This course proposes to analyze the global turn as it relates to the industrial revolution and the regimes of circulation of goods and commodities, knowledge, experts, techniques, people, and labor that it introduced and supported. We contend that these regimes posed new challenges to the discourse and practices of modern architecture that yielded substantial innovations during the mid nineteenth century that changed and consolidated in the second half of the twentieth century to the present. Each of the six modules focuses on a particular regime of circulation and thus provides the epistemology framework with which to engage with phenomena and buildings that are grouped thematically and chronologically.

We identify and discuss the contribution of world exhibitions and fairs to global production and consumption of good and commodities as it relates to the emergence of new spaces of display and commercial collectivity. Case studies range from the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of London (1851) to the urban department stores of Europe (Innovation by Victor Horta in Brussels and Schocken by Erich Mendelsohn in Germany) and suburban shopping malls in the post world war two USA (Southdale by Victor Gruen) and more recently in the middle east and Asia (Makkah Shopping Center in Mecca, Saudi Arabia).

Germany

We identify modes of knowledge creation and dissemination in different media over time. Whereas travel was the most important source of direct learning during the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, the proliferation of printed matter and photography expanded the possibilities of learning from afar and was eventually even more radically transformed by the advent of the digital revolution. When travel was not possible, the plaster cast functioned as a surrogate, as did photographs, and folios.

Paris

As education moved from in-situ learning to spaces of collectivity, so too did opportunities for architects and students of architects to converge into the transcultural classroom. If colonialism promoted exchanges between nations, it was not until nationalism asserted itself that institutions began to formalize education. Together with the increased media, this lead to the rise of greater networks of collaboration and the rise of the international competition.

Australia

Here, the question is: How can construction practices be regarded as global processes? We identify and analyze a series of producers of products alongside the emergence of new construction techniques and technologies. This lecture aims at illustrating the increasingly complex circulation of different materials and methods that go against the grain of the traditional vernacular ideal of sourcing local materials that has recently re-gained momentum within the ‘green’ and environmental movements.

Mexico

Dramatically increased mobility throughout the last century has generated both increased dialogue and new types of buildings that have accommodated new forms of transport ranging from air and train to automobiles. This phenomenon has given way to a number of diverse types of buildings including the Motel, Hotel, Airport, and Train Stations.

London

The building industry has increased relied upon labor moved across geographies that reveals the economic disparities between regions and cities of the global north and south. These exchanges reveal the paradoxes between the virtual and real insofar as the needs of actually building in specific places go counter to the global circulation of ideas and capital.

Berlin

Brussel, belgium

The Global Turn: Six Journeys of Architecture and the City, 1945-1989

This GAHTC module focuses on the global history of climate as a consideration in architectural ideas and practices. It is intended to operate either as a ‘stand-alone’ subject in relevant courses, or as part of a broader history of global architecture or of architecture and the environment. 

Through a series of six lectures, the module describes how climatic concerns have developed as an input to architectural design processes in many different global regions. The historical record of architectural-climatic engagement also brings up relations to new forms of governance, to the role of science in architectural developments, and to issues of architectural representation and communication. As such, through the rubric of climate, a broad interdisciplinary perspective is brought to bear on the global development of architecture.

This lecture provides a launching point into some of the issues involved with tracing an architectural history through the lens of climate. The lecture is divided into two parts. The first addresses the shifting concept of the “primitive” within architectural culture, especially as it was evoked as a symbol for ideas of naturalness and climatic adaptation. The second and third parts, revolving around two case studies, add to this historiographic narrative by introducing the complex entanglement of architecture and climate in the history of Native American architecture. The case studies will focus on Seminole chickee architecture in the sub-tropical region of Florida and adobe Pueblo architecture in the high desert region of New Mexico.

Singapore

The records of non-western architecture prior to the 19th century are relatively scarce. This is because much of the continental land mass south of Europe’s Iberian region, and coastal North Africa remained unexplored territory to European explorers of the 16th and 17th century. Whilst in global history, from the 16th century, there is a marked increase in inter-continental trade, with new trading and communicating networks being established to support this, the built physical infrastructure in which trade, residence and other cultural transactions take place took much longer to establish. 

Early adventurers and explorers in continents, such as Marco Polo, (in Asia) and Dapper,  (North and West Africa), travelled with knowledgeable traders to new kingdoms, and lived with the locals, blending in and assimilating indigenous customs. Their travel narratives and reports are rich in description of the local landscapes and lifestyles in these far away lands, in the case of Dapper a clear description of the built city of Benin (in today’s South Western Nigeria). Despite these narratives being published and available to the public, it is arguably not until the development of established missionary activity and trading networks that attention is paid to buildings and infrastructure.

Whilst mission and trade exploits often took place in tandem, they produced different built legacies. The missionaries’ long term visions of proselytization and establishment of new Christian communities, looked to long term infrastructure design, whilst the officers of the European trading companies; the Dutch East India, and the United Africa Companies for example, had basic inland outposts, often manned by indigenous traders. These structures were built with the main objective of being sites for the transhipment of produce to the exterior.  At the exterior outposts, usually in port cities, the trading company houses were more elaborate affairs serving both as trade warehouses and also housing for expatriate company representatives. By the emergence of colonial rule then, the colonists could draw on a pre-exisiting building design framework from which to plan and design their major administrative and later on local outposts in their acquired protectorates and colonies.

Northern nigeria

This lecture is concerned with the development and exchange of ideas and principles that have informed the designs of towns, buildings and landscapes in former British colonial territories (late17thC – Mid 20C). We will be looking at what Georg Simmel called the ‘visible institutions of the state’ – that is, those buildings and projects that enabled the British Empire to exist - the very mechanisms for imperial advancement. We will be focusing primarily on four geographical areas: The West Indies, British West Africa, Iraq and India and spanning the considerable timeframe of late 17C – mid20C – so this lecture is very much an introduction. The case studies, many of which are yet to feature in global histories of architecture, attempt to show that a response to climate, as well as political agendas, materials, labour, imperial ambition and health have been key drivers in the formation of late colonial cities, individual buildings and streetscapes. 
Many factors influence the design of architecture, not least cost, materials and labour. Climate is but one factor, made all the more complicated in the colonial landscape because of the power differentials at stake, coupled with the belief that the hot and humid climates of the tropics was itself toxic and dangerous to European health.

West africa

The purpose of this lecture is to demonstrate links between architecture and climate that developed from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. Part 1 begins by illustrating how attempts to treat and prevent tuberculosis, an urban disease, had a direct impact on the development of architectural typologies and forms. As the treatment of tuberculosis was closely linked to the environment and climate, architects around the world had to design buildings (in the main sanatoriums) with an increased awareness of the effects of sunlight and fresh air. The forms of these new buildings, which attempted to maximise the patients’ exposure to the sun and air through features such as verandahs and terraces, and the increased awareness of the effects of weather and climate on the inhabitants, soon influenced other building typologies, particularly housing in densely populated urban areas where living conditions were unsanitary and unhealthy. Designing healthy, affordable housing became one of the main goals of the architects associated with the modern movement. While this happened across Europe and in the USA, this lecture focuses on the German example, both because there was a strong collective movement around these issues and because there was a longer history of building with an awareness of climate. After outlining the accompanying ‘scientific’ shift in architecture, Part 2 closes by questioning how the ideas of the (predominantly German) modern movement spread around the world. A slide illustrating the exile paths of 24 German-speaking architects following the seizure of power by the Nazi Party in 1933.

Parts 3 and 4 demonstrate the spread of scientific, climate-conscious architectural design through a case study of the Berlin-born architect Otto Koenigsberger (1908-1999). Due to his Jewish background, Koenigsberger had to flee Germany in 1933. The lecture tracks his exilic trajectory from Berlin to Cairo, Egypt, then to Davos, Switzerland, and finally to Bangalore in India, examining his climatically-sensitive approach to architecture and analysing how it changed and developed through his exposure to different cultures. It illustrates his attempts to create buildings that were rooted in local building cultures and spatial practices, and responded, as efficiently as possible, through materials and forms, to climatic and social conditions. Part 5 follows Koenigsberger through the mid-century ‘tropicalisation’ of architecture. It discusses how Koenigsberger and colleagues such as Robert Gardner-Medwin, Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, who, unlike Koenigsberger, had previously worked in colonial contexts, contributed to the institutionalisation of ‘tropical architecture’ in the metropole of London. Through conferences and a course at the Architectural Association tropical architecture became established as a field that promoted climate appropriate architectural solutions in countries of the ‘Global South’ – generally colonies or former colonies – that relied on features such as appropriate orientation, natural ventilation, narrow floor plans, sun-breakers and verandas to regulate the temperature within the spaces.

South india

This lecture discusses the importance of climate to the development of architectural modernism in the period surrounding World War II. Starting off with some of the basic climatic principles championed by Le Corbusier in the late 1920s, the lecture then discusses developments in Brazil and the United States. A primary focus is on the chains of influence and counter-influence between these different regions, and many others as well, that led to the refinement of the use of shading systems and other “bioclimatic” methods; a secondary focus is on the relationship between science and architecture as it played out in these same methods.

Brazil

This is the final lecture of the series. In this lecture, we examine a new technology – air-conditioning – and discuss its sociotechnical and architectural histories, i.e. how it shaped and was shaped by both the society and the built environment. Although this series of lectures is organized in a loosely chronological manner and air-conditioning appears to be the latest instalment in the history of climate control, I argue that the architectural history of air-conditioning is parallel to that of climatic design. Both climatic design and air-conditioning require “useable” climatic data, i.e. standardized measurement of weather data, which modern meteorology produces. Thus, climatic design and air-conditioning

Chicago

India

The Global History of Architecture and Climate

The general aim of this module is to help frame the beginning of a survey of architectural history. Lectures are designed to be a little over an hour long, but can be lengthened or shortened or combined as required. The material covers some basic aspects of First Society cultures (Lectures 1-4) and the transition to agriculture, pastoralism and city building (Lectures 6-10).

In the last lecture, I introduced the idea of the “Social Package” that made us modern humans, from 150,000 or 200,000 BC through today. There is a lot more than can be said, but the lecture was intended to give the rudiments of a more elaborate discussion.

This lecture moves the clock forward to the period called the Last Ice Age (ca. 24,000 BCE – 10,000 BCE). Though the world was uniformly colder than before, it was coldest in Europe, Russia, Siberia and Canada, which were under sheets of ice. It was in this context that a remarkable transformation took place. It was initiated by a culture known as the Gravettians – cold-weather/big game hunter specialists. Their culture was perpetuated into the modern age by the Siberian cultures, the Inuits, and the Plains Indians. 

This Northern Hunting Tradition – stretching from 25,000 BCE to ca. 1900 CE – turned out to be one of the most durable and cultural formations in human history. It is marked by the development of winter clothing, requiring needlework done by women; a heightened degree of shamanism, particularly relevant in winter season; sweat lodges; and ritual and ceremonial exchanges, usually during the winter. In terms of architecture there are two basic prototypes, the pit house and the conical house. In this lecture I will look at the conical house and compare the lavvu by the Sami in Sweden with the tipi of the Plains Indians. The lavvu is obviously the older formation. The tipi, developed maybe around 1,000 BCE or so – no one knows – is infinitely more ingenious. It is clear that it was an invention of the women, who own the tipi and are responsible for its construction and maintenance.

Sweden

Shamanism is a generic term that describes a broad set of ritual beliefs about the human relationship to other humans and nature. It is linked also to
Animism. This lecture introduces the broad parameters of shamanism while also trying to get students to realize that shamanism is not a ‘dead religion.’ In the last few decades, it has even been revived – just think of the so-called neo-pagans who flock to Stonehenge! So what we see today in some parts of the world is a mixture of survival and revival.  

The lecture is structured as a general discussion of shamanism. I introduce Sweat Lodges since they played an important role in the ceremonial world of the First Societies, although in some cases everyone – not just shamans – used them. Particularly important are long winter ceremonies. I was in Cusco in June 2015 and included videos from that visit to demonstrate the survival/revival of winter ceremonial culture in the Peruvian highland region. I also discuss the enigmatic Medicine Wheels of North America. The last section is more theoretical in tone and tries to get students to see the difficulty of discussing this topic given our modern worldview.

England

Rock Art accompanied all First Society cultures the world over. Its meaning and purpose can only be known through conjecture. This lecture introduces some examples and introduces the idea of Sacred Landscape.

