of the making of cities. Can a
city be made as a whole from a fictitious beginning where social standards are defined as a
starting proposition. What are the results where cars and other transportation networks
offer new accesses and new borders. A visit of Marne-la-Vallee and Gergy Pontoise with a
lecture by an invited urban planner will be organized.
CLASS THEMES AND CURRICULUM
� The Plan. Analysis / Comparison: New York- Paris. Grids, Blocks, Measures.
The New York grid and the plan of Paris will be looked at with a focus on comparative
analysis: the Manhattan block and the Haussmanian counterpart, will generate an analysis
with direct bearings on Zoning, Local Codes, light and air, proportions and geometry.
� Urban Projects in Paris: visionary projects of the 19th and 20th Century.
Examples of visionary urban projects in Paris will be studied. From LeCorbusier's Plan
Voisin and its invention of an entire city in direct relationship with a typical unit, to the
Boulevard a Redents, Mallet Stevens Alley of the Champs Elysees, Paris is also the terrain for
Utopia, urban vision and social models. Utopia becomes the source for social imagination and
its proposition into an urban/ architectural proposition.
Texts from Walter Benjamin will be analyzed in class.
� Gardens and Parks
From the typical Haussmanian Parc des Buttes Chaumont, to the Parc de la Villette, the Parc
System offers a vision of composition and organization of relationships between urban spaces
and social needs, based on a plastic resolution of the idea of leisure in the city, and its direct
impact on architectural space.
"The development of the art of garden bears witness to the development of technology", the
idea of machine and nature offers a new vision in the making of spatial relationships.
Visits will be organized, and comparisons will be studied.
� Invention in Social Housing
What is the system of Zoning Districts like a "ZAC", Zone d'Amenagement Concertee. How is
it possible to regulate neighborhoods, qualify them with public programs and enhance their
urban qualities with the redefinition of Housing, the redefinition of an entire public domain.
Visits: Zac de Bercy, Surroundings of the "Tres Grande Bibliotheque", Zac Citroen.
� Defintions and examples of "Decentralization"
The phenomenon of decentralization, by restoring political autonomy to Local Regions and
their Government has favored a displacement of political center while being able of
generating local interventions and possible redefinition of spatial/ urban goals. Secondary
cities behaved like capitols, new centers, refocusing the energy on rehabilitation of new city
centers.
A visit of Euralille will be organized, and the urban space will be compared to Paris and
other French examples.
� Borders
The Borders of the city have been through history in constant redefinition and
transformation. We will examine the urban qualities of the urban territory between the
Petite Ceinture and the Peripherique: territory for the realization of public programs, schools,
day cares, sports and youth centers, as well as parks.
The borders continue to grow, and the definition of the "Grand Paris" reaches the suburbs
� The Territory of the Suburbs.
The suburbs offer a different urban landscape, another vision of the making of cities. Can a
city be made as a whole from a fictitious beginning where social standards are defined as a
starting proposition. What are the results where cars and other transportation networks
offer new accesses and new borders. A visit of Marne-la-Vallee and Gergy Pontoise with a
lecture by an invited urban planner will be organized.
Professor : Mr. Dolkart
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to familiarize students with the history of the major building types
that comprise the physical fabric of New York City. We will use the development of building
types as a basis for looking at various New York neighborhoods and the ways in which they
have developed and changed.
We will discuss the physical and stylistic evolution of these building types and, through
walking tours in various New York neighborhoods, we will examine how these buildings work
within the evolving form of the city and its neighborhoods. Among other types of buildings,
we will study the development of residential architecture, particularly row houses,
townhouses, and multiple dwellings; the changing nature of commercial architecture from
modest low rise structures to great skyscrapers; and the evolution of public and institutional
architecture from the small buildings of the early city to some of the great architectural
complexes of America. We will also discuss contemporary issues in design, planning and
preservation as we discover the city.
Lectures and Tours
� Introduction: Development of New York. Row house architecture and the creation of
residential neighborhoods
� Brooklyn Heights tour
� Tenements and apartment houses in Hew York
� Lower East Side tour visit to Tenement Museum
� Morningside Heights tour
� Carnegie Hill tour
� Public architecture and public infrastructure
� Central Park tour
� Harlem tour
� Commercial Architecture I
� SoHo tour
� Commercial Architecture II
� Midtown tour with visits to Art Deco lobbies and Grand Central Terminal
Syllabus varies each semester. We have also toured Lower Manhattan, East Village, Gramercy
Park, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Chelsea, Theater District, etc. Choice often depends
upon projects in other classes and timely local issues.
