Elective Course
Credits: 3-0-3 (3 semester hours)
Type of Course: Lecture
Instructors: Marc Bedarida
Prerequisites: None
Course Overview
Course Objectives:
This course interrogates the idea of the home through the reflections of Gaston Bachelard, Adolf Loos, and Gottfrield Semper, among others. More specifically, it uses this concept of home to address oppositions such as those between wall/roof, skin/structure, element/concept, and enclosure/place, as well as the relationship between the domestic environment and the notion of the uncanny developed by Sigmund Freud. The course retraces the various fictions of the modern movement concerning housing in relation to scale, domestic and social life, and symbolic components. The course also seeks to approach the difference between the Latin apartment house tradition, with its dense and collective grouping, and the Anglo-American suburban ideal. These theoretical reflections will be coupled with a questioning of the role attributed in Europe (and in France in particular, but also the US up to WW2) to public housing, and the reasons for the almost complete disappearance of this subject in recent architectural discourse.
Topics include:
- Huts and tombs: the good salvage. Le Corbusier, Loos, Mendelsohn, Gropius
- The primitive house: Laugier, Semper, Vitruvius, Columelle, Pline
- Renaissance villas, setting up a typology: Palladio
- From castle to hôtels particulier: the apprenticeship of composition
- The Haussmannian appartment houses: the bourgeois set-up
- Utopias of home reform: phalanstère and familistère : Fourier, Godin
- Hygenism and the technics of the confort
- Existenz minimum and mass culture: Loos, Le Corbusier, Roux-Spitz
- Prototype and standardization from Gropius to Archigram
- The Uncanny: house or home. Banham, Koolhaas, Derrida
Learning Objectives
- To stimulate an awareness of domestic spaces.
- To gain an understanding of the ordinary on architecture.
- To develop the student's sensitivity on the question of architecture against the city, architecture against the human body.
To integrate the awareness to the political dimension of housing.
Course Requirements
A notebook with class notes and including personal observations on the readings; a paper that compares an hötel particulier, an haussmannien apartment house and a Parisian project of housing drawn by Le Corbusier which will be documented by investigations at the Foundation Le Corbusier (2000/2500 words); and a series of "postcards" (15 x 21 cm) acting as an account of each visit with sketches, diagrams, pictures and - on the opposite side - personal notes. These "postcards" will be shown every other week.
Bibliography: G. Bachelard, :The Poetics of Space
J. Derrida & A. Dufourmantelle : De l’hospitalité
D. Hayden:The great domestic revolution
H. Heynen : Architecture and modernity
G. Ragot : Le Corbusier en France
J. Rykwert : Adam’s House in paradise
A. Vidler : The architectural uncanny