The lecture moves to what are certainly the most spectacular examples – the caves in southern France and northern Spain, made by the Magdalenian Culture. The history of these caves is not known definitively, but they were probably begun by the Gravettians. As the climate warmed, and they became more accessible, the number of sacred caves multiplied. People were no longer big game hunters, but lived in a world that had a more diverse fauna. The new people – known as the Magdalenians, and named after an archaeological site – used the caves as ritual centers. Large numbers of people gathered for ceremonial activities – not inside the cave, but in their vicinity. The caves were painted by people with extraordinary skills. How were these skills developed? What happened in these caves? Why did this culture die out? How early are these caves? No one knows, but it is likely that they were first put to use by the Gravettians and expanded dramatically during the Magdalenian Period.

Africa

This lecture introduces the Holocene (around 10,000 BCE) and its consequences for the development of social forms. 

It is often argued that the Holocene set the stage for agriculture. This lecture starts from this premise, and demonstrates that the Holocene also set the stage for an expansion of First Society cultures. By 3,000 BCE, around the time we see the first cities in Mesopotamia, we see extensive First Society cultures developing in areas of particularly rich and diverse flora and fauna. 

The most notable of these was the emergence of fish-based and ocean-shore societies that spread rapidly by 3,000 BCE especially in the Alaskan-Canadian Pacific Region. That culture has its origins with the Jomon in Japan. The first part of the lecture, therefore, covers the civilizational arc around the northern Pacific from Japan to the Haida. The common threads are salmon fishing and the pit house. The pit house tradition was one of the most extensive and long-lasting architectural traditions in all of history. I discuss the Haida to emphasize the affluence of this culture and to review their extensive architectural world-view.

Around 3,000 BCE, if not earlier, another affluent First Society emerged in the lower Mississippi River area. Their contribution comes in the form of mounds and plazas. These are basically man/woman-made sacred landscapes that are the settings for ritual ceremonial events that last for weeks or longer during the winter or spring. People traveled from very far away to these places. The shamans who controlled them lived at the sites year-round. The mounds were built most likely by the visitors as part of the ceremony itself. They were at the center of an elaborate ceremonial landscape where people came to exchange goods, socialize, and partake in long, sacred dances.

The lecture discusses the sad legacy of these mounds and plazas today in the U.S. It is estimated that about 98% are no longer extant, leaving us little clue about the extensive nature and significance of this landscape.

Japan

At the core of the lecture is a map that differentiates the forest- and shore-based societies of the north and the emerging monsoon-based societies around the equator. It is to the latter that the word ‘civilization’ is often linked. What tends to be forgotten in that narrative is the emergence of the pastoral tradition and its new relationship to animals.

Pastoralism developed in Africa and West Asia and had a huge impact on the social structure in the area of Africa-Eurasia. The lecture introduces the difference between Pastoralism and Agro-pastoralism. The examples of pastoral societies that still exist are the Dinka in Sudan and the Maasai in Kenya.

The Maasai arrived in Kenya around 1500 CE and, importantly, are not “indigenous.” However, they are nonetheless part of a pastoral tradition that goes back to 7,000 BCE and that has its origins probably in what is now the Sahara Desert. As the desert expanded, pastoral communities had to find special ecological niches for themselves, such as in Southern Sudan. While it seems difficult to compare the Maasai (cattle) with the Haida (salmon), the point that is worked out in this lecture is the emergence of two types of vastly different yet affluent cultures, neither of which are agriculturalists.

One of the prime contributions that pastoralism makes to civilizational narratives is the idea of sacrifice. It pervades many modern religions – Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam in particular.

Karnataka

This lecture is dedicated to agro-pastoralism, where agriculture and pastoral traditions blend into a single village-based worldview. Pastoralism and agro-pastoralism develop more or less at the same time, but in different eco-landscapes. The emergence of agro-pastoralism begins around 9,000 BCE and involves the concentration of energy around a single set of plants. Whereas First Society people used many plants in various ways, agriculturalists began to elevate one or two above all others. This can be described as grain-centrism, the consequences of which for the social and spiritual world were enormous. The emphasis of worship began to shift from ancestors to deified plants – gods that lived ‘to be eaten.’  

Göbekli Tepe must have played a role in this since it is situated at the very heart of the revolution of spiritual sensibilities between the 10th and 8th millennium BCE. Though excavations are not finished, it certainly was one of the most important ceremonial and ritual centers of the age. People must have come from long distances to participate in events here. As settled society matured, so did its physical structures. Çatal Hüyük played was close to an important source of obsidian, needed for sickle blades. Obsidian intensified grain production and specialization, creating the need for grain storage and protection.

At the conclusion of the lecture I discuss the general parameters of a village. Village Worlds once constituted a huge portion of global worldview. This is increasingly under threat with the growth of cities national interests.

Turkey

The first four centers of agriculture were Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus region, and China. These places expanded outward from a clear center. Different is the story of Europe, where the agro-pastoral revolution arrived after expanding westward and northward from Mesopotamia, starting 5,500 BCE and reaching Ireland around 4,000 BCE. There were two main tracks, one overland through Romania and Germany, and one along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The latter produced a remarkable architectural legacy in the form of an assortment of different monuments made of large stones; thus the moniker megalithic. However, it was not just stones that were important, but also the sacred landscapes where people met to dance, socialize, remember the dead, and have feasts. This lecture covers the different types of architecture that were produced during this period. Today only a small fraction of these structures remains, many having fallen victim to urban expansion, farming, and road construction.

The highlights of the lecture are Newgrange and Stonehenge. Newgrange was a spectacular engineering feat, a clock with one hand, so to speak; it was at the center of a vast sacred landscape that must have attracted people not only from Ireland for its – probably annual – ritual and ceremonial events. Stonehenge was an equally complex place that served as a key festival site between 3,000 and 2,000 BCE. 

This lecture does not cover developments in central and continental Europe. For that material please consult Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective.

At the same time as the expansion of the agro-pastoral tradition across Europe, we see in Malta the emergence of a unique culture built not around
self-sustaining agriculture, but a religious economy. As difficult as it might seem to the modern mind to imagine, this site in Malta was one of the first great regional sites of the world – perhaps even more important than Stonehenge, with which it has parallels. People came from afar by boat to visit one of the temples, to experience dreams/visions bringing them closer to the ancestral world. How exactly the various temples worked is not known, but particularly noteworthy is that the temples were designed with models – actual small models – in mind. What this modeling served is not known. This can be related to the ‘model’ culture of Egypt, in order to question the notion of architectural ‘origins.’ It is often thought that architecture begins with the desire to protect oneself from the elements. This is an Enlightenment fantasy that has no real relevance in the ancient world. The better explanation appears to be that architecture begins as a model – as a scaling down (Malta) or a scaling up (Egypt).

Mediterranean

This lecture covers the East Asian agricultural/horticultural worlds. I start with Hemudu, one of the first places where rice was grown agriculturally. The expansion of rice to the islands would come, however, remarkably late. First there was the Polynesian expansion, which did not involve rice, but a host of plants that were connected to solving the problems of food, clothing, building materials and the like. This ‘civilizational  package’ was highly mobile and brought by boats all the way to Hawai’i.  This expansion was followed by a rice-centric package that was more singular in focus. The two examples are in Japan and the Philippines.

Melanesia

This is a long lecture that can easily be shortened or split into two. It covers the emergence of cities in the Tigris-Euphrates marshes. Unlike the conventional approach, which ‘naturalizes’ this phenomenon as part of the inevitable march of civilization, I want to make sure students realize that at that time, the first cities were highly speculative and filled with extreme risk. They had economies that had never been attempted before, namely single production economies (think of the story of steel in Korea) that were vulnerable to the vicissitudes of nature and humanity. This required a stronger, centralized relationship between religion and state. The temple became an instrument of power and control. The concept of Theocratic Urbanism that I introduce at the end of the lecture tries to bring home the fact that temple-based urbanism has a long history in Asia and is still going strong today.

Israel

This lecture introduces what I call the “Social Package” that travelled from Africa from around 60,000 BCE throughout the entire globe. Traditionally, the emphasis has been on tools and weapons; here I want to emphasize the integration of tools with art making, hut making, and dance. The tendency in the scholarship has been to see these things as separate and to focus on ‘firsts.’ The point I want to make in this lecture is to focus on the time when the various elements of social functioning cohered as a mobile platform. It was this mobile platform that allowed humans to leave Africa and colonize the world.
 
This “Social Package” begins to take shape around 150,000 BCE as evidenced in Blombos Cave in South Africa, thus its significance in the lecture.
 
The end of the lecture focuses on the !Kung, who are among the last surviving Haplogene A people, of whom we are all descendants. They have been called “hunter-gatherers” but I argue that this widely used scholarly category belittles the complexity of their culture. 
 
Sadly their existing is under severe threat from the construction of game reserves, and now mining. I want the lecture to remind us that the world of First Societies is not over and not a ‘stage’ in the progress toward civilization. First Society people are still among us. What is our responsibility to them, now that they are on the verge of extinction. 
 
So the over-all thrust is 1: What is it that makes us social creatures 2: The First Society is closer to us – all of us - than we think 3: First Society people still exist and we should think about the impact of our world on theirs.

South africa

Denver, usa

First Societies

This course approaches architecture as a form of knowledge like cinema, literature, or history. Except unlike these other mediums, it is both aesthetic, intellectual, spatial and material. It is both haptic and contemplative.
Architecture defines who we are. It is a potent tool for the construction of gender identities, class, self and the other.
It helps internalize religious beliefs, political ideologies, and all sorts of power relations. 
Just think of the organization of your classroom so you can see how the roles of students as listeners and peers and teachers as speakers are codified.
Architecture creates, normalizes and naturalizes distinctions between men, & man and nature.
 Architecture defines reality and our values.

Global architectural histories undermine the spurious mythologies of race, nationalism, and ethnicity often at the heart of political conflict. They illustrate architectural objects while locally manifested, are invariably impacted, manipulated, or redefined by global vectors such as technologies that travel across space and time.

These technologies provide students with critical knowledge and skills to understand their built environment as situated within wider networks of place and more complex trajectories of time. Such a consciousness of cultural identity as multivalent and mutable equips students to augment nationalist frameworks with global frameworks.

Students can begin to perceive themselves as both national and global citizens. The multiplication of loyalty is a grass roots effort towards producing a generation that will be able to negotiate national and global interests with greater care and delicacy.

Dadu

The lecture today looks at horse and camel as vital technologies of globalization. The transformation of camel from a food and textile source to a draft and saddle animal, likewise, the re-envisioning of horse beyond a source of meat, bones and skin into riding animals turned them from food and things into technologies. They introduced easier ways of traversing and living in inhospitable climates.  Camels brought the ability to carry goods while horses brought speed to travel. Portability became possible. Both did not need extensive investment in roads and infrastructure that the wheel and carts would require. Carts and chariots needed state institutions, bureaucracy, army, and writing…inventions of the agrarian and sedentary cultures. Earliest Camel and horse cultures could trade, accumulate wealth, and prosper without these trappings.

This lecture argues that architectural forms were significantly impacted by the proliferation of road networks in the pre-modern world. Specifically three types of impact can be observed across the 5 case-studies:
Changes in built form: 
	1) The expansion of empires along road networks precipitated the standardization and replication of certain built forms in order to create a homogenous visual order in the empire as well as provide infrastructure for the imperial subjects. One example is the construction of similar tambos (resthouses) and qolqas (storehouses) across the Inka empire. Another is the provision of resthouse temples and trapeangs (water tanks) across the Khmer empire.
	2) As peoples, technologies, and ideas traveled across these roads, architectural ornament and form was significantly hybridized. One example is the square Kufic calligraphy and glazed tile decoration on the Gur-i Amir mausoleum in Central Asia (on the Silk Road) which was influenced by the aesthetics of Chinese pottery and Chinese seal inscriptions. Similarly the Great Temple at Petra (Nabatean) shows a mix of Roman, Assyrian, and Indian motifs. 

B) Symbolic Connections
Road networks allowed empires to consolidate their territory geographically, however, architecture created symbolic connections between the hinterlands and imperial centers. An example of this is the replication of ushnus the ceremonial platform at Cusco—the Inka capital—in various other smaller administrative centers. 
Another type of symbolic connection was that between imperial nodes. An example of this is the Bibi Khanum mosque in Samarqand, Uzbekistan which was modeled after the Begumpuri Masjid in Delhi, India to signify Tamerlane’s sack of the latter city. 

C) Appearance of New Typologies
The spread of religions such as Islam and Buddhism brought or precipitated new typologies of form (such as the mosque and the pagoda) to places such as China. 
Technologies of communication such as the postal system in China necessitated new forms such as the yamb (post office).

Arabia

Two main types of structures associated with Buddhism—the vihara (place of congregation and idol worship) and the stupa (reliquary). Stupa is a place for the storage and veneration of relics associated with the Buddha’s and his disciples bodies. Rituals such as circumambulation define structures such as the stupa. Relics (such as miniature models of the Mahaboddhi temple) proliferate throughout the medieval Buddhist world. Xuanzang travels to India in the 7th cen. to find the “authentic” source of Buddhism, however, with the decline of Buddhism in India after the 13th century, China, Burma, and Sri Lanka become dominant centers of Buddhism.

