Studies in Architecture (470-0-1)
Topic
Broken Earths: Landscape in the Third Ecology
Instructors
Holly Amber Kennedy Gilmartin
Meeting Info
Kresge 4354 Art Hist. Sem. Rm.: Fri 2:00PM - 4:50PM
Overview of class
Recent critical movements within architectural and landscape studies have proposed that the unfolding climate crisis, together with planetary urbanization, calls attention to the need for new methodologies that rethink the damaged ecologies of the Anthropocene in aesthetic analysis. Returning to well-known moments in landscape history, this seminar will examine how post-Enlightenment modes of knowing and seeing the world, rooted in eighteenth and nineteenth century political economic discourses, continue to inform habitual distinctions between natural and built environments, in contrast to traditional ecological knowledge. Such distinctions lay at the heart of an imperial technique, both discursive and material, that was used to turn nations and overseas colonized territories into landscapes, "turning," in Jill Casid's formulation, "the pays into a paysage." To do this, land was "emptied out and then repossessed." The story of such dispossession has been a subject of recent decolonial and ecofeminist scrutiny within architectural and landscape history. Thinking with these movements, this seminar will tackle the problem of writing reparative histories of architecture and ecology in our present moment. We will find fertile ground for our investigations in the Block Museum's upcoming exhibition Actions for the Earth.
Class Materials (Required)
No textbook required.