Final Project
Each student must choose one square block in New York City and trace its growth,
development, and change from the time that it was initially built up through today. Issues
that you might consider include:
1. When did development begin?
2. What types of building were erected on the block?
3. Who were the architects and builders?
4. What were the original uses of the buildings?
5. How did development on this block relate to development in the surrounding area?
6. Why did this block develop as it did?, when it did?
7. How has the block changed since it was initially developed? Have the buildings
changed?, the uses changed?, the scale changed?, etc.
8. Has the change been for the better or for the worse?
9. Who was responsible for the changes?
10. How have the changes related to changes in the surrounding community?
There are other issues that you might wish to discuss. Those listed above are only
suggestions and you need not necessarily discuss them all. However, you must place your
block in some sort of context within the neighborhood or within the city.
Development of Paris
Professor : Mr. Salomon
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The development of cities is the consequence of multiple factors which include : the adaption
of human settlement to topography, hydrology and environmental features ; the impact of
historical trends and events ; the interplay of political forces and key actors : kings, city
government, municiple administrators, architects and planners, private developers and city
dwellers. But cities are also artifacts which can be described as works of art in terms of
their architecture, their morphology and spatial organization, the physical embodiment of
aesthetic, cultural and artistic values. The course on the Development of Paris will provide
an overview of the 2000 year history of the city seen as a matrix relating the evolutioon of
urban structure and architecture to social, political forces and intellectual history. The
course will be articulated around six major periods developed thematically:
LECTURES
� Gallo-Roman and Medieval period
Topography and origins; The Roman legacy; The mythical city of the Middle Ages ; reading
Victor Hugo; The Organic plan and the tripartite city. Fortifications, walls and containment;
Court and Garden ; the French Hotel; Baroque vs. Classic; The invention of public space; Early
development : the Ile St Louis; Domestic architecture and the private realm as abstract space
� XVI-XVII centuries
The open city; The imaginary city & the French Enlightenment; Urban Design and the forest
metaphor; Private places vs. public servitude; The new "lotissements"; The Turgot and
Verniquet maps
� XVIII century
The First Empire : Napoleon & Paris; Iron work and the Parisian arcade : reading Walter
Benjamin; Baron Haussmann and the invention of modern Paris; Nature and the city : Alphand's
"Les Promenade de Paris"; The Beaux-Arts school; The impact of new urban regulations; World
Exhibitions ; The Eiffel Tower reading Roland Barthe
� XIX century
Paris and the debate on the city; Haussmann vs. Camillo Sitte; Camillo Sitte vs. Le Corbusier;
Le Corbusier vs. Perret; Social Housing : the HBM; Modernism and the City : "l'Ecole de Paris" ;
Le Corbusier - Patout - Mallet Stevens, Chareau et al...; The new programs : mixed use vs.
single use and the development of public amenities.
� XX century up to 1945
1950's and 1960's social housing ; High rise developments ; the XVth, la Defense;
1970's : The new center of Paris: The Pompidou Museum; the Baltard pavilions destruction and
the underground Forum shopping mall; Malraux laws on historic preservation and the Marais
� After 1945
The monarchic heritage : the Grands Projets : IMA - LeLouvre etc...
New urban architecture planning and social housing : case studies : Parc de la Villette and Cite
de la Musique; Parc Andre Citroen, ZAC Seine-Rive-Gauche and the Bibliotheque Francois
Mitterand; ZAC de Reuilly; the Foundation Cartier; future trends
WALKS
6 walks and visits are planned both to illustrate each lecture and provide a cross section of
development within selcected areas of the city.
READINGS
-Text book: Anthony Sutcliffe Paris - An Architectural History. Yale University Press 1993
-Readers : books I, II, III including supplements
-Walter Benjamin "Paris, Capital of the XIX Century" in Illuminations.
-Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower
An exercise on observation, with a multi-media presentation by groups of two students, will be assigned for the second week of class
There will be mid-term and final exams based on the content of readings, lectures and walks.