As Buddhism spreads over the world structures are built in reference to the Mahabodhi temple and Bodh Gaya itself. The decline of Buddhism in India in the 13th century means that Bodh Gaya to fall into disrepair. By the 19th century it is a contested site with Hindus and Buddhists laying competing claims to it.

Damascus

This lecture covers prehistory to the present, demonstrating the enduring and fundamental scope of infrastructure in the construction of society.

Projects also cover a wide geography, demonstrating the universal significance of infrastructure.

What, exactly, is infrastructure?

Common definition is “The basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society of enterprise.” (Merriam Webster) This thusly draws a distinction between built parts of our environment that are designed for human inhabitation and usage and those that facilitate an environment of societal connection and function (as opposed to, primarily, inhabitation).

The examples in this lecture demonstrate some of the most common aspects of these connections, including:

Water Systems
Land Manipulation
Bridges

Egypt

Historians tend to think of human history in terms of major events and famous personalities happening in kingdoms and nation-states--that is in land-bound terms. But as Carl Schmitt, pointed out, some of the most important developments have been connected with the sea and evolving technologies for traversing it and exploiting its resources.

In our Ship I lecture, we looked at the ship as a technical and aesthetic object in ancient cultures like Haida, Minoa, and Egypt. We also discussed the ship as the subject of rituals that shaped architectural and urban design and experience, a physical embodiment of the social order, and a source of formal inspiration.

This lecture presents some of the key ways in which early boats and ships have influenced architecture and organization of space starting some 3000 BCE. Boats and ships are the oldest and most enduring technology of globalization. They not only facilitated repeated attempts of people to spread out of Africa. They produced new type of urban centers, port cities / exchange hubs, trading centers, special building typologies like warehouses and shoreline factories designed especially for export. Today, in our contemporary context, ships have become meaningless vessels: pure instruments of exchange of goods, military surveillance, and naval warfare. But in early fishing communities (Haida), industrial centers (Lothal), imperial temples (Pharaonic Egypt), as well as the contemporary endangered agrarian villages (Toraja) economic function of the ship was integrated into worship rituals of cosmological beliefs of return, animation of all objects and beings with the same spirit, and other spiritual meanings. Ships were sacred, community building, spatial entities. They were meaningful. This lecture is the first of a pair of lectures on ships. Ship II discusses the radical transformation in the role of ships from Renaissance onwards with the growing European hegemony of the world, the development of slave trade, plantation economy, colonization of Americas and Australia.

The role of the wheel in architecture stretches from 3500 BCE when it was first invented, to the present. In fact, many of the future lectures such as the printing press, railways, elevator, automobile, subways, roads II, tourism, airplane, even the computer and the internet are not possible without the invention of the wheel. This lecture however focuses on the impact of the early wheel on architectural expression. Advances in wheel technology were slow; the first wheels were heavy and clunky and yielded little in terms of technological progress. Nevertheless, they captured the cultural and symbolic imagination of many societies. In other words, rather than being used as an instrumental technology the early wheel first appeared as icon, in rituals, or in sculptural aspects of temples, tombs, and graves. More specifically we trace how the chariot as a form of technology influenced architectural form and spatial practice from ancient China to Iron Age Europe, and from the early Roman empire to medieval India. The lecture ends on a polemic note with the Ferris Wheel, asking if the recent possibility of viewing cities from an elevated vantage may be seen as the contemporary form of the chariot. 

Our first set of case studies look at the geographical expanse of chariot burials from ancient China (Shang, Zhou, and Qin dynasties) to Western Europe. Wheeled vehicles symbolized military power and political rank and we see how graves and tomb architecture accommodated chariots in various cultural contexts. Contemporary to Chinese chariot burials are the chariot burials of the Hallstatt and Arras cultures of Iron Age Europe. In medieval India, wheels are manifested in cultural imagination as religious icons in the Hindu temples, specifically the Jagannatha temple and the Sun temple at Konarak. Here the chariot (a symbol of Hindu deities such as the Sun God (Surya) or Krishna) becomes a formal typology of architecture. In Roman Empire, in turn, wheeled vehicle afforded the spatialization of speed e. Hippodromes and circa became key spaces through which the culture of the Roman Empire spread from the center to the periphery through mass entertainment and spectacle related to the wheel. The final case-study of this lecture looks at the recent proliferation of urban Ferris Wheels such as the London Eye and the Singapore Kris Flyer which offer bird’s eye views of their cities. In sum, this lecture looks at the profound impact that the wheel has had on the architectural imagination from ancient to contemporary times.

Europe

Traditional wisdom holds the wheel to be one of mankind’s cleverest inventions and the camel to be one of God’s clumsiest. But from 200-600 CE camel cultures came to dominate the world scene. The invention of Southern Arabian saddle extended possibilities for herders by also making them into trekkers and merchants. The corollary was the monopoly of land trade by camel cultures without dependence on older infrastructure of imperial Roman roads. This reversed the socio economic power relation between sedentary people (who insist on being more civilized) and nomads. The dizzying speed with which Islam spread globally from Bedouin dependent caravan cities in Arabia around this period, cannot be separated from the technological and economic edge that the camel and Arabian saddle gave Bedouins over agrarian and urban societies.  

The 4 case studies (a) Petra’s caravan city b) Al Murrah’s Black Tent, c) Tuareg’s Mat Tent and d) Turkmen’s Trellis Tent, demonstrate that camel technology informed both monumental architecture of caravan cities and lightweight architecture of mobile communities in huge swaths of the world. Our methodological framework approaches history of Arab, Bedouin, African, and Turkmen architecture as the history of technology as opposed to religion and primitivism; extending the history of media and technology beyond Europe and United States. Most productively, it allows us to see beyond the male centricism of Islamic architecture (mosques, palaces, madrasa etc.) and recognize the vital role of women as designers and builders in Muslim societies. The lecture ends by featuring the fate of camel cultures in the age of nationalism and carbon economy. Here we witness the radical reduction of camel centric tents to the imperatives of global image economy.  Postmodern architecture by western architects building in the Middle East reveals the intolerance of the modern, high tech, instrumental system of knowledge to other systems of making sense of the world.

This lecture examines the interrelationship between mapmaking technologies and architecture through the lens of three themes: 1. Pictographic vs. chorographic representations of architecture, 2. The measurement and locative functions of architecture, 3. Architecture and its relationship to topography. The first theme explores how pictographic mapping of architecture tended to represent its symbolic function and likened architecture to writing and thus the built environment as a language of its own, capable of expressing meaning. The chorographic mapping of architecture tended to represent its geographical position and united the manmade world with the natural world, highlighting the connection between man and nature. In the second theme, the lecture explores how architecture has harnessed ways of creating hierarchies, orders, and orientations of Cartesian space, a locative importance that maps and drawings often represent. Although this is often connected to religion, it can also apply to aspects of agriculture, politics, security, and commerce. In the third theme, the lecture explores how mapping land and the natural world has been an age-old activity across cultures with many purposes. Although the practice of studying topography is typically associated with charting the contours of the earth’s surface and determining the natural relationships between different places, architecture has often been deployed as an indexical element of those natural environments, creating a series of unique relationships between buildings, their surroundings, and their global relationships, in both natural and psychological terms. Case studies deployed to explore these themes include the mural paintings at the Mogao caves in China, the architectural iconography of the Ottoman explorer Piri Reis, 19th century geographic science and cartography in Germany, the relationship between aerial photography and architecture, as well as the evolving relationship between GIS and the built environment.

The case-studies in this lecture will investigate how miniatures, souvenirs, and replicas work as architectural technologies of communication and movement. The objects under investigation here all point to movement and or transportation in some form or the other. Contrary to the primary function of architecture as an inhabitable space or form of shelter, miniatures and souvenirs are often scaled down versions of an original that are used as fetishes or objects of sentimental value. Replicas while they can be built to architectural scale derive their value less from their utility as inhabitable spaces and more as referents for an original. 

This lecture looks at the phenomenon of reproducing architecture either at a smaller scale as portable objects or at a 1:1 scale to physically recreate buildings that are geographically distant. For example, the mingqi houses of Han China and the miniatures of Nyarit and Chan Chan cultures of South America were portable devices that “travelled” symbolically between the realms of the living and the dead and possibly to the afterlife beyond. The courtyard house miniatures of Seljuq Persia too were meant to be given (possibly as New Year gifts) and were portable representations of slightly illicit activities such as drinking and playing music in Islamic Persia. And the souvenirs of the Eiffel Tower were meant to be portable mementos –often worn on the human body—that circulated in spaces where the “original” could not have been. Even in the case of “fixed” architectural representations such as the tiangong logue—there were aspects of movement as the miniatures were meant to represent an idealized place (Pure Land) that was elsewhere and the miniatures were used as a means of meditation that would transport (transcendentally) devotees to this higher realm of consciousness. Similarly, with the replica of the Eiffel Tower in China—the ideas regarding French culture and lifestyle travel from one part of the world to another and “visiting” the replica of the Eiffel Tower in China becomes a surrogate for travelling to Paris. 

Objects such as the mingqi from Han China and the architectural miniatures from the Nyarit and Chan Chan cultures of South America were meant to communicate information of the living world in the afterlife of the dead. The miniaturized representations of Buddhism’s Pure Land in the tiangong logue were meant to communicate aspects of religious transcendence and the heavenly kingdom. Similarly, courtyard house miniatures from Seljuq Persia were representations of the musical and celebratory rituals that took place in covert spaces away from the eyes and surveillance of the ruling clergy at the time. In terms of contemporary architecture, the technological feats of icons such as the Eiffel Tower were communicated through small size souvenirs as well as full-scale replicas. In sum, this lecture looks at the history of architectural reproduction for mass audiences and the various forms of portable architecture from ancient times to the present.

China

Architecture has long acted as a form of timekeeping, though what constituted time and how it was defined across history and cultures varies greatly. Contrary to our contemporary relationship with time as precisely measureable and something that individuals can control; historic communities had a more reverential attitude to time. This is seen in the sacred rituals practiced within and around architecture that also told of the movement of stars and the passing of seasons. The control of time was an important feature in imperial expansion and communicating its importance from the center to the periphery of empire was crucial task to organizing subject populations from ancient Rome to the British colonial project. Global religions such as Islam and Christianity too sought to control time (both quotidian time as well as exceptional time) and make it a function of religious order. Finally the rise of capitalist economies saw the emergence of various forms of architecture that disciplined human bodies and made them more efficient workers.

This lecture explores that role through six examples (Stonehenge & Newgrange; Tower of Winds; Pantheon; Minaret of the Grand Mosque of Damascus, Ghanta Ghar (clocktower); and Grand Central Station) that cover a wide swath of time and space. These examples are considered through three central themes:

Ritual: Architecture as an intermediary of a religious, pious, or cultural ceremony and their associated acts as dictated by time. Here we see most clearly how architecture plays a role in enhancing the dramatic effects of time for example through light and shadow or through iconographic references to mythological characters. While this architecture played an important role in “taming” time—i.e. offering a predictability to what was otherwise inscrutable it also amplified the mystical qualities of time.

Guidance: Architecture as an intermediary in navigating and resolving the challenges posed by time, such as seasons, harvests, and weather. Here we see architecture working as a scientific instrument of time keeping and an increasing desire to match ideals architectural forms with more precise methods of time keeping.

Efficiency: Architecture as a streamliner of time, as an extension of capitalist logic, and as a system of human productivity. Here we see architecture performing the work of disciplining human bodies and subjecting them to more efficient means of labor extraction. This form of architecture can be seen as ordering individuals and communities according to a world-view of production and efficiency. 
 
This lecture spanning from 3000 BCE to the present is a mere glimpse at the way in which societies have used architecture to tell time and record its passing. While some examples are more global than others, in that they show the influence of time-keeping from a distant culture; others are more regional or even local phenomena. Yet we can say that using architecture to document and communicate the importance of time has been a global preoccupation for several centuries.

This lecture considers some of the different modes in which architectural knowledge has circulated since the fifteenth century. Today, in our contemporary context where rapid and economical reproductive technologies are available to many people, we have come to think of written texts and photographic images as the primary means through which architectural knowledge circulates. If we consider the period before printed works were widely available, the architects themselves can be understood as the primary vectors of architectural knowledge. The best-known example of this is the “grand tour” of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, when architects and artists traveled in the company of young elite European men completing their education by traveling through London, Paris, Venice, Florence, and Rome. It was through this means that neoclassical architecture came to dominate European taste into the nineteenth century.

