This course surveys the history of architecture and design, including furnishings, decorative arts and interiors, from the earliest settlements of the Neolithic Era until the onset of Neoclassicism in the late Eighteenth Century. Special attention is given to the developments that have remained most influential within the architecture and design of today, with particular emphasis on ancient Greece and Rome, Early Christian, Byzantine and early Islam, the European Middle Ages, and the Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo cultures.
Through extensive lectures and readings, special focus in this class is devoted to the art of the Greek temple, Roman civil engineering, the rise of monasticism in the early Middle Ages, early Byzantine and early Islamic religious design, pilgrimage and Romanesque church building, Gothic Europe and the age of cathedrals, Italian Renaissance architecture and the rise of Humanism, Baroque churches and papal patronage, French chateaux and absolute monarchy, and the origins of Modernism during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
Students will complete a combination of in-class and take-home exams along with a final research paper on a topic chosen in consultation with the instructor.