Each student will write an approximately 15 page typed term paper. The subject should be either a thematic topic or a geographic area of the city to investigate across time. Many possibilities will be suggested in class. The paper should include:
-historical reference material such as copioes of old plans and viewess
-contemporary reference material such as slides, photos ad analytical drawings
-proper footnotes and bibliography
History of the American city
Professor : Ms. Wright
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Patterns of American Urban Life & Urban Design
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive "master plans" and banal,
unregulated "growth," of visions and incremental actions. They show the fusion, and often
the confrontation, of broad-based global trends and local particularities; of social change,
economic development, and resistance to those forces�all of which are manifest in patterns
of urban design.
Certain themes recur: the primacy of commercial development; public instituions efforts to
represent unity and progress; ethnic, class, and regional variations; separations between
public and private areas, between rich and poor, between center and periphery. Each of these
tendencies influences both the cultural values and the physical appearance of American cities.
This course will move between the national or global scale of particular cities and groups of
buildings. Against a backdrop of political and social condtions, as well as a larger cultural
milieu, we will focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities;
the role of infrastructure and centrifugal forces; the emergence of new building types, styles,
and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period anmd
contemporary analyses. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each
student�s research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
LECTURE TOPICS
� Introduction: Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the role of region, the distinctiveness of
place, and the pattern of cultural norms.
� Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; European continuities, prototypes, and
experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies; the Puritan "city on a hill";
conformity and social control through formal design; the breakdown of formal and social
control in the 18th century.
� The Emergence of a Civic Culture and an Urban Hierarchy
National Survey Land Ordinance; L'Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's plan
for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; the role of monumental architecture; the
dissemination of the grid, the town square, and the democratic political system; early mill
villages and the model industrial town of Lowell.
� Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the Park system; nature in the city; unity and diverstiy in American park design;
the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan Plan for Washington, D.C. and the
progressives' civic cneters; themes and variations on a type.
� Housing Reform and Residewntial Segregation
Model workers' housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural
profession; the "project" as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public
housing; cultural preferneces versus discriminatory segregation.
� The Evolution of the Suburbs
Residential models for family and community life; stages of suburbanization; building
controls and restrictive covenants; the success of "alternative" models; the dominat role of
transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes.
� The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
Professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of
density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; the design
implications of the automobile ; the slab city and the spread city of the Regional Plan
Association of New York; regulating the free market.
� Commerce as the Basis of Urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street;
Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of "cities-within-cities"; the shopping
center and its expansion as commercial and public space.
� Pragmatic Modernism
Private enterprise and public controls; the International Style and American anti-orthodoxy:
the Siedlung and the tower-in-the-park; model communities of the New Deal; Robert Moses as
Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City and Kahn's Philadelphia.
� Development and Decentralization in the Post-war Era
The Federal Highway Act and the Urban Reneweal Act; luxury apartments and convention
centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and "new humanism" in design; "new towns
in town" and outside; "cleaning up" hisotric districts.
� Fragmentation and Pluralism in the Late 20th Century
Megastructures and grandiose visions; attacks on modernism and the discovery of "context";
neo-traditional urbanism; community design centers and politicized planning; theme parks,
historic districts, and gated communities; the urbanized suburb and the downtown mall;
images and realities of violence.
History of the European City
Professor : Ms. Britton
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
Back to main page
Forward to more class info
COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is designed to familiarize students with the history of the major building types
that comprise the physical fabric of New York City. We will use the development of building
types as a basis for looking at various New York neighborhoods and the ways in which they
have developed and changed.
We will discuss the physical and stylistic evolution of these building types and, through
walking tours in various New York neighborhoods, we will examine how these buildings work
within the evolving form of the city and its neighborhoods. Among other types of buildings,
we will study the development of residential architecture, particularly row houses,
townhouses, and multiple dwellings; the changing nature of commercial architecture from
modest low rise structures to great skyscrapers; and the evolution of public and institutional
architecture from the small buildings of the early city to some of the great architectural
complexes of America. We will also discuss contemporary issues in design, planning and
preservation as we discover the city.
Lectures and Tours
� Introduction: Development of New York. Row house architecture and the creation of
residential neighborhoods
� Brooklyn Heights tour
� Tenements and apartment houses in Hew York
� Lower East Side tour visit to Tenement Museum
� Morningside Heights tour
� Carnegie Hill tour
� Public architecture and public infrastructure
� Central Park tour
� Harlem tour
� Commercial Architecture I
� SoHo tour
� Commercial Architecture II
� Midtown tour with visits to Art Deco lobbies and Grand Central Terminal
Syllabus varies each semester. We have also toured Lower Manhattan, East Village, Gramercy
Park, Upper West Side, Upper East Side, Chelsea, Theater District, etc. Choice often depends
upon projects in other classes and timely local issues.