The five case studies discussed in this lecture complicate our understanding of the circulation of architectural knowledge. They show that objects like the hand-printed Topkapi Scroll, and other agents including Indian Ocean merchants in Zanzibar, the conquistadores in Peru, have stimulated the spread of architectural ideas. And even when knowledge was disseminated through the movement of specific individuals such as the Jesuit missionaries in the Qing emperor’s court or the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, the results were never entirely predictable nor unilateral.

East africa

This lecture is a comparative study between two types of architectural models: the small scale bure kalou (spirit houses) of the Fijian people and Fillipo Brunelleschi’s proposals for the dome of the Santa Maria Novella in Florence Italy (Duomo from now on). These two case-studies were specifically chosen to complicate the contemporary definition of an architectural model as a three-dimensional representation of a building created by a designer in order to communicate his/ her vision to a client or builder on site. While this was certainly true for the Duomo models created by Fillipo Brunelleschi which were meant for his client/ patron and craftsmen on site; the model bure kalou of the Fijians were in fact meant as ritual objects that priests used to communicate with spirits and gods. However, as this lecture shows in pre-Christian Fiji the model bure kalou were often created by the same priests and elder men who made the full-scale bure kalou. Similar to Brunelleschi’s models, most of which were created for a powerful and wealthy patron, model bure kalou were made by and for the elite of Fijian society. 

Following European colonization and mass conversion of Fijians to Christianity in the mid-nineteenth century, model bure kalou became collectors objects—taken by Europeans from Fiji to museums and ethnographic collections in Europe and the United States. As commodities in a global trade, model bure kalou were no longer created for religious purposes, but for new patrons who were eager to show them off as specimens of a “primitive culture”. In addition, all of the original bure kalou of Fiji were destroyed during the process of Christianization; model bure kalou are now the only evidence of these important structures of pre-Christian Fiji. Meanwhile, Brunelleschi’s wooden models of the Duomo are also preserved in museums in Italy: now serving as signs of his genius and exemplars of Renaissance innovation. 

By juxtaposing the model bure kalou with a model of the most iconic Renaissance building, this lecture seeks to broaden the definition of an architectural model beyond its narrow Eurocentric framework. The expert craftsmanship of the model bure kalou and its extrapolation in monumental spirit houses complicates the narrative of Fijian architecture as primitive and without structural finesse. Meanwhile, the models of the Duomo seek to reframe Brunelleschi as a singular Renaissance genius working alone to solve one of the greatest technological feats of his time. Instead, models produced by many other architects and craftsmen were crucial to the innovations in the Duomo. In short, this lecture proposes that in the pre-modern world architectural models served many different purposes that do not neatly align with our contemporary understanding of models as objects made in an architect’s studio and presented to clients as a means to gain a project. Instead, architectural models straddled the worlds of designer and patron and religious object and explanatory device, and served as talismans for the maker as well as its audience.

Fiji

This lecture offers a comparison between two architectural treatises: one written in medieval China and the other in Renaissance Europe. While neither of these were the first architectural treatises of their respective languages or cultures, they were amongst the earliest to be printed and widely published thereby making them widely known to audiences within and abroad. What is being examined in this lecture then, is the particular intersection of a technology of communication (printing) and a modality of architectural knowledge (the treatise). Taken together the combination proved to be a powerful aspect by which architectural information moved from one part of the world to another.

In comparing the Yingzao Fashi to the General Rules of Architecture we can detect many points of similarity. First, both books were written at a time of political tumult and social upheaval. The royal patrons of both these treatises understood that architectural standardization would provide the veneer of stability and unity in a time of great uncertainty. 

Second, the Yingzao Fashi and the Rules were not simply manuals written for masons or illiterate craftsmen. They were sophisticated texts that reflected the humanistic concerns of their time in 12th century China and 16th century western Europe.  They brought architecture into discussion with poetry, philosophy, and science in such a way that what had previously been seen as a trade or a craft was now elevated to the level of fine art. 

Third: written during periods when printing technology was being used to disseminate ancient texts, the Yingzao Fashi and Rules also played a large part in creating civilizational identities across time and space. The Yingzao Fashi was printed when the written word of Buddhism and the translation of ancient Buddhist texts into vernacular languages like Chinese, Japanese, and Korean created a common civilizational core for medieval societies in East Asia. Architectural knowledge from the Yingzao Fashi also moved within this new community: Buddhist temples built 200 years apart in China and Japan show the same details of bracketing taken from the Yingzao Fashi. In the case of Renaissance Italy, it was classical Greece and Rome that provided the civilizational foundations for a new interconnected Europe. Architectural treatises such as Serlio’s Rules circulated amongst a new knowledge of classical philosophy and the forms of building that Serlio prescribed became the grammar of a European civilization that saw its roots in ancient Greece and classical Rome. 

Today, we take printed books for granted—and architectural manuals can be freely downloaded on the internet—and we seek no deeper meaning in the architectural treatises, if they can be called such, of our own times. However, the exercise of composing and then printing an architectural treatise in 12th century China or 16th century Italy was a formidable task, it was one that required its authors to dedicate much of their lives to as they synthesized and codified vast amounts of knowledge and practical information from various sources into a single source.

St. peter’s basilica

This lecture focuses on how architecture and landscape have functioned in oral societies. 
For this we roam not the world but instead concentrate on different people of the Colorado Plateau in the Four Corners area in Western United States (at the intersection of the states of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona). Oral societies have created a different system of knowledge than literate societies; they do not see the nature-culture, and epistemic-technic divide at the heart of cultures with scriptures; science and cosmological belief bleed into one another; art, architecture, and construction was a form of prayer, living human’s facilitation of the Sprit with its magical powers; it was communication across different dimensions of consciousness (eg living & dead; animate and inanimate; human & animal). 

This lecture takes two tacks for explaining how different typologies of art, architecture, and landscape invented by oral societies in Colorado Plateau are motivated and mobilized.
a)	Detail the properties of different typologies. 
b)	Study specific examples of specific typologies 

Talk of typologies has the danger of making oral cultures look ahistorical. Case studies ensure specificity of time and space; uniqueness of an example; continuity and innovation. We reject the term “prehistory” used to talk about the material culture and systems of knowledge of all cultures without writing, while reserving the word “history” only for written cultures.

Chaco canyon

Salt lake city, utah

Technologies of Movement and Communication

Appreciation develops from understanding.  The goal of this course is to introduce and foster an understanding of architecture as a central component of the built environment and of the ways in which architecture exemplifies cultural values.   
Architecture is all around us and part of our daily lives.  It refers not only to buildings: architecture is human settlement, the physical settings made by humans for their traditions, rituals, living, working, and community-building.  It is the house, street, city, temple, church, theater, city hall, market, park, and garden.  It embodies the relationship between humans and the natural world, and represents our most basic need for shelter, as well as our loftiest aspirations.
You will begin to learn architecture's story this term by studying its history and developing a visual awareness of the built environment. You will learn to recognize architectural features and to describe these using appropriate vocabulary, and in doing so, come to notice and care about architecture.  By understanding architecture’s past, you become aware of its present and can begin to imagine its future.

This course serves as an introductory course to the history of ancient built environments. We will become familiar with the language of built environments including the vocabularies of architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.  We will also be introduced to ideas that have shaped the cultures we know today, from the Western Culture of Europe to that of China, India, and some of the many cultures of the African continent. This is a survey course and an introductory course, so we don’t expect you to come with specific knowledge but we do expect you to engage the material with curiosity and rigor. 

Before we begin, it is important to consider the core objective of the course. Many courses in architectural history have strong global foundations, however, they generally remain tied to traditional European stylistic categories such as “Classical Greek,” “Byzantine,” “Romanesque” and “Gothic.” In this course, we hope to strengthen the global perspective by treating “western” and “non-western” material in less isolation through cultural and environmental lenses. We want to create a deeper understanding of commonalities across diverse geographical areas by examining, in a more holistic manner, how different cultures relate to their built and natural environments. 

Additionally, the study of architecture's history has tended to focus on buildings as objects in isolation.  Our approach is to emphasize a humanistic reading, to look at individual monuments as elements of human settlements that can tell us the story of human history. We do so by approaching architecture as place-based, culturally inscribed, and environmentally-shaped.

Today's monuments range geographically from Korea to France, England, Ireland and Egypt, and in date from the 5th to the 1st millennia BCE. What unifies them is their use of stone - used for a range of building types that speak to a human desire to provide enduring monuments on the landscape.

While we may have monuments that have endured from very early dates, we don't always have full knowledge of why they were built or what purpose they served. Our earliest examples today date to a period before recorded history, though keep in mind that written languages developed at very different dates around the world.
We refer to those cultures who did not record their stories in a permanent way as 
pre-historic.

Ireland

Lecture 3 continues an examination of materials and explores the broader context within individual monuments were sited, looking at the settlements that preceded the emergence of cities, which will be the topic of Lecture 4. 
With these we address several among the sites of the world's earliest civilizations, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and Mesoamerica.

Korea

While small villages comprised the earliest settlements, we can also identify the beginnings of early urban settlements if we define urban as a center of population, commerce, and culture - a town of significant size and importance.  We can recognize these settlements as constituting a series of networks, from social networks and governmental systems to modes or systems of commerce, trade, and production. A city is the result of urbanization, which can be thought of as a process of making a permanent settlement. An aspect of the city that is important to us in this course is the system of infrastructure- the roads, the places for markets, the trade networks, and the control of water. 

This lecture will introduce vocabulary of settlements and urbanization as a part of the history of built environments. It will also explore selected comparisons of places and cities as a means to develop our ability to read the urban landscape, for its differences and for its similarities. If we begin to compare such patterns and infrastructures we can identify five primary morphological components common to emerging cities, both in Mesopotamia and in the Indus Valley: wall, citadel, temple(s), granary/food storage, and residential structures. We will briefly apply these same ideas to a city in China, as a means to understand how cities are shaped by place and by culture. By focusing on these built structures we can then understand more fully the relationship between the built, the environment, and the culture, the essence of the city. 

This is the first of a series of lectures that introduce sites of the world's earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Aegean, and China. The Sumerians (ca.4000-2300 BCE) and Assyrians (ca.2500-650 BCE) of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) developed the first cities but were also highly warring cultures, resulting in a series of successive rulers within the region. To the west in the Aegean (modern Greece), the two interrelated civilizations of the Minoans (ca.1600-1400 BCE) and Myceneans (ca.1600-1200 BCE, developed at a later period and established architectural forms important for subsequent developments in ancient Greece.

This is the first of two lectures that focus on architecture and ritual, exploring the ritual spaces and architectural forms that developed along with enduring religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism. These religions both originated in the Indian subcontinent and were later exported along trade routes, taking hold across Asia. Both symbolically and architecturally, the religious monuments we'll now explore demonstrate strong ties to the landscapes of their settings.

Indonesia

This lecture is the first of a sequence of two lectures that focus on the building of empire, looking at the empires established in Rome, China and Central (or Meso-) America. We will look at the architectural forms and effects on the built environment of these political systems.

In the case of Rome and China we are discussing vast territorial holdings and long durations - and we have a great deal of information about each of these empires. The situation in Central America differs in that we have far less knowledge of the cultures that controlled areas of central Mexico -in the west- and the Yucatan Peninsula -to the east, but here too we find civilizations of long duration.

We also find some common traits within the built environments of these areas. And, importantly, we have evidence of city and empire building at a far earlier date than was once understood. Building and infrastructure were one key to establishing empire: roadways, water sources.

Equally important was the establishment of clearly defined cosmological understandings within a culture - these then were inscribed upon the built environment. And a given political entity could then establish and make visible its territorial control through the replication of these forms.

We can talk about the ancient Roman, Chinese and Mayans building in their own image, leaving a mark of dominion across the landscape. How each of these cultures did so is the topic of today's and next lectures.

This lecture will focus on the building of empires, how were the empires manifested in the built environment?  We have looked at Rome and then moved to Meso or Central America, where we will pick up today and finally to China. These were distinct empires, sharing characteristics but as with all of the built environments we have studied, there are specific response to place, to landscape, to environment, to culture, and to practices including trade, politics, and power.

The three distinct empires that we have studied are brought together in these two lectures so that we can not only learn about them as important and significant empires who have shaped culture in many ways, even today, but also so that we can learn to compare and consider how we might read difference and similarities in the built environment. It is often when we compare places or practices that we can see the details more carefully, that we can begin to question our assumptions. We will explore how while building and infrastructure were one key to establishing empire: roadways and water sources were important as was the establishment of clearly defined cosmological understandings within a culture – and how these then were inscribed upon the built environment.

This lecture will focus on the question of how did secular developments and trade influence the form of cities in the later medieval period?

