Constellations: HAA 2531 American Architecture Since Industrialization

By the time the Civil War ended in 1865, traditional American architectural values had broken down under a barrage of ornament and imported European styles. Something new had to take shape to express the new wealth of post-Civil War America and the new social order that went with it. The next 135 years would see a succession of brilliant architects in Furness, Richardson, the early skyscraper builders in Chicago, Sullivan, the firm of McKim, Meade and White, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies, Kahn, Venturi, Moore, Gehry, Predock, Holl, Arquitectonica, and the pluralists of today. At the same time, these successes also masked major problems: spoiling the land; architecture as social welfare; and the concern for national and regional values as expressed in building. These individual successes and collective problems will constitute the underlying theme of the course.