As registration for Spring 2013 academic courses begins
soon, I wanted to provide more information about new courses I will begin teaching
in January. Please see detailed descriptions below including a new special
topics class in the History of Architecture (1700-present), and the History of
Avant-Garde Film. If you have any specific questions that are not answered here
or in the links I provide you to the registration for the courses, you can contact me directly. I look forward to another rich
and engaging semester with both new and familiar faces.
This course traces the history of architecture from the period of the late Baroque in the eighteenth century through to the postmodern architectural styles associated with the contemporary present, approaching architecture as a unique medium with its own visual vocabulary and spatial codes. The various formal languages, designs, and theories that have shaped the history of architecture will be explored through the close examination of select buildings and spatial environments set within specific cultural, social, political and economic contexts of their planning and construction. The broader purpose of this course is to provide students with the ability to critically evaluate and recognize how the history and theory of architecture, especially as it evolved through periods of emerging nationalism, industrialization, urbanization, and modernism within the framework of a broader global visual culture and art history, continue to impact our collective spatial, visual, intellectual and cultural environments today.
The avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries have been determining forces in shaping collective ideas
about artistic practice and culture, social history, and subversive
intent. Not surprisingly, the technology of motion pictures has provided avant-garde
practitioners with a dynamic new medium to explore a range of themes and
philosophies, linking filmic experimentation with important ideas emerging in
the modern and contemporary art of the past century.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Mondays 4:00-6:50pm, Room
Fir 3414)
 |
| Norman Foster, Reichstag interior, Berlin (1993) |
This course traces the history of architecture from the period of the late Baroque in the eighteenth century through to the postmodern architectural styles associated with the contemporary present, approaching architecture as a unique medium with its own visual vocabulary and spatial codes. The various formal languages, designs, and theories that have shaped the history of architecture will be explored through the close examination of select buildings and spatial environments set within specific cultural, social, political and economic contexts of their planning and construction. The broader purpose of this course is to provide students with the ability to critically evaluate and recognize how the history and theory of architecture, especially as it evolved through periods of emerging nationalism, industrialization, urbanization, and modernism within the framework of a broader global visual culture and art history, continue to impact our collective spatial, visual, intellectual and cultural environments today.
All of the buildings under examination (which will introduce
and cover aspects of architecture, spatial planning, and styles associated with
the Baroque, Neo-Classical, Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts, and Art Nouveau
movements in Europe and North America, together with radical breaks seen in the
turn to globalizing Modern and Post-Modern architecture in the practices of Le
Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Venturi, Peter Eisenman,
Frank Gehry and others) will be related to their original contexts, but also
raise questions about the range of functions that architecture might fulfill
within different societies. While the primary focus of the course will be on
Western architecture and culture, the architecture of the Middle East, Asia,
the Americas and Africa will also be explored through targeted readings and
lectures. The course will therefore not just be about following a chronological
and progressive trajectory of “great buildings” and “great architects” but will
instead address broad issues related to political power, gender, sexuality,
race, and the formation of individual and group identities. In this way, the
ideas raised in this course will also draw attention to the dynamics and
ongoing debates concerning what it means to make a building and design a space
in any cultural context.
Kwantlen Polytechnic University (Tuesdays 4:00-6:50pm, Room
Fir 3414)
 |
| Andy Warhol, Screen Test (Edie Sedgwick) (1964) |
Beginning with an examination of film’s critical role in the
development of modern art and the history of the avant-garde, this course will draw
from existing issues and debates concerning art history and the expanding field
of visual culture linked through a number of filmic subgenres (such as
abstraction, collage, Dadaism, appropriation, surrealism, structuralism,
duration, parody, camp, autobiography and expanded cinema). In this way, the
course also offers a critical examination of selected films in connection to
key theoretical and historical turning points in art history and critical
theory and will roughly follow the history and theory of visual arts as it
moves from the emergence of the modern period in Europe through the demise of
modernism following WWII and into the areas of post-modern intervention leading
to our contemporary present. Artists and filmmakers under examination include,
but are not limited to, Germaine Dulac, Marcel Duchamp, Sergei Eisenstein, Jean
Cocteau, Hans Richter, Man Ray, Jean-Luc Godard, Stan Brakhage, Akira Kurosawa,
Shirley Clarke, Robert Smithson, Chantal Akerman, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, David
Lynch, Doug Aitken, Stan Douglas, Doug Aiken, Matthew Barney, Pipilotti Rist,
Kenneth Anger and Matthew Barney.