The increasing importance of cities as places of trade, commerce, defense, and culture is a development that parallels the rise of Gothic architecture in Europe. A part of the rise of the city reflects the growing significance of building and environments that are not tied to the church or to religious institutions but instead serve the needs of trade, commerce, defense, culture, and of course, residence. To understand these cities, we will look at a series of cites as well as their medieval castles. Both relied on well-built fortifications and defensive architecture. They both were able to control access to the interior and thus could collect taxes from merchants or others entering the city or castle. This will bring us from new towns in France and Italy as well as SE Africa.

There are characteristics of medieval cities that we can describe:
•	Cities were often very compact, minimizing circumference
•	Central squares would become increasingly important
•	Guild halls or other forms of merchant and trade elite become increasingly important
•	Cathedrals or other major religious and cultural sites were important- often distinct from or a distance away from markets and trade centers, but not always
•	And finally, due to density the round city often made the most sense as it was te best use of space... some scholars (Vincent Scully) refer to this as an organic system or urban plan.

Italy

Globalizing a Humanities Approach to Architectural History

This course presents a series of six introductory lectures describing the characteristics and global history of so-called ‘rock-cut’ architecture, or the subtractive architecture that is embedded within a native geological mass. Such structures are found worldwide, as residences, churches, shrines, meditation spaces, civic structures and tombs – rock-cut architecture occupies a central place in many global civilizations. It even persists into the present day in forms such as subway systems, underground market spaces, and the occasional itinerant work of architecture. The goal of this modules is to enable teachers of architecture and art history to present this material in a conceptually rich and globally situated manner. One of the key ways in which it engagse the global history of the rock-cut will be through the framework of structures. The space-shaping potential of the freestanding structural form is the hallmark of tectonic architecture – from the beams and columns of Greek temples to the flying buttresses of the Gothic Cathedrals. In ‘rock-cut’ architecture, the structure is deeply integrated with the native earth, with structural properties that derive directly from the geology of the site and place. Construction is focused on material to be removed, not structure to be assembled. The native stone guides the gravity forces around the carved space, not to a ground plane below, but simply deeper into the earth – a resolution of forces that can never be precisely determined. This property will be emphasized to adduce discussions that are both philosophical and practical.

This lecture will introduce the theoretical basis to ‘chthonic’ work, in contrast with tectonic.  Shown as residences, churches, shrines, meditation spaces, civic structures and tombs, rock-cut architecture occupies a central place in many global civilizations - even persisting into the present day in forms such as subway systems, underground market spaces, and the occasional itinerant work of architecture.  In ‘rock-cut’ architecture, the structure is deeply integrated with the native earth, with structural properties that derive directly from the geology of the site and place.  Construction is focused on material to be removed, not structure to be assembled.  The native stone guides the gravity forces around the carved space, not to a ground plane below, but simply deeper into the earth – a resolution of forces that can never be precisely determined.  This property will be emphasized to adduce discussions that are both philosophical and practical.

This lecture provides an interpretation of the Pharoanic architecture of the Nile River valley through the lens of the chthonic.  Beginning with the Old Kingdom, this lecture argues that the iconic forms – from the mastaba to the stepped pyramid, and eventually to the great pyramid complexes of Cheops - are proto-chthonic ‘mountains’ created over burial sites: Pyramids as shaped mountains, in conversation/ on cross axis with the flowing water of the Nile. During the middle Kingdom, the Pharoahs abandoned the abstract pyramid and adopted the strategy of actual burial within the mountain sides, fully realizing the chthonic potential of the earlier pyramids. The funerary complex of Queen Hatshepsut formalized the procession from the river into the eastern mountains.  Later burials in the Valley of the Kings and Queens took the dead further into the chthonic mass of the earth.
From this chthonic understanding, the ‘free’ standing temple at Karnak can be seen as a constructed ‘replica’ of a chthonic structure, evidenced not only by the massiveness of the columns and wall of its internal structure, but in particular by the massive mass-like quality of its so-called ‘pylon’ facade, which is better read as the truncated front of cliffs that much of the Pharonic chthonic architecture is cut out from.   In the New Kingdom, Ramses created the landmark Abu Simbel - a temple within the native stone, with a sculpted entry portal in his own image.  The royal body manifested as the mountain.

Concurrent developments in Mesopotamia display similar chthonic roots.  Beginning with the ziggurat form as a ‘sacred mountain’ – a mass containing the source of all life, reaching towards the sky with labyrinth-like passages and openings.  
In Persia, this sensibility is evident in the Tomb of Cyrus outside of Pasargarde – an assembled stone mass that mimics the earlier ziggurats.  Like the Egyptians, the Persians then transitioned to rock-cut tombs for Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes at the Naqsh-I Rustam complex, near Persepolis.  With elaborate facades, the tombs are in dialogue with the assembled buildings of Persepolis – more permanent, eternal residences for the royal family.  With only simple vaults behind, the appearance of the Persian tombs derives more from the process of quarrying stone, than excavating occupyable volumes.  The cliffs of the mountain become architectural facades
As Persian power waned with the arrival of Alexander, rock-cut architecture migrated to new locations.  In Lycia (present day Turkey), rock-cut tombs flourished.  The Lycians had fought for the Persians against the Greeks, and their architecture reflects a hybrid influence.   In the cliffs outside the cities of Dalyan and Myra, the dead were interred in a vertical network of crypts with elaborate facades.  
At the same time, another instance of the chthonic architecture flourished in the Nabataean culture of present day Jordan.  The city of Petra was cut directly into the high canyon walls – elaborate buildings, amphitheaters, markets, and tombs.  The city also had elaborate water channels to gather, control and distribute that most precious resource in the desert landscape.  Located at a crossroads of crucial trade routes, the architecture combined Greek influences with a more local sensibility routed in the reverence of stone.  Several ‘stone god’ altars have been found – unadorned monuments that communicate the sacred nature of the native material.  This rock-cut sensibility extended south to Mada’in Saleh (in Arabia), where 111 tombs were cut into a different desert landscape.

The Persian Empire had a massive influence over the rising Mauryas in India.  After the conquest of Persepolis by Alexander, the craftsmen and thinkers of Persia migrated East to India – taking their expertise and aesthetic ideology with them.  Stone pillars with animal capitals transitioned directly, while other forms had a more tangential influence.  The rock-cut tombs and treasuries of West Asia, may have been the direct precedent for the first Buddhist and Jain caityas and viharas that from the 2nd century onwards gave birth to a full millennia of exploration in the rock-cut and the mass assembled (stupa). 
From South Asia, the Buddhist carried their chthonic forms to Central Asia, and from there, along the Silk Routes, to China and onwards to Korea and Japan. In a different form, another Buddhist journey took the stupa form to Sri Lanka and South-east Asia, while, in the meanwhile in South Asia itself, Buddhist chthonic form were transformed into the great rock-cut caves and temples of later Hinduism from the 5th century onwards. This is when the ‘battle’ between the rock-cut and rock-assembled produced some of the finest constructions of South Asian temple architecture, such as those at Ajanta, Ellora, Aihole, Badami, and Mamallapuram.

And then, half a century later, as the chthonic waned in South Asia, massive churches were built in Ethiopia in Lalibela.

Ethiopia

The main theme is the concept of the ‘chthonic-ecology’, where the body of the earth is understood as a living system - soil, earthquakes, snow, water, sun, air interdependencies - that can be characterized as ecology in the modern sense of the word. This is chthonic architecture not as the ‘rock-cut’, as in Afro-Eurasia, but the chthonic as a complete understanding of landscape and the environment: a chthonic ecology.
The lecture begins with the chthonic forms of the Pueblo culture in the American southwest.  The sacred kiva space operates as an earth-bound space, connected to the origin story and reserved for rites of passage.  Similarly, the Mayan culture of Mesoamerica utilized the rock-cut Temple of Malinalco as the initiation site for warriors – a ritual rooted in the natural site and beings.
This lecture then shifts south to the pre-Incan and Incan inhabitation of the mountains and valleys of South America.  The body of the land is entirely determined by the Andean topography, where the mountainous landscape denies any strong conception of the plains, or tabula rasa base for architectural form.  The sites of Caral, Chavin de Huantar and Chan Chan display an chthonic architecture rooted in the site.  This architecture is about the shaping of the [surface of] the earth, of terracing, of going up the side of the mountains, and descending down into valleys, and pools – a complete chthonic ecology.	
Through the Incan cities of Cusco, Ollantaytambo and Machu Pichu, the mountains are a living body, whose life is given in particular by the movement of water, the life-blood. Thus, the flow of water - or gravity -  as a key ‘shaper’ of the chthonic body of the earth. The importance of the relationship between water channeling and terracing as not just ‘technology’ for irrigation, but as a key reading of the process by which the chthonic body of the earth lives and reproduces.

Lake titicaca

This lecture explores the unexpected appearance of rock-cut architecture in more modern context. As we have seen, the chthonic idea ﬂourished as architecture in pre-modern times.  With the onset of modernity, the longstanding separation of the native ground from the capital-A architecture became dominant, particularly with the ascent of the functionalist, materialist and tectonic contentions of architecture. As per the expectations of the European Enlightenment, the empowered individual separated themselves from their dirty, wet beginnings in the ground to a sanitized, free- standing form, or even preferably lifted above the ground, as for instance in Le Corbusier’s conception of the piloti.  Theorists like Semper described the sterotomic as separate from the tectonic – the assembled frame through which architecture emerged. 
Yet the chthonic has persisted… in interesting ways into the modern era. Continuously occupied cites ﬂourished as both above and below ground constructions, like in Byzantine Cappadocia.  Other places began to experience such density of people, that the only available space was underground – use coming ﬁrst through practical need.  This lecture includes utilitarian infrastructure: tunnels, subways, underground cities.  In other places, modern architects – typically in the late modern period (1950s/60s/70s) – began to question the stark division of above ground and underground space, and rediscovered chthonic sensibilities. Modern architecture of Gaudi, Juan O’Gorman and B.V. Doshi demonstrate how the chthonic persists into the present.

Greece

Global History of Rock-cut or ‘Chthonic’ Architecture

This course focuses on the architectural traditions and conventions of East Asia, especially those of China, Korea, and Japan, and highlights the cross-cultural aspects of their great cities and monuments. The aim is to reveal that what has often been considered “traditional” in Asia was actually a constantly evolving process driven by dynamic cultural exchanges among different cultures and civilizations of its extensive regions. “Globalization” is not an invention of the contemporary world, but the driving force behind the development of the great architectural traditions linking different cultures in East Asia.

East Asia is a relatively clear idea defined by geography, culture, political constitution, and history. For more than two millennia, the high culture of the region was part of the Chinese cultural sphere, most centrally defined by the influence of Chinese script, Classical Chinese, and the wide range of cultural practices that it entails. At the same time, East Asia contains a vast diversity of political entities, ethnic communities, and language groups. China is presently a large nation state (roughly the same as the USA) with a long history and many different cultures. During the last 2,000 years since 221 BCE, many empires have been founded on this land. Some of them are bigger than the current China; some are smaller. The dynastic history goes even further back, to the 17th century BCE according to Western scholars or to the 21st century BCE according to the Chinese. And before the appearance of the first dynasties, numerous prehistoric cultures had flourished for millenniums. Hence, the notion of “Chinese” in the idea of the Chinese cultural sphere is similar to a civilizational character, much in the way that ancient Greek and Roman civilization became the foundation of a Western civilization.

We know very little about Neolithic and Bronze Age architecture in East Asia. Many regions were not under centralized governance yet during this period, thus the lack of permanent monumental construction. Housing, often built with temporary material, and often succumbed to the lapse of time and easily vanished in repeated redevelopments during the following eras. The life and history of this remote past survived only fragmentally in legends and artifacts. In recent years, archaeological discoveries added some more substantial evidences to the early settlements throughout East Asia.  Interpretation of the pre-historic era in East Asia has been an important and contentious issue since the late nineteenth century as Japan, Korea, and China sought cultural legitimacy over one another. There have been famous incidences where archeologists have planted false evidence in archeological sites to prove that their country was the earlier founder of civilizations.

Siberia

Fengshui (pungsu in Korean, literally “wind and water”) is a theory in East Asia to identify the best locations in nature for a city or a building. In China and Korea, with the belief that the fengshui of the ancestral tomb or living residence influences the fortune of the descendants and the prosperity of the family, consulting a fengshui master is important for the construction of both residential and funerary architecture. 
Confucianism highlights family values and venerates ancestors. As a result, mortuary architecture is among the most significant architectural types in East Asia. Confucians also believe that “the deceased ancestors should be treated as if they were alive” (shisi rushing) and the afterlife was generally imagined as in a similar fashion as that on earth, with the same spiritual and material needs.

