Essentials of Enlightenment-Era Architecture

This course looks at the architecture of nineteenth-century Europe and the United States and charts to shift away from elite architectural modes- like the Baroque and the Rococo- towards a transnational iteration of Neoclassicism and through the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which brought new possibilities of construction in new materials like iron and steel. As Europe and the United States assimilated these new modes of expression in the construction of buildings, the face, function, and features of architecture in the modern West were transformed. In this course, we’ll look at the last gasp of aristocratic French taste in architecture and interior design- the Rococo- and the rise of the Neoclassical style as the architecture of choice to communicate the ideals of Europe’s Enlightenment, when revolutionary reassessments of humanity were giving rise to a new kind of representative government which would fundamentally alter the course of Western civilization. Also in this course will be our first glimpses of how the Industrial Revolution brought forth entirely unprecedented construction materials and transformed the prerogatives of urban planners in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  With the Enlightenment unfolding in the philosophical works of the era, the corresponding leaps in manufacturing and industry which would signal the Industrial Revolution later on in the same century introduced an alternative mode of construction. This convention of not only building with cast iron and steel, but also exposing its skeletal architecture as a new possibility of form constituted a new articulation of the new capacity of modern man to build higher, larger, and stronger than in any period prior.