Joseph C. Forte

This course will involve reading works in philosophy, theory, criticism, politics, and social analysis that deal with the aesthetic, formal, infrastructural, and sociopolitical questions raised by design strategies, buildings, and utopian or speculative projects. Our focus will be on methods and movements, such as: Enlightenment rationalism and race theory; houses as machines for living; idealized metastructures; corporate and colonial modernisms of the ’50s; new nationalist capitals; blobs; dots and folds; fractal form; fractured landscapes; datatowns and metacities; ascetic aesthetic/minimalist consumption; megastructures; themed or Theme Park ’80s urbanism; transformational design grammars; and economic models for sustainable growth/development/design, monuments and the unspeakable, political and social remediation. Class will begin with a review of previous material through slides discussed by students, then proceed to considerations of readings and new material in PowerPoint. Interaction with colleagues is key. Authors will include: Mabel O. Wilson, “Notes on [Jefferson’s] Virginia State Capital”; Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime; Le Corbusier, Toward an Architecture; Frank Lloyd Wright, In the Cause of Architecture; Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking”; Hassan Fathy, Architecture For The Poor;  Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Peter Eisenman, Written Into the Void; Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, Learning From Las Vegas; Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York and Junkspace; along with Bruce Sterling, Anthony Vidler, Sylvia Lavin, and Ma Yansong. Buildings will include work by major architects, such as: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, Luis Barragan, Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Bjarke Ingels, Sam Mockbee and Rural Studio, Alejandro Aravena, Wang Shu, Ma Yansong, Elizabeth Diller, and Jean Gang. Movements discussed will include Modernism, Post-Modernism, Formalism,  Situationism, Minimalism, Counter Culture, Green Urbanism, Monuments and the Unspeakable, The Architecture of Development and of Crisis, Parametrics, and new Pragmatism. Assignments will involve analytical and critical papers, directed discussions on close reading of texts, historical context for ideas, and design projects with an imaginative flair—and, in the spring, designing a “future” or futuristic campus for Sarah Lawrence College in either Shanghai or other major cities by class “firms.” This course complements interests on urbanism, visual arts, environmental science and studies, literary theory, physics, and, of course, art and architectural criticism and history.

In Annibale Carracci’s painting of St. Margaret (1609), an Early Christian martyr, an altar is inscribed: Sursum Corda (Lift Up Your Hearts). This course explores what that meant in the 17th century—for the arts to be a vehicle of uplift and salvation, a challenge to the supremacy of nature, an analysis of history, and a site of contention, paradox, and pride for artists and architects. Using PowerPoint presentations, class discussion, and papers focusing on works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the course will cover the art of 16th-century Italy—as that art frames the questions that painters, sculptors, and architects pursued throughout Europe in the 17th century, commonly called the Age of the Baroque. Included will be studies of major movements in religion, politics, and society (Catholic reform and the founding of the Jesuits Order, the evolution of academic art, the creation of papal Rome, the importance of private patronage); issues in aesthetics and art theory (the transformation of classical models, theories of the reception of nature, the links to poetry, and the dynamics of style); the emergence of the varying national traditions (the sweet style and Bel Composto in Italy, Calvinist naturalism and the power of light in The Netherlands, and high classicism and Bon Gout in France). Focus will also be on careers of artists like Titian and the erotics of the brush; Michelangelo and transcendent form; Caravaggio and naturalism as the death of painting; Artemisia Gentileschi, biography and exemplum; Bernini and the beautiful whole; Rubens and the multiple ways of transforming; Rembrandt and the rough style; Vermeer and the discipline and technique of light; and Poussin and the modes of expression, among others. Group conferences in the first semester will focus on the art of Michelangelo as practice and problem and theories of the Baroque; in second semester, theories and problems in 17th-century architecture.