East asia

The practices of laying out cities with regard to the geomantic principles of fengshui, enclosing and subdividing urban space within an orthogonal grid of walls and thoroughfares, and creating a hierarchy of space based upon functional and status considerations makes up one of China’s most significant contributions to the global history of urbanism.  The rational, gridded order of the Chinese city served as metaphor and reinforcement for compelling ideologies of centralized control that found immense appeal among ruling elites in Korea and Japan, where these ideas made up part of the vast intellectual apparatus that accompanied exchange with various Chinese regimes over many centuries.

The extraordinary legacy of art and architecture associated with the teachings of Buddhism constitute one of the most enduring elements of cultural connection among diverse cultures in Asia.  Originating in South Asia, these teachings found multifarious and complex pathways over both land and sea to find followers in cultures as distinct in their values as they separated by geographical distance.  The history of East Asian Buddhist architecture, and Buddhist belief and practice more generally in China, Japan and Korea, echoes broader patterns of cultural exchange among these three regions.  The irony of a non-materialist system of belief generating the rich panoply of architectural forms that justified imperial rule, centralized the control of ruling elites, motivated reform and rebellion in shifting contexts, and aroused violent repression and resurrection is nowhere more evident than in the variety and richness of variations upon Chinese timber-frame techniques that developed in Korea and Japan in the centuries after the introduction of Buddhism.  More than trade, diplomacy or military adventurism, the teachings of the Buddha stimulated the spread and development of the timber-frame, ceramic tile-roofed system of architecture that today is seen as East Asia’s most distinctive visual contribution to world art.

Manchuria

Kagoshima

Buddhist architecture since the 14th century became more and more integrated into local cultures, creating colorful mixtures in philosophy, ritual practice, as well as architectural space, form, and decoration.

Major dynasties and cultural periods in East Asia since the 14th century
Maritime route connection, replacing the land route Silk Road, became the main venue for cultural exchanges. Influences from mainland East Asia on Japan and the Korea Peninsula were mainly from the southeast coast.

Lhasa

This lecture focuses on the palatial residences, together with the surrounding monumental ritualistic structures that legitimatize their claims to rule, highlighting the period between 1400 and 1800 but also tracing its ideological origins to earlier monuments. Centered on the major capital cities of the Ming and Ching dynasties in the continent, the Joseon Dynasty in the Korean peninsula, and the castle complexes of the late Muromachi and Momoyama period in Japan, the city and its architecture was planned predominately as a mechanism of power and symbolism. Though not without dynastic change, civil wars and invasions, the period of 1400-1800 was also a period when the sophisticated cultural traditions of Japan and Korea, as they were identified during the past century, were consolidated. Working within diverse geographical conditions, political systems, economic forces, and beliefs, different regions and periods created a wide range of sophisticated ideas, methodologies, and monuments.

The nineteenth and early twentieth century saw a fundamental shift in the power structure of the world and of the East Asian region. Marked by the loss of the Opium wars, the Qing Dynasty went into radical decline. At the same time, Japan ascended as a world power by quickly absorbing and adapting to Western technology. With this fundamental shift in the power structure of the region, East Asia enters a fascinating, tragic historical period of imperialism and colonialism, of imported modernity and invented tradition that ends in war and destruction at a scale that the world had never imagined. The very idea of architecture was imported and translated by the Japanese Still very much a history that global conflict and arouses national passions, the urban and architectural legacy is to be studied not as part of a nationalist agenda but as part of a structure and network of forces.

Wuhan

The unconditional surrender of Japan and the end of World-War II marked the beginning of a new world order that has directly shaped the environment that we now live in. The ensuing decades of the Cold War saw the rise of communist China, the division of the Korean peninsula into north and south, the disarmament and democratization of Japan and its re-emergence as an economic powerhouse. Even though the conditions of architectural production among the newly-born nation states in East Asia were widely disparate, their architecture shared certain values and directions. In the new global structure of nation states, the new issues of national identity, tradition and modernity, On the other hand, with the onset of capitalism, the growth of the Asian metropolises and its architecture has become a central of twenty-first century world civilization.

Beijing

Literati culture boomed in East Asia since the 10th century. The greatest architectural expression of the literati culture is the private garden, where all intellectual and artistic activities associated with the literati taste took place, such as poetry, calligraphy, painting, qin zither playing, weiqi (go in Japanese) chess, refined theater, and antiquarian connoisseurship.

Penglai

East Asian Architecture from A Global Perspective:  Cultural Transactions and the Development of Traditions

“Sites and Systems of Global Colonialism” is a survey course that introduces students to building cultures, landscapes and urbanisms in an already globally connected world from the colonial era through 1900. The course examines multiple overlapping systems by which the practices of human cultures have come to be interconnected around the world over time. It is a history of the world through architectural evidence, and a history of architecture through a global perspective. 
The “Sites and Systems” approach is informed by systems theory perspectives arising from within the social sciences, especially sociology. It builds on and problematizes the international political-economy methods of World Systems Research and Braudelian approaches by examining specific selected cases grounded in actual cultural-spatial-material conditions. The complex and vital lenses of architectural analysis applied to sites, cities, and material systems, at scales ranging from tectonic details to global infrastructures of exchange, inform and contest our understandings of distributed networks.

Evangelical colonialisms are characterized by combining projects of religious conversion with the use of force to impose dominant trade relations. While religion played a more or less significant role in European moral justification for imposing control over the peoples, cultures and societies of the rest of the world, the evangelizing mission of the Catholic powers of the Iberian Peninsula, now known as Portugal and Spain, were so deeply integrated with the mechanisms of colonial power that it justifies be distinguished from other colonial systems. 

The architectural evidence of Evangelical colonialisms demonstrates the interpenetration of economic and religious imperatives in the formal spatial relationships between the architectures of colonial administration, and institutions of the church. Formal expressions found in the Portuguese and Spanish colonies demonstrate the ways that various European Baroque, Classical, or Neo-Gothic styles were deployed in the pursuit of a joint operation of conversion and control of indigenous populations. These architectures came into being as copies of European precedents taking on a hybrid expression as they bear the imprint of local, indigenous labor and materials.

The site for this lecture is the Presidential Palace, in Mexico City via Cordoba and Sevilla. This lecture will focus on the system of forced displacement using religious and urban architectures built over the remains of indigenous structures. The Spanish method of conversion and occupation requires that existing sites of power, be used as the foundations for new architectures of religion and political control. The Influence of mujedar architectures in New Spain will also be important to the new architectures in Mexico. In this global framing of history, we instead use as our point of entry the establishment of religious orders and their evangelical imperative of claiming for the Catholic Church the newly discovered human souls of the Americas. In this framing, the exuberance of the Baroque treatment of church architecture operates as an instrument of spreading the faith. It operates to compete with, displace, or subsume indigenous beliefs by dramatizing the rapture of the Christian faith.

New spain

The labor system of Encomienda was extended to the Viceroyalty of Peru using the physical forms and institutions of the Spanish Catholic Church and the Laws of the Indies. Similarities with the Inca tribute labor obligations smoothed the transition to the Spanish Encomienda implemented with particular violence in the extraction of silver at the mines of Potosí (Bolivia). As elsewhere, the Encomienda was part and parcel of the Spanish rulers’ obligation to baptize, educate, and care for the souls of the new American Catholics, but it often subjected the encomendados laborers to hardship, abuse, or death. As demonstrated elsewhere the evangelical imperative to convert souls of indigenous Americans provided the underlying justification for a forced labor system of the Spanish Encomienda operating in part through the physical and institutional infrastructures established in hundreds of towns as prescribed by the Laws of the Indies. In the Viceroyalty of Peru (Peru and Bolivia), this system of wealth extraction was brought to bear on intensive mining operations for the extraction of gold and silver. As elsewhere the role of the Spanish Catholic Church is central to the larger social, political and economic system of colonial rule. The infrastructures of road networks, town form, the urban focal points of the Plaza surrounded by religious and political buildings are central to sustaining the far-flung system of colonial extraction. We find that the architectures and cultural systems of the Inca Empire are sometimes erased and sometimes redirected to become a part of the Spanish Catholic cultural system. 

Similar to the New Spain in the lands of the Mexica, The Spanish Crown granted a number of settlers, called encomenderos, with indigenous labor grants called encomiendas. These gave extensive powers to the encomenderos, and allowed them to freely demand whatever services they pleased within their assigned native districts. Through his assignment of power, the encomendero was mainly permitted to require the natives to provide him with forced labor. However, he could also mandate they pay him large amounts of money, and bring him assorted food products and manufactured goods to his house, regardless of the distance. These encomenderos, made vecinos (official citizens of the town) by royal authority, were also allowed to dominate the city council and thus be holders of political power. Throughout we find a complex interplay of erasure, displacement, and syncretic reformation in the architectures of the Spanish Andes. Solares, plots of land distributed by the Crown, were meant to establish Spanish residences and public space in the center of the new city. The colonial period thus permitted the increase of indigenous land ownership by Spanish families, to the point of the best farm land passing from Inca into Spanish hands by the time of independence.

Peru

Over the course of several generations, the Spanish transformed the excellent port of Cartagena into one of the most effectively defended harbors in history. 
Through the fortifications of the port, town, fortified hill, and especially through a series of strategic choke-points between the port, inner harbor, outer harbor and the sea resulted in a deadly gauntlet of remarkable force despite the relatively small number of ships, cannon, and soldiers emplaced there. The greatest test came in 1741 with the British and American Colonial forces of some 27,000 mounted an attack sustained for almost two months only to be turned back when disease, the rainy season and the sheer tenacity of the Spanish defenses proved insurmountable. From this point, the Spanish effectively controlled the flow of gold, silver and slaves in and out of the Spanish Americas. Of particular importance was the unprecedented flow of silver from the Petosí mines of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Bolivia) through Havana (Cuba) to Seville (Spain) and later through Acapulco (Mexico) to Manila (Philippines) and Canton (China).

From the 15th Century through the 19th Century the naval power and ocean-going trade routes determined who is the most powerful empire in the world. By the end 17th Century, the Portuguese and the Spanish had largely been crowded out of the Indian Ocean and Asia by the Dutch and the English, both of whom were already making forays into North America as well.
In this module, we see how the representation of a country on a map of the world using a uniform color and a sharp boundary tends to often exaggerate the homogeneity of conditions within, and the sharp distinctions with the conditions beyond, its borders. Political maps devoid of geological and topographic features, in particular belie a sometimes extreme unevenness of population distribution, access, and degree of control within nation states while seeming to concentrate differences at political boundaries. Similarly, the vast seas separating the populated places of the earth as barriers. However, advancements in seafaring vessels effectively shrank the distances between sites accessible by water transforming the shape of architecture, cities, infrastructures according to the need to exchange goods, people, and ideas. The underlying conditions that must be satisfied before any exchange can take place are precise and unyielding. Maps of the 15th century explorers demonstrate the primacy of the search for natural harbors that are best suited for building defensible fortified-port-canal-factory-house towns. Against the impressions given by most maps, the primary concern of geopolitics has for most of history been less about large more or less uniformly controlled territories, and more about controlling strategic points along accessible coastlines.

The new devices for financial exchange detailed in this sequence of lectures were developed in conjunction with new architectures supporting the activities of merchants and facilitating the accountability and trust that is the basis for the operation of the paper transactions that were central to Europe’s new capacity for flinging itself out across the globe. Company colonialism is the origin of capitalism. It is a system whereby, nation-states outsource the extraction and exploitation to for-profit companies in exchange for an often-exclusive charter fee. Companies relied on a number of financial innovations. Banks and the emerging bond market allowed companies to borrow money to invest in better ships and new routes. The stock market allowed them to sell shares to other owners, both raising capital and diversifying risk. Indeed, this was the key advantage the company had over sovereign fleets. The risk of a single voyage could be pooled among many owners rather than bankrupt a family. As a stockholder, you could hold on the shares and receive the dividend paid once per year upon the conclusion of a voyage, or sell your shares to somebody else for a profit or loss. Initially these were one time deals, shares were liquidated after each voyage. The commodities themselves were worth money, not only in sale, but in what is now known as the “futures” market. You could purchase an option to buy or sell a given item at a fixed price at some date in the future. This is always risky, however, for many this enabled them to know fixed costs months in advance and was worth the risk that they may lose or make money on the deal. 