Final Project
Each student must choose one square block in New York City and trace its growth,
development, and change from the time that it was initially built up through today. Issues
that you might consider include:
1. When did development begin?
2. What types of building were erected on the block?
3. Who were the architects and builders?
4. What were the original uses of the buildings?
5. How did development on this block relate to development in the surrounding area?
6. Why did this block develop as it did?, when it did?
7. How has the block changed since it was initially developed? Have the buildings
changed?, the uses changed?, the scale changed?, etc.
8. Has the change been for the better or for the worse?
9. Who was responsible for the changes?
10. How have the changes related to changes in the surrounding community?
There are other issues that you might wish to discuss. Those listed above are only
suggestions and you need not necessarily discuss them all. However, you must place your
block in some sort of context within the neighborhood or within the city.
Professor : Mr. Salomon
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The development of cities is the consequence of multiple factors which include : the adaption
of human settlement to topography, hydrology and environmental features ; the impact of
historical trends and events ; the interplay of political forces and key actors : kings, city
government, municiple administrators, architects and planners, private developers and city
dwellers. But cities are also artifacts which can be described as works of art in terms of
their architecture, their morphology and spatial organization, the physical embodiment of
aesthetic, cultural and artistic values. The course on the Development of Paris will provide
an overview of the 2000 year history of the city seen as a matrix relating the evolutioon of
urban structure and architecture to social, political forces and intellectual history. The
course will be articulated around six major periods developed thematically:
LECTURES
� Gallo-Roman and Medieval period
Topography and origins; The Roman legacy; The mythical city of the Middle Ages ; reading
Victor Hugo; The Organic plan and the tripartite city. Fortifications, walls and containment;
Court and Garden ; the French Hotel; Baroque vs. Classic; The invention of public space; Early
development : the Ile St Louis; Domestic architecture and the private realm as abstract space
� XVI-XVII centuries
The open city; The imaginary city & the French Enlightenment; Urban Design and the forest
metaphor; Private places vs. public servitude; The new "lotissements"; The Turgot and
Verniquet maps
� XVIII century
The First Empire : Napoleon & Paris; Iron work and the Parisian arcade : reading Walter
Benjamin; Baron Haussmann and the invention of modern Paris; Nature and the city : Alphand's
"Les Promenade de Paris"; The Beaux-Arts school; The impact of new urban regulations; World
Exhibitions ; The Eiffel Tower reading Roland Barthe
� XIX century
Paris and the debate on the city; Haussmann vs. Camillo Sitte; Camillo Sitte vs. Le Corbusier;
Le Corbusier vs. Perret; Social Housing : the HBM; Modernism and the City : "l'Ecole de Paris" ;
Le Corbusier - Patout - Mallet Stevens, Chareau et al...; The new programs : mixed use vs.
single use and the development of public amenities.
� XX century up to 1945
1950's and 1960's social housing ; High rise developments ; the XVth, la Defense;
1970's : The new center of Paris: The Pompidou Museum; the Baltard pavilions destruction and
the underground Forum shopping mall; Malraux laws on historic preservation and the Marais
� After 1945
The monarchic heritage : the Grands Projets : IMA - LeLouvre etc...
New urban architecture planning and social housing : case studies : Parc de la Villette and Cite
de la Musique; Parc Andre Citroen, ZAC Seine-Rive-Gauche and the Bibliotheque Francois
Mitterand; ZAC de Reuilly; the Foundation Cartier; future trends
WALKS
6 walks and visits are planned both to illustrate each lecture and provide a cross section of
development within selcected areas of the city.
READINGS
-Text book: Anthony Sutcliffe Paris - An Architectural History. Yale University Press 1993
-Readers : books I, II, III including supplements
-Walter Benjamin "Paris, Capital of the XIX Century" in Illuminations.
-Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower
An exercise on observation, with a multi-media presentation by groups of two students, will be assigned for the second week of class
There will be mid-term and final exams based on the content of readings, lectures and walks.
Each student will write an approximately 15 page typed term paper. The subject should be either a thematic topic or a geographic area of the city to investigate across time. Many possibilities will be suggested in class. The paper should include:
-historical reference material such as copioes of old plans and viewess
-contemporary reference material such as slides, photos ad analytical drawings
-proper footnotes and bibliography
History of the American city
Professor : Ms. Wright
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Patterns of American Urban Life & Urban Design
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive "master plans" and banal,
unregulated "growth," of visions and incremental actions. They show the fusion, and often
the confrontation, of broad-based global trends and local particularities; of social change,
economic development, and resistance to those forces�all of which are manifest in patterns
of urban design.
