ARC 342R.2 / ARC 388R.2 Seminar, AMS 321, URB 325
Tues/Thurs 12:30 – 2:00pm, WMB 5.114
Open to all SOA Majors and Minors, Urban Studies students, and American Studies students
Tara Dudley: taradudley@utexas.edu
This course examines the history of the built environment in the United States and its territories from Indigenous North America to the present, considering architecture as an expression of cultural identity, political power, economic transformation, technological innovation, and everyday life. Organized chronologically and thematically, the course explores the contributions of architects, builders, craftspeople, laborers, and communities whose work shaped American landscapes. Particular attention is given to Indigenous building traditions, colonial settlement and empire, slavery and emancipation, immigration, industrialization, reform, suburbanization, and the changing architectural profession. Through buildings, landscapes, material culture, and historical primary sources, students will investigate how Americans created, occupied, contested, and transformed the spaces in which they lived and worked. The American South and Southwest (particularly Louisiana and Texas) and the Greater Caribbean, serve as important regional case studies within a broader national and transnational history.
The course meets twice a week for one-and-a-half hours. Students are expected to read a wide array of primary and background texts, participate in writing assignments, and pursue a research project with a finished product suitable for digital media. This is an intermediate-level, lecture/discussion course building on the foundation of the World Architecture survey sequence. It offers frameworks for interpreting the history of architecture in the United States and opportunities for developing research and writing skills.
Undergraduate students in the School of Architecture program must have completed ARC 318L World Architecture: Industrial Revolution to Present. Upper-division undergraduate and graduate students from other departments are welcome to enroll with the consent of the instructor.