For defenders of Efficient Market Theory, this is the best thing about capital markets, they allocate capital efficiently to the best performing companies, rewarding success, and the fewer barriers the more efficiently the capital will be allocated. The enlightenment assumption behind this idea is that people never make poor decisions in their own self-interest. Yet the companies are often structured as Limited Liability Companies, meaning the majority owners and operators are shielded from the consequences of their actions by law. Indeed, most companies had a monopoly without competition from their home country. What is more their right to trade was enforced by military power, often leading to outright war. Charter companies also had the ability to negotiate trade, build, and some cases, the license to wage war. Indeed, historian Sven Beckert calls this, “war capitalism,” as capitalism cannot operate in a vacuum of frictionless exchange. It relies always at some point on violence, whether physical or implied through law. This is arguably a more accurate description, because rarely is any form of exchange for profit completed without some violence or coercion at one point in the system from production to consumption. Indeed, most of the growers, harvesters and crafts people for spice, pepper, tea, sugar, cotton or any valued commodity were slaves, chattel labor or serfs. 

We choose company colonialism for the four lectures in this module because the extraction of profits for the benefit of the few is shrouded in a new corporate construct that includes the exertion of power, territorial violence and resource extraction that is the essence of all forms of colonialism. The other aspect of the company colonial system is that the benefits are largely concentrated in particular sites due to the relatively new ability to create wealth from invested capital and compound interest alone, without a marketable skill or product. This new form of wealth is visible as architecture and vital to the emerging modern city. For the Dutch, Amsterdam profits off of the extraction centered on Batavia, two urban sites anchored by the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Both sites illustrate the expression of power and profit through their architectures. Indeed, without the VOC, Amsterdam and Holland itself would be far less wealthy and Batavia would not even exist.

Amsterdam

The United Provinces of the Netherlands was a loose confederation of seven semi-autonomous republican states (Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel, Gröningen, Gelderland and Friesland) that had won independence from Spain during the Eighty Years War (1568-1648).
Dutch national policy was formulated by delegates from the seven provinces at the States-General in The Hague. The war between the Netherlands and Spain was advantageous to English merchants, who could trade in Spanish markets from which the Dutch were excluded. After the peace treaty of 1648, however, Dutch merchant fleets returned to every trading sphere. English merchants had already been driven out of the lucrative East Indian spice trade and soon began to lose markets to the Dutch in Spain, the Mediterranean, the Baltic and the Americas. Unofficial warfare developed as English privateers began seizing Dutch ships and their cargoes. 1617 Koorenbeurs Stock Exchange (Bourse) Damrak, Amsterdam by Hendrick de Keyser (PD)

Netherlands

Calcutta as the English Capital of the Indian Ocean. 
There are two Systems of English Capitalist Power in India
System 1Company Colonialism which in this lecture is defined by economic extractive power of East India Company and how reshapes the world through desire, addiction, wealth, violence and global war.

System 2 is the deployment of Classicism as a means of Imperial Power, Christianity and Colonialism
Calcutta demonstrates the Power of the East India Company in four ways.
1.	Calcutta becomes known as the City of Palaces renowned for its grand architecture
2.	Fort William, the Government House and the East India Company Headquarters (Writer’s Building) form a formal Axis of powerful edifices that anchor the city that will rule British India from 1773 to 1917
3.	Classicism is used to not only imply the imperial power of the East India Company but to demonstrate moral Christian superiority
4.	Calcutta’s inhabitants are all segregated in public by station and by race not merely through architecture but by customs and laws
The 1799 Government House demonstrates the Power of the East India Company in five ways
1.	The resurgence of Classicism and Grandeur as a racial White form of Power versus the “uncivilized” society and its architecture of the region
2.	Emulation of Architecture back in England
3.	Domination of the Landscape using Roman hybrid forms
4.	Marking the Landscape 
5.	Modifying the architectural templates of England for climate, bureaucracy and military order, and important social functions

Calcutta

During the 18th and 19th centuries England develops its colonial infrastructures to become the most successful colonizer in history operating out of its global headquarters, London.
As in the case of Amsterdam, London’s prosperity was derived from extractive activities around the World. In 1688, Protestant Dutch Burgher Willem of Orange became William III of England. Under the Dutch-burgher-turned-King William III, England adapts rapidly to the Dutch system of commerce. England which has a larger population. England also directly controlled lands that provided timber oil, sugar, iron, cotton and tobacco extracted from the West Indies as well as the Americas. The timber along the Atlantic coasts will allow it to build ships to build ships to challenge the Dutch in the Indian Ocean and in South Africa. Thus, London ccombineds the Dutch System with and Mercantilism, and later, coercive industrialization to rule the World for nearly two centuries.
During the 18th and 19th centuries England develops its colonial infrastructures to become the most successful colonizer in history operating out of its global headquarters, London.
As in the case of Amsterdam, London’s prosperity was derived from extractive activities around the World. In 1688, Protestant Dutch Burgher Willem of Orange became William III of England. 
Known as the “Glorious Revolution,” the change of power in 1688 was much more than just replacing one king with another. William III was invited to invade England by powerful members of the English Parliament. One of William’s first actions was to enact a Bill of Rights striking a new balance between royal and parliamentary power. With the erosion of royal sponsored land expropriations and trade monopolies, wealthy merchants and early industrialists were incentivized to expand their activities contributing to a steady expansion of economic activity by a newly powerful merchant-industrialist class. The new era of English Imperialism in London was born out of 5 complementary but distinct systems each with distinctive architectures:
1.	London itself is reshaped by the wealth from its overseas colonies to build squares, new religious monuments and dwellings for the newly wealthy merchants
2.	An Independent Central bank is created to finance war, provide loans, issue bonds and control the currency, paving the way for English laws, ideological systems and Empire to spread around the world and influencing the Neo-Liberal financing system that undergirds global economics in the aftermath of World War Two. The Bank of England and other merchant banks fuel the well-established joint stock company system to more forcefully drive a global system of exchange feeding the ensuing English industrial revolution
3.	A Capitalist legal monopoly in the form of the East India Company extract the wealth of the Indian ocean and concentrates it in the hands of shareholders in London, allowing London to become one of the most powerful cities on Earth. The English “Mercantile System” primarily through the East India Company conjoins state-directed military operations to protect and expand trade relations deemed profitable to the mother country, particularly its capital city, London.
4.	In the 19th Century as England transforms itself into an Empire, London builds the Crystal Palace in order to host the Great Exhibition of all Nations designed to highlight its prominence as a global capital
5.	This rapid growth will come at a cost as urban London becomes over-crowded, giving birth to discontent, violence and crowded slums.

The Triangle Trade system refers to the movement west across the Atlantic of forcibly extracted human beings for slaves who arrive in the Americas to produce raw goods  gold, silver sugar, tobacco, timber, whale oil, and cotton for the Mercantile systems of Europe. 
Those goods are then sent to Europe where they are sold back to the colonies in the Americas and Africa as finished or luxury goods. This is known as mercantilism it is designed to keep the colonies subservient to the capital. Often the goods are used as a medium of exchange for other goods or human beings. Cotton cloth from Manchester or Liverpool for example traded in the ports of West Africa for human beings to be sent to Charleston where they will be sold to grow cotton. Most of the slaves, an estimated 4.5 million slaves were sent to the West Indies  and 5 million slaves went to Brazil, to produce highly desired commodities for global trade.
The “Triangle” in the trade is of course inaccurate. It refers to West Africa as a place, the entire Atlantic Coast of the Americas as a place, and then Liverpool and London as one place. In fact many cities and regions were involved in this trade, in Europe, all coasts and the interior of Africa, the Americas, from coast to interior as well as Asian ports in the Indian Ocean. The Slave Economy is a true global system.

Most histories of this period focus on the twin Revolutions in France and the United States.
However, it was the Slave Revolution in what would become Haiti that changes the world in this period. This lecture explores the the architectures of the French Revolution and Empire through the island of S. Dominique (Haitian) and the Slave Revolution. It emphasizes the importance of of sugar, rum production, plantation slavery and the Louisiana Purchase as understood from the perspective of S. Dominique. In the late 18th Century, the island of S. Dominique was controlled by three colonial powers, France, Britain, and Spain This lecture also examines the Palladian architecture of the U.S. plantation system through the lens of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, as well as in Louisiana. In short, this lecture seeks to reframe world history through what is now Haiti, as it was the most profitable island in the West Indies, with over 400,000 slaves working on sugar and coffee plantations to feeding the fast-growing addiction of Europeans and their colonies, and shaped the vast world around it. Finally, the lecture ends with the ongoing legacies of French colonialism in the present.

There are two systems illustrated here. 
•	System One is the economic system of slavery, sugar, coffee and tobacco production that is an integral part of the Triangle Trade.
•	System Two focuses on global war with the parallel revolutions in France and Haiti, the American Revolution and the mercantilist “quasi-war” between the young United States, the Directory of France and the British Empire. In both cases the need to control trade and keep afloat struggling economies led to violence and the reshaping of the colonial world. Indeed S. Dominque influenced the 1803 acquisition of the Louisiana territory which opened up vast lands for plantations and indigenous displacement in the rapidly growing United States.

Santo domingo

For nearly two centuries, the price of cotton in Liverpool determined the fate of the most lucrative markets in the World. From the displacement of indigenous populations in the American South for cotton plantations, to the massive movement of West Africans to work those plantations. The theme of this lecture is that slavery and the desire for goods such as cotton, sugar, coffee, gold transforms the modern world. The economics of slavery is embedded in the form and creation of architectures from the West Coast of Africa, to the Americas. Without slavery there is no Industrial Revolution, no mass production of textiles, no fashion, no rapid urbanization in England, no railroads, and no modernity. Following the depopulation of the Americas the human costs of colonialism are stark when viewed through the lens of slavery. Slavery was not invented in the colonial period, as many ancient and contemporary cultures throughout the world utilized slaves, often for domestic, sexual, military or menial tasks. In most of these cases slaves were captured in smaller groups during military conflicts or raids to be sold throughout markets around the world. 

Colonialism, however, institutionalized slavery on an industrial global scale, relocating millions of people by force around the world for profit for nearly four centuries. What is more, the argument for slavery, as for the conquest of the Americas and issues of contemporary power, was always framed in religious, moral, biological, health, scientific and market terms.

This site explores the impact of slavery through cotton and the railroad by examining and how the slave economy made through its control over cotton and rice. Savannah, with its famous plan and mythical utopian origins, uses slavery, cotton, rice, and architecture to grow from a small colonial outpost to a lynchpin in the global economy.  Christianity, Classical architectures, the railroad and extractive violent capitalism were used justified inhumanity and cruelty over one hundred years before the present where 13 million tourists stroll through its curated idyllic squares largely ignorant of the town’s history.

Savannah is also a crucial part of the history of the United States. Indeed, most of the famous and beautiful homes that make Savannah such a popular site was built on the profits of the slave trade. The most violent battle of the Revolution took place in Savannah, attended by none other than the future Emperor of Haiti, Henri Christophe. Soon after the war, Telfair tutor Eli Whitney revolutionized cotton production here. The largest industrial plantation in the world called Savannah home. Savannah hosted the largest single slave sale in United States history. Savannah is also where the Civil War arguably began with a highly public and controversial slave smuggling trial. Savannah is also where it ended, saved from destruction by its warehouses full of valuable cotton. Savannah is now a tourist centric town; however, its architecture reveals how it once played a vital role in the slave economy, a legacy that continues to haunt the city.

South  carolina

Carribean

Sites and Systems of Global Colonialism

The first lecture explores how earth has been conceptualized and integrated into African thought and architectural practice as material, metaphor, environment, and intervention over time. Some of the first known man-made environments on the African continent were carved out of rock features in the landscape, and from this point of origin, cultures across the continent would proceed to develop a variety of distinctive architectural traditions and material practices that were regularly governed by the availability of specific materials in their environment, namely dirt, clay, and other substances derived from the earth. Students will engage with these structures using cross-disciplinary methodologies ranging from art and architectural history to anthropology and environmental studies to critically analyze the physical and conceptual strategies deployed at these sites over time and space with regards to the material and meaning of earth. In particular, they will explore how environmental material like earth came to signify important socio-political, cultural, and spiritual messages in the architectural landscape.

The second lecture picks up  where the previous lecture left off, this lecture explores the ways in which earth and architectural practice has evolved in the contemporary period in the context of increased concern around issues of pollution, unsustainable development, and the widespread depletion of natural resources in Africa. Architects are increasingly turning to so-called vernacular materials like earth and experimented with different methods of construction technology in an effort to establish a trajectory of architectural building into the future that focuses on low-cost, low energy built environments constructed from readily available, low-impact materials like earth. As such, this lecture will explore a range of ecologically-related issues and critical methodologies that have thus far been addressed in African architectural production and will explore the ways in which different contexts are responding to contemporary environmental problems on the continent through the use of so-called 'vernacular' materials like earth.