Certain themes recur: the primacy of commercial development; public instituions efforts to
represent unity and progress; ethnic, class, and regional variations; separations between
public and private areas, between rich and poor, between center and periphery. Each of these
tendencies influences both the cultural values and the physical appearance of American cities.
This course will move between the national or global scale of particular cities and groups of
buildings. Against a backdrop of political and social condtions, as well as a larger cultural
milieu, we will focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities;
the role of infrastructure and centrifugal forces; the emergence of new building types, styles,
and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period anmd
contemporary analyses. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each
student�s research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
LECTURE TOPICS
� Introduction: Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the role of region, the distinctiveness of
place, and the pattern of cultural norms.
� Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; European continuities, prototypes, and
experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies; the Puritan "city on a hill";
conformity and social control through formal design; the breakdown of formal and social
control in the 18th century.
� The Emergence of a Civic Culture and an Urban Hierarchy
National Survey Land Ordinance; L'Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's plan
for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; the role of monumental architecture; the
dissemination of the grid, the town square, and the democratic political system; early mill
villages and the model industrial town of Lowell.
� Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the Park system; nature in the city; unity and diverstiy in American park design;
the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan Plan for Washington, D.C. and the
progressives' civic cneters; themes and variations on a type.
� Housing Reform and Residewntial Segregation
Model workers' housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural
profession; the "project" as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public
housing; cultural preferneces versus discriminatory segregation.
� The Evolution of the Suburbs
Residential models for family and community life; stages of suburbanization; building
controls and restrictive covenants; the success of "alternative" models; the dominat role of
transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes.
� The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
Professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of
density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; the design
implications of the automobile ; the slab city and the spread city of the Regional Plan
Association of New York; regulating the free market.
� Commerce as the Basis of Urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street;
Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of "cities-within-cities"; the shopping
center and its expansion as commercial and public space.
� Pragmatic Modernism
Private enterprise and public controls; the International Style and American anti-orthodoxy:
the Siedlung and the tower-in-the-park; model communities of the New Deal; Robert Moses as
Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City and Kahn's Philadelphia.
� Development and Decentralization in the Post-war Era
The Federal Highway Act and the Urban Reneweal Act; luxury apartments and convention
centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and "new humanism" in design; "new towns
in town" and outside; "cleaning up" hisotric districts.
� Fragmentation and Pluralism in the Late 20th Century
Megastructures and grandiose visions; attacks on modernism and the discovery of "context";
neo-traditional urbanism; community design centers and politicized planning; theme parks,
historic districts, and gated communities; the urbanized suburb and the downtown mall;
images and realities of violence.
History of the European City
Professor : Ms. Britton
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
Back to main page
Forward to more class info
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The development of cities is the consequence of multiple factors which include : the adaption
of human settlement to topography, hydrology and environmental features ; the impact of
historical trends and events ; the interplay of political forces and key actors : kings, city
government, municiple administrators, architects and planners, private developers and city
dwellers. But cities are also artifacts which can be described as works of art in terms of
their architecture, their morphology and spatial organization, the physical embodiment of
aesthetic, cultural and artistic values. The course on the Development of Paris will provide
an overview of the 2000 year history of the city seen as a matrix relating the evolutioon of
urban structure and architecture to social, political forces and intellectual history. The
course will be articulated around six major periods developed thematically:
LECTURES
� Gallo-Roman and Medieval period
Topography and origins; The Roman legacy; The mythical city of the Middle Ages ; reading
Victor Hugo; The Organic plan and the tripartite city. Fortifications, walls and containment;
Court and Garden ; the French Hotel; Baroque vs. Classic; The invention of public space; Early
development : the Ile St Louis; Domestic architecture and the private realm as abstract space
� XVI-XVII centuries
The open city; The imaginary city & the French Enlightenment; Urban Design and the forest
metaphor; Private places vs. public servitude; The new "lotissements"; The Turgot and
Verniquet maps
� XVIII century
The First Empire : Napoleon & Paris; Iron work and the Parisian arcade : reading Walter
Benjamin; Baron Haussmann and the invention of modern Paris; Nature and the city : Alphand's
"Les Promenade de Paris"; The Beaux-Arts school; The impact of new urban regulations; World
Exhibitions ; The Eiffel Tower reading Roland Barthe
� XIX century
Paris and the debate on the city; Haussmann vs. Camillo Sitte; Camillo Sitte vs. Le Corbusier;
Le Corbusier vs. Perret; Social Housing : the HBM; Modernism and the City : "l'Ecole de Paris" ;
Le Corbusier - Patout - Mallet Stevens, Chareau et al...; The new programs : mixed use vs.
single use and the development of public amenities.
