T 1:00 - 3:30pm
ANH 153
This seminar takes the position that the history of ideas about property and liberty is essential to understanding architectural modernity. The course will focus on the Atlantic World during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an age of colonialism, revolution, slavery, and emancipation that gave rise to a world order based on new ideas and legal frameworks of private property, human rights, and liberalism, along with novel aesthetic experiences, architectures, and theories that tried to make sense of them.
How have changing ideologies of property and liberty shaped the way landscapes and cities are designed, produced, seen, and valued aesthetically, politically, and economically? How have modern people used acts of building and design not only to stake their claims to ownership, belonging, and freedom but also to dispossess others of their land, culture, and personhood? To what extent has architecture helped to materialize, naturalize, aestheticize and/or challenge modern legal regimes of ownership, structures of inequality, and ideals of freedom?
We will read works of political philosophy and legal theory—from Aristotle to Locke and Blackstone, Marx and Proudhon to Milton Friedman and Cheryl Harris—alongside histories of architecture, landscape, and aesthetic movements that illuminate their intersections with the dialectic of property and liberty. Topics will include classical ideas about private property and moral virtue; gender, domestic economy, and public life; aristocratic privilege and aesthetic judgment; enclosure and improvement; race and dispossession; revolution; liberalism; abolition and Reconstruction; and utopia and agrarian populism. We will also discuss how old ideas about the proper disposition of property and liberty animate many of the values that remain deeply ingrained in modern architectural culture—taste, style, creativity, abstraction, subjectivity, and autonomy, among others.
While our focus will be on the Atlantic World and Western traditions of political and aesthetic thought, the class is open to students’ explorations in other historical contexts and philosophical traditions.