ART 370 - Seminar in Architectural History

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as MEDS 370 and URBS 370) Topic for 2018/19b: The City and the Stage: Theater, Film, and Architecture in the Short Twentieth Century. This seminar studies the connections among theater, film, and architecture in global urban environments, from 1914 to 1991. The performance and exhibition spaces of modernity simultaneously shaped and were themselves shaped by societies and communities in their search for different forms of constitution (liberal democracy, fascism or communism), and shared identity (with or without their race, gender, sexual, and religious biases), real or imagined. Stages and cities, as sites of expression, representation, and construction of the world at the heart of what Jacques Rancière calls the Aesthetic Regime of Art, deserve to be examined in detail—in their specific locations and materialities—considering them as multitude of places, and not merely as empty containers of theater, film, or public life. Readings include political and media theory from Kracauer or Benjamin to Deleuze or Rancière, as well as related theory and contemporary debates on the design of playhouses, movie palaces, and even architecture and urban planning since the rise of film until its digital transformation. The seminar studies dramatic works in the context of their imagined places, as well as their actual places of production and exhibition (studios, sets, streets, screens, or movie theaters). Weekly screenings and a case study field trip to New York city, archives, and stages. Travel expenses are funded by the Department. Eduardo Vivanco.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period plus outside screenings.