� XX century up to 1945
1950's and 1960's social housing ; High rise developments ; the XVth, la Defense;
1970's : The new center of Paris: The Pompidou Museum; the Baltard pavilions destruction and
the underground Forum shopping mall; Malraux laws on historic preservation and the Marais
� After 1945
The monarchic heritage : the Grands Projets : IMA - LeLouvre etc...
New urban architecture planning and social housing : case studies : Parc de la Villette and Cite
de la Musique; Parc Andre Citroen, ZAC Seine-Rive-Gauche and the Bibliotheque Francois
Mitterand; ZAC de Reuilly; the Foundation Cartier; future trends
WALKS
6 walks and visits are planned both to illustrate each lecture and provide a cross section of
development within selcected areas of the city.
READINGS
-Text book: Anthony Sutcliffe Paris - An Architectural History. Yale University Press 1993
-Readers : books I, II, III including supplements
-Walter Benjamin "Paris, Capital of the XIX Century" in Illuminations.
-Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower
An exercise on observation, with a multi-media presentation by groups of two students, will be assigned for the second week of class
There will be mid-term and final exams based on the content of readings, lectures and walks.
Each student will write an approximately 15 page typed term paper. The subject should be either a thematic topic or a geographic area of the city to investigate across time. Many possibilities will be suggested in class. The paper should include:
-historical reference material such as copioes of old plans and viewess
-contemporary reference material such as slides, photos ad analytical drawings
-proper footnotes and bibliography
Professor : Ms. Wright
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Patterns of American Urban Life & Urban Design
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive "master plans" and banal,
unregulated "growth," of visions and incremental actions. They show the fusion, and often
the confrontation, of broad-based global trends and local particularities; of social change,
economic development, and resistance to those forces�all of which are manifest in patterns
of urban design.
Certain themes recur: the primacy of commercial development; public instituions efforts to
represent unity and progress; ethnic, class, and regional variations; separations between
public and private areas, between rich and poor, between center and periphery. Each of these
tendencies influences both the cultural values and the physical appearance of American cities.
This course will move between the national or global scale of particular cities and groups of
buildings. Against a backdrop of political and social condtions, as well as a larger cultural
milieu, we will focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities;
the role of infrastructure and centrifugal forces; the emergence of new building types, styles,
and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period anmd
contemporary analyses. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each
student�s research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
LECTURE TOPICS
� Introduction: Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the role of region, the distinctiveness of
place, and the pattern of cultural norms.
� Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; European continuities, prototypes, and
experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies; the Puritan "city on a hill";
conformity and social control through formal design; the breakdown of formal and social
control in the 18th century.
� The Emergence of a Civic Culture and an Urban Hierarchy
National Survey Land Ordinance; L'Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's plan
for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; the role of monumental architecture; the
dissemination of the grid, the town square, and the democratic political system; early mill
villages and the model industrial town of Lowell.
� Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the Park system; nature in the city; unity and diverstiy in American park design;
the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan Plan for Washington, D.C. and the
progressives' civic cneters; themes and variations on a type.
� Housing Reform and Residewntial Segregation
Model workers' housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural
profession; the "project" as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public
housing; cultural preferneces versus discriminatory segregation.
� The Evolution of the Suburbs
Residential models for family and community life; stages of suburbanization; building
controls and restrictive covenants; the success of "alternative" models; the dominat role of
transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes.
� The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
Professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of
density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; the design
implications of the automobile ; the slab city and the spread city of the Regional Plan
Association of New York; regulating the free market.
� Commerce as the Basis of Urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street;
Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of "cities-within-cities"; the shopping
center and its expansion as commercial and public space.
� Pragmatic Modernism
Private enterprise and public controls; the International Style and American anti-orthodoxy:
the Siedlung and the tower-in-the-park; model communities of the New Deal; Robert Moses as
Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City and Kahn's Philadelphia.
