Critical Architecture: more than mere containment

Aims

On successful completion of the module, students will be able to:

• Identify, articulate and critique a range of approaches to architectural discourse and be able to discuss​ them​ critically​.
• Discuss a range of different sorts of architecture in relation to key theoretical issues, including gender, sexuality, colonialism, temporality.
• Discuss with knowledge and insight important debates in this field.
• Think critically about the problem of the relationship between past and present in architecture and theory.
• Engage in architectural analysis at both a detailed empirical and critical theoretical level.

Academic and graduate skills

• Students will be trained in the ability to read carefully and think critically and independently about complex issues relating to architectural theory and architectural history.
• Students' visual analysis capacities will be enhanced and refined.
• Students will be trained in the capacity to think about one set of issues in relation to another when there are significant shifts of paradigms between them.
• Students will be able to draw ideas from one source and apply them critically and with rigour to another.
• Students will learn the problems of thinking about "history" in relation to "architecture'.
• A critical knowledge of leading debates in this field.
• A renewed and critical awareness of the questions and potential entailed in thinking architecture in relation to gender, film, literature, fashion, colonialism.

Suggested Reading

• Catherine Ingraham, Architecture, Animal, Human. The Assymetrical Condition, London & New York: Routledge, 2006.
• William Braham & Jonathan Hale (eds), Rethinking Technology. A Reader in Architectural Theory, London & New York: Roiutledge, 2007.
• Radner, H 2011, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (& review: Journal Of American History, 98, 3, pp. 880-881).
• Booth, M 2010, Harem Histories [Electronic Resource] : Envisioning Places And Living Spaces / Marilyn Booth, Editor, n.p.: Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press, 2010.
• Davidson, J 2011, Bodymaps: Sexing Space and Zoning Gender in Ancient Athens, Gender & History, 23, 3, pp. 597-614,
• Lori A Brown, Feminist Practices. Interdisciplinary approaches to women in architecture, Ashgate: 2011
• B Colomina (ed), Sexuality and Space, Princeton University School of Architecture: Princeton, 1992.
• Holmes, D, O'Byrne, P, & Murray, S 2010, Faceless sex: glory holes and sexual assemblages, Nursing Philosophy, 11, 4, pp. 250-259
• Shannahan, D 2014, Gender, inclusivity and UK mosque experiences, Contemporary Islam, 8, 1, pp. 1-16.
• Olkowski, DE 2001, Matter in Motion, Architecture and Sexuality, Parallax, 7, 2, pp. 95-106
• Baydar, G 2012, BEDROOMS IN EXCESS, Woman's Art Journal, 33, 2, pp. 28-34.
• Baker, CM 2005, Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity, Nashim, 9, pp. 191-203
• Baydar, G 2002, Tenuous boundaries: women, domesticity and nationhood in 1930s Turkey, Journal Of Architecture, 7, 3, pp. 229-244,
• A Friedman, Women & the Making of the Modern House, New York: Abrams, 1998.
• Pollock, G 2008, The visual poetics of shame: A feminist reading of Freud's Three essays on the theory of sexuality (1905), Shame and sexuality: Psychoanalysis and visual culture pp. 109-128 New York, NY, US: Routledge/Taylor & Francis
• Conan, M 2002, Bourgeois And Aristocratic Cultural Encounters In Garden Art, 1550-1850 / Edited By Michel Conan,: Washington, D.C. : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, c2002
• Gershenson, O 2005, The Restroom Revolution Will Not Be Televised: The Transgender Movement and the Politics of Unisex Bathrooms, Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, pp. 1-26.
• P Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1977, esp. chs. 2, 3, and 4.
• H Lefebvre, The Production of Space (La production de l’espace, Paris: Editions Anthropos, 1974), trans. D Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell: Cambridge, 1991.
• P Bourdieu, ‘The Berber House’ in M Douglas, Rules and Meanings, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1973.
• Jarzombek, M 2010, Architecture and sexuality in the words of Filarete, Thresholds, 37, pp. 6-7.
• Prussin, L, Adan, A, Andrews, P, Fullerton, A, Grum, A, & Holter, U 1995, African Nomadic Architecture: Space, Place, And Gender, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press
• Baydar, G 2002, Tenuous boundaries: women, domesticity and nationhood in 1930s Turkey, Journal Of Architecture, 7, 3, pp. 229-244,
• Cheng, A 2009, Skin deep: Josephine Baker and the colonial fetish, Camera Obscura, 69, pp. 34-79,
• Betsky, A 1995, Building Sex : Men, Women, Architecture, And The Construction Of Sexuality / Aaron Betsky, n.p.: New York :
• Colomina, B, & Bloomer, J 1990, Sexuality and space: interview with Beatriz Colomina, Columbia University. Graduate School Of Architecture, Planning & Preservation Newsline, 2, 7, pp. 6-7,
• Shonfield, K 2000, Walls have feelings: cult films about sex in 1960s London, Architectural Design, 70, 1, pp. 32-35.