ARCT20040

The course sets out to present the development of the modern and contemporary designed environment in order to build a common knowledge base for future architects, engineers, designers, landscape architects, planners and others involved in the procurement and management of the designed physical environment. Not withstanding this perspective, it is accessible to all.

The time span of the study is the latter half of the nineteenth century to the latter half of the twentieth. While concentrating on key figures and movements, the course situates changes in the design environment over this time in a wider social, cultural and technological context. Often underpinned by a political agenda, modernity has its roots in a critical reaction to the conditions and inequality of the nineteenth-century industrial city. This module traces how this develops, examining those projects from the modernist canon which are most significant and influential. Furthermore it examines how modern architecture, urbanism and landscapes adapted to changing technologies and structural theories.

More recently, it has been recognised that modern architecture and development is instrincially linked to the fossil fuel economy in terms of the resources it uses, the methods and processes it deploys and the functions it serves. Equally, modern architecture and development is fundamentally related to geo-political processes of colonisation and globalisation. Interwoven through the course, a series of three thematic lectures and seminars, dealing respectively with systems and resources, with so-called 'carbon form' and with global society, will reflect on how these new perspectives can complicate and enrich our understanding of the architecture of the period.