� Development and Decentralization in the Post-war Era
The Federal Highway Act and the Urban Reneweal Act; luxury apartments and convention
centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and "new humanism" in design; "new towns
in town" and outside; "cleaning up" hisotric districts.
� Fragmentation and Pluralism in the Late 20th Century
Megastructures and grandiose visions; attacks on modernism and the discovery of "context";
neo-traditional urbanism; community design centers and politicized planning; theme parks,
historic districts, and gated communities; the urbanized suburb and the downtown mall;
images and realities of violence.
History of the European City
Professor : Ms. Britton
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
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Forward to more class info
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Patterns of American Urban Life & Urban Design
American cities are simultaneously the product of impressive "master plans" and banal,
unregulated "growth," of visions and incremental actions. They show the fusion, and often
the confrontation, of broad-based global trends and local particularities; of social change,
economic development, and resistance to those forces�all of which are manifest in patterns
of urban design.
Certain themes recur: the primacy of commercial development; public instituions efforts to
represent unity and progress; ethnic, class, and regional variations; separations between
public and private areas, between rich and poor, between center and periphery. Each of these
tendencies influences both the cultural values and the physical appearance of American cities.
This course will move between the national or global scale of particular cities and groups of
buildings. Against a backdrop of political and social condtions, as well as a larger cultural
milieu, we will focus on spatial and architectural development: the changing outline of cities;
the role of infrastructure and centrifugal forces; the emergence of new building types, styles,
and aesthetic constructs; and their effect on what already exists.
Weekly assigned readings include both primary sources from the historical period anmd
contemporary analyses. A series of short analyses of visual and written texts, based on each
student�s research topic, will lead up to a final paper.
LECTURE TOPICS
� Introduction: Patterns of Community and Conflict
American particularism and European influences; the role of region, the distinctiveness of
place, and the pattern of cultural norms.
� Colonial Cities and Towns
Cities as the key to European colonization; European continuities, prototypes, and
experiments; the codification of the Laws of the Indies; the Puritan "city on a hill";
conformity and social control through formal design; the breakdown of formal and social
control in the 18th century.
� The Emergence of a Civic Culture and an Urban Hierarchy
National Survey Land Ordinance; L'Enfant's plan for Washington and the Commissioner's plan
for New York; urban rivalries and boosterism; the role of monumental architecture; the
dissemination of the grid, the town square, and the democratic political system; early mill
villages and the model industrial town of Lowell.
� Urban Parks and the City Beautiful
Olmsted and the Park system; nature in the city; unity and diverstiy in American park design;
the invention of the American parkway; the Macmillan Plan for Washington, D.C. and the
progressives' civic cneters; themes and variations on a type.
� Housing Reform and Residewntial Segregation
Model workers' housing; the role of philanthropists, government, and the architectural
profession; the "project" as an ideal environment; the saga and scale of American public
housing; cultural preferneces versus discriminatory segregation.
� The Evolution of the Suburbs
Residential models for family and community life; stages of suburbanization; building
controls and restrictive covenants; the success of "alternative" models; the dominat role of
transportation systems; changing families and suburban prototypes.
� The Social Scientist and the Central Business District
Professionalization of City Planning and its separation from architecture; the problem of
density and the dream of urban order; zoning for height, use, and density; the design
implications of the automobile ; the slab city and the spread city of the Regional Plan
Association of New York; regulating the free market.
� Commerce as the Basis of Urbanism
The fantasy panopticon world of department stores; the rise and demise of Main Street;
Rockefeller Center and other urban concentrations of "cities-within-cities"; the shopping
center and its expansion as commercial and public space.
� Pragmatic Modernism
Private enterprise and public controls; the International Style and American anti-orthodoxy:
the Siedlung and the tower-in-the-park; model communities of the New Deal; Robert Moses as
Czar of New York; Wright's Broadacre City and Kahn's Philadelphia.
� Development and Decentralization in the Post-war Era
The Federal Highway Act and the Urban Reneweal Act; luxury apartments and convention
centers in redeveloped downtowns; expressionism and "new humanism" in design; "new towns
in town" and outside; "cleaning up" hisotric districts.
� Fragmentation and Pluralism in the Late 20th Century
Megastructures and grandiose visions; attacks on modernism and the discovery of "context";
neo-traditional urbanism; community design centers and politicized planning; theme parks,
historic districts, and gated communities; the urbanized suburb and the downtown mall;
images and realities of violence.
Professor : Ms. Britton
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
Back to main page
Forward to more class info
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The Architect, the City, and the State; Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe.
The aim of this course is to help students develop a critical understanding of the types of
discourse that have been applied to and influenced the development of life in the European
city. With this aim in mind, the course will draw particularly on architecture as an
intellectual discipline, using the examples of specific individuals and their aspirations for
the urban context to illuminate the larger issues at play at key periods in the urbanization of
European life.
The course is not simply an historical survey of the development of the European city (though)
that is also an important feature). The goal is to help students to think of the city not merely
as the product of demographic and economic forces, but as an attempt to construct a European
city through two routes. The first will be a discussion of individual architects, urban
planners and patrons who expressed a sense of public responsibility and vocational ambition
towards the city; they are individuals in whose theory and practice is reflected an intention
to represent and articulate a message to, as well as for, the public. The second approach will
be to understand our more focused discussions within a broader chronological history
covering the major developments of the European city. Much of the material for this more
traditional narrative will be found in the weekly required readings. Where appropriate, the
discussion will be grounded in the Parisian context and contrasted with the way similar
themes came to be understood in the American landscape and the city of New York in
particular.
The Architect, the City, and the State;
Aspirations for Urban Life in Modern Europe
� Introduction
Discussion of the Panosfsky reading andthe goals for historical study: "enlivening what
otherwise would remain dead" more than" arresting what otherwise would slip away." The
concept of the polis; the citta felice; the public sphere. The city as a language; learning the
discourse of the city.
� The Medieval Aspiration: Abbot Suger and the Civitas Dei
The celestial and social hierarchy. The Heavenly Jerusalem. Church and State. The material
and immaterial world. The interiority of the medieval town as spatial extension of the Early
Christian.
� Citizenship and Prosperity: The Cityof the Burgher and the Visionary City of Hans
Vredeman de Vrles
The moral geography of the cities of the lowlands (Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges). Beyond the
late medieval city. Extra urban domains; villas and gardens. Forms of utopianism.
� "Court, Parade, and Capital": Bernini in Paris
The city as spectacle; perspective and vantage point; radical avenues; Vauban, Le Notre and
Jules Hardouin-Mansart; the city as an extension of centralized french state; forms of
authority; Place Dauphine and Place Vendome, Paris.
� Revolution and the New Social Orde: Ledoux's physiocratic city
The ideal city of Chaux; absolutist monarchy adapted to factory settlement; caractere; toll
houses or Barrieres around Paris; architecture as the reflection of social order.
� Nineteeth Century Utopianism: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Ruskin, Morris, Owen
The city and its architecture as a means of judging the quality of a society; the socialist
consciousness; Engels ; Marx; population expansion; the center vs. periphery; the economic
drive; the "social" novel; the industrial building type; the phalantsere; the country in the city:
"ambiguities of the Garden City;" Ebenezer Howard; Georges Benoit-Levy; the Owenite village.
� The Imposition of Orderonthe "Disordered" City: Schinkel's Berlin; Wren's London; Cerda's
Barcelona; and Hausmann's Paris
Urbanization; Alois Riegl; Camillo Sitte and the construction of the Ring in Vienna; Gilly's
Berlin monuments; Joseph Stubben; the Rondas and the plaza de Cataluna, Barcelona.
� The Soviet Experiment: the Linear City
The disurbanization proposals of Okhitovich and N.A. Milyutin; M. Baruch and Moisei Ginsburg,
"Green City Competition," Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, 1930; the Association of
Contemporary Architects (OSA); Arturo Sotia y Mata and the model linear city.
� Technology and Social Reform; Le Corbusier�s Villa Radieuse
Garnier's Cite Industielle; large scale and serial production; the "machinery of society," the
Immeublevilla; CIAM; the open-city; "architecture or revolution."
� Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer: The "Post-Humanist" City
The new objectivity (neue Sachlichkeit) "Building is a technical, not an aesthetic process;"
"All things in this world are a product of the formula Function times Economy;" the two-tier
vertical city; the writings of Georg Simmel.
� Post-war reconstruction: Auguste Perret and Le Havre
The problem of the classicist aspiration applied to urban planning; Perret vs. CIAM and the
International Style; "economy efficiency", a variety of interpretations ; the Athens Charter.
� The Tensions of the Contemporary City
(Walk with Khoa Pham, architect : the red belt of Paris, the banlieu, mass housing, the
problems of immigration; ZAC)
Back to main page