This lecture explores how earth has been conceptualized and integrated into African thought and architectural practice as material, metaphor, environment, and intervention over time. Some of the first known man-made environments on the African continent were carved out of rock features in the landscape, and from this point of origin, cultures across the continent would proceed to develop a variety of distinctive architectural traditions and material practices that were regularly governed by the availability of specific materials in their environment, namely dirt, clay, and other substances derived from the earth. Students will engage with these structures using cross-disciplinary methodologies ranging from art and architectural history to anthropology and environmental studies to critically analyze the physical and conceptual strategies deployed at these sites over time and space with regards to the material and meaning of earth. In particular, they will explore how environmental material like earth came to signify important socio-political, cultural, and spiritual messages in the architectural landscape.

Morocco

Picking up where the previous lecture left off, this lecture explores the ways in which earth and architectural practice has evolved in the contemporary period in the context of increased concern around issues of pollution, unsustainable development, and the widespread depletion of natural resources in Africa. Architects are increasingly turning to so-called vernacular materials like earth and experimented with different methods of construction technology in an effort to establish a trajectory of architectural building into the future that focuses on low-cost, low energy built environments constructed from readily available, low-impact materials like earth. As such, this lecture will explore a range of ecologically-related issues and critical methodologies that have thus far been addressed in African architectural production and will explore the ways in which different contexts are responding to contemporary environmental problems on the continent through the use of so-called 'vernacular' materials like earth.

Algeria

Earth and the Environment in African Architecture

The cultural and artistic traditions that developed around the shores of the Mediterranean have traditionally been studied as autonomous developments. When exchanges or borrowing were acknowledged, they usually focused on the influence that European motifs had on the Eastern Mediterranean, starting in the eighteenth century. The aim of this project is to focus on preceding centuries, illuminating the rich web of cultural, artistic and especially architectural exchanges that crisscrossed the Mediterranean before modernity.
 
The current of such borrowings, adaptations and reinterpretations crossed the Mediterranean, frequently flowing westward rather than eastward. The anecdotal evidence that has been offered for the direction of that flow, which crossed religious as well as national and geographic boundaries, has encountered ideological resistance. Our aim is to focus on the architectural evidence to lay a first systematic and unequivocal basis for the argument that borrowings and cross-pollination gave rise to multiple but related architectural languages across a region roughly extending from the Caspian Sea to the European shore of the Atlantic.
 
While we will rely on visual evidence to remedy the scarcity of textual documentation for such early periods we do not aim to offer formal or typological comparisons. Rather, we intend to ground our discussion historically, formulating hypothesis concerning the physical routes, nodes, workshops and forms of transmission along which ideas, including architectural ones—schemes, motifs, structural systems—traveled, were adopted and adapted.

Pendentive domes—or domes with a circular plan used as vaulting for a square hall—emerged in Byzantine architecture. That well known fact has not, however, been explained. This lecture offers an explanation for the elaboration of pendentives as the result of the encounter of two different architectural practices concerning domes: classical Roman and eastern vaulting traditions. Roman builders made the footprint of vaulting match the footprint of the room or structure that supported the vaulting. Such a system made structural sense and provided the greatest support for the outward thrust of any vaulting system. Thus, for example, rectangular halls were roofed with barrel vaults that were supported along their entire length by the parallel walls of the room beneath, and circular domes capped circular halls. In the eastern Mediterranean, domes with a circular plan were instead built atop square rooms since Mesopotamian times with a technique still in use in vernacular examples. The encounter of Roman builders with eastern traditions produced pendentives domes, which capped square or rectangular halls, giving rise to new spatial effects. The invention of pendentive domes is a particularly important instance of the fruitfulness of exchanges that occurred across the various Christian and Muslim shores of the Mediterranean. 

Rome

This lecture presents early Islamic, or Umayyad, Architecture and its relationship to Late Antiquity. It examines the sequence of well-known Umayyad monuments, which appear to have engaged in a vibrant referencing process that treated Antiquity as a heritage to appropriate, build upon, or, sometimes, to deconstruct.   In that it did not differ much from Latin Europe and Byzantium, both of which looked to the classical heritage as theirs through the lens of Christianity.  Byzantium in particular continued the imperial tradition of Antiquity, with which the Umayyad actively competed in the architecture they built in the own realm, especially in Greater Syria.  This competition allows us to understand the patterns of appropriation, modification, transposition, scaling, and distortion of post-classical elements in Umayyad architecture as a conscious process to chart a new, or, perhaps more accurately, a post Post-Classical architecture. 

The medieval monuments of the Armenian high plateau, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, are typically ignored in histories of art and architecture. Yet they are abundant, sophisticated in design and decoration, and bear inscriptions of historical importance. This lecture will introduce the architecture of medieval Armenia, demonstrating the importance of Armenian monuments for an understanding of the seventh century, when the Armenian plateau was at the center (and not the margins) of world history. Churches such as Mren, Zvartnots, Hripsime, Talin and others were produced at the height, and at the center, of Byzantine, Persian, and Arab conflicts, and thus hold not only architectural but historical significance. Armenia also played a role in the formation of Islamic and Byzantine architecture. In considering this rich and striking corpus of monuments, we thus arrive at a much more coherent picture of the early medieval era than has been achieved previously.

Iran

The Great Mosque of Cordoba, founded around 784 and expanded in the latter half of the tenth century, is one of the most striking monuments of world architecture. The red and white arches that distinguish its prayer hall and portals, its interior support system of double arcades, polylobed arched screens, and its gold mosaics and ribbed domes are iconic. Yet, while this monument is undoubtedly innovative, details of its construction and decoration also illustrate how medieval patrons, designers and builders incorporated pre-existing formal and structural elements from Syrian, Byzantine, & North African architecture, combining existing forms and techniques into a creative new architectural expression. The adaptation of these same formal elements in later western Mediterranean monuments illustrates how medieval architectural forms and solutions were transmitted as a result of specific and meaningful choices made by medieval patrons, designers, and builders. These movements of form and technique illuminate the meanings and mechanisms of architectural exchange across medieval religious and political boundaries.

Cordoba

Christian Europe expected the world to end in the year 1000. When that fateful year passed, a century and a half of church building (with attendant sculpture and painting) followed, on a scale and of sophistication not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. In 1814, Thomas Rickman coined for the architecture of this period the term “Romanesque,” that is to say, “like the Romans.” The term colored the perception of architectural historians studying that period. They focused on architectural elements indebted to the legacy of ancient Rome, displaying a sort of cultural blindness to the rich array of motifs and structural systems learned or adapted from different architectural traditions.

More recently, scholars of this period pointed out the evident similarities among the churches built in this period and the architecture of regions surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean. They balked, however, at including Islamic architeture among those influencing the architecture of Christian Europe. While they acknowledged the influence of the East, they strove to artificially circumscribe that influence to the legacy of early Christian churches in Syria, or Armenian churches from the seventh-century onwards.i An examination of the architecture produced in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries reveals instead a wide array of architectural influences from the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, including and especially Islamic architecture.

This lecture poses our fundamental historiographical question: what are the origins of medieval European architecture?  In Part I, it rehearses the conventional answer—that medieval art and architecture continue western, classical traditions; but it confronts that answer with the realization that we simply haven’t sufficiently conceived the late antique and early medieval world as one in which the East and the West were strongly interconnected.  By surveying some of the magnificent structures of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ built in the East (e.g. Armenia and Syria), Part II demonstrates the limitations of the conventional answer: that many cultures to the East shared in the heritage of classical Rome and Greece.  The final section of the lecture surveys the career of Europe’s first professor of non-western art history, Josef Strzygowski, whose 1901 book, Orient or Rome? forced open discussion of our question.  It shows that Strzygowski’s travels and connections to other cultures allowed him to ‘see’ non-canonical, non-western monuments and to include them in his history, and thus to open up an essential discussion—even though Strzygowski himself drifted into wild polemics and racist forms of thought.

Cicily, italy

The Medieval Mediterranean: A Crossroads

Entitled as the Peripheries of Contact - Beyond Geographies and Historical Flatland, this course examines the dynamic peripheries of a cultural region (area) - a global region loosely defined not only by its ethno-linguistic character, but more importantly, by its inherently intertwined environment and culture. Given that cultural regions have adjoined each other, often connecting (and sharing) the same periphery (or peripheries), these cultural regions are also viewed as those with peripheral affinities and interconnections through the course of their complex histories. In recognizing the inherent dynamism and instability of these 'edge spatialities', we consider that as the centers rise and fall, peripheries are invariably redrawn and redefined constantly.

Peripheries of Contact is therefore particularly focused on interrogating these liminalities as an effective zone of transmission. It explores how these conventionally ‘outlying’ zones (or sites) have effectively enhanced and continue to enhance, artistic and 'artifactual' transmission owing to comparative (and occasionally contested) notions of regional and nationalistic identity. Also, given the penchant for agents of cultural exchange and transfer to move through the borderland periphery (or occupy points within it on a temporary basis), the periphery is a fertile site of experimentation in its exemplars of cultural mixing, un-mixing and stylistic change. On these lines, peripheries are often border zones where peoples or things are thrown into unexpected contact, creating hybrid spaces and processes, while yielding new possibilities for social and cultural organizations. In comparative perspective, therefore, while centers may seem more advanced or more privileged than peripheries, decisive change and innovation often begin on these fringes.

Towards these overarching goals for the course, four examples are employed to create the core of a framework with an inherent flexibility to allow for additional cultural zones, as per curricular needs emerging in the future (and based on geographical preference). Moving beyond the normative nation state and/or chronological sub-divisions employed in course primers, the four cultural worlds at the focus of theare the Slavic cultural zone, the Persianate cultural zone, the Indian Subcontinent, and the Central Eurasiancultural zone.

While ‘messy’ in the nature of their spatio-cultural definitions, these four zones fall well within the specialist purview of global histories, yet provide an unbridled opportunity to adventurously explore a new way of looking at the past, present and future. Moreover, through the course of their complex histories, the first three cultural zones—the Persianate, Slavic and Indian—have remained interconnected to each other via the fourth zone (or periphery), i.e. Central Eurasia. This so-called periphery - an ungainly zone, yet distinct in its own right - remains a rich continuum of cultural landscapes effectively combining the domical churches of the Slavic lands, with the rigor of Seljuk exposed brickwork, and the terracotta-marble combinations of the Indian Subcontinent. Furthermore, if the agents and actors of the three mentioned cultural worlds were the stalwarts of sedentary (and unstable) empires, these were aptly contrasted by the fecund, nomadic-sedentary exchanges characteristic of the peripheral zone. Lastly, even the concept of what constituted architecture and cities underwent radical shift between the four cultural zones, their avenues of transmission and exchange based on traveling armies, migrating craftsmen and moving (occasionally canonized artifact and craft-making traditions).

This first lecture introduces the broad theme of Peripheries of Contact - Beyond Geographies and 	Historical Flatland, questioning how this theme be conceptually examined. It proposes four ways 	to visualize cultural histories, in particular the histories of architectural and urban 'making and 	un-making':

	- As an overarching concept of Periphery (versus the center) - a new way of looking at history
	- The Periphery 'condition' as akin to a thick ‘cultural zone’ or liminality, versus a line or 	separation
	- Periphery defined as a zone of contact and exchange, versus separation and difference
	- As the Periphery giving rise to conditions of synthesis, hybridity and invention
	- Comparing Centers with Peripheries versus Peripheries as interregnums

	Beyond the introduction, this lecture briefly outlines the four cultural zones employed in the 	analysis -

	1.	The Persianate World
	2.	The Slavic World
	3.	Peripheral Worlds & Shifting Centers: The Indian Subcontinent 
	4.	Spatial interregnum or Cultural Matrix: Nomadic Eurasia & the Silk Road

Kerman

In looking at the architecture of the Persianate world with respect to its peripheries, this lecture starts by defining the term 'Persianate', and the complex cultural context of what actually comprised the Persianate world? Why could this 'condition' be better described as'a world of many Worlds?' What were the geographical boundaries of this land that effectively comprised of not only multiple ethnicities and people resident, but scores other transient and nomadic? 

	Units of Lecture 2-

	1.	What do Persia, Persian, and Persianate stand for?  
	2.	Historical Geography of the Persianate World
	3.	Population of the Persianate World 
	4.	Space-Time ‘Moments’ in the History of the Persianate World

This second lecture on the Persianate World introduces four space-time moments that were 	critical to the intertwined histories of this region. On this particular front, the arrival of Islam as a 	new religion in this land was perhaps as important as the inter-mixing of nomadic and sedentary 	cultures. Within the Persianate world, the arrival of Islam is followed by transition and change, 	and later its deep assimilation within local beliefs. Meanwhile, the cultural inter-mixing is 	followed by the development of a unique social class of elites, whose clout pervades across the 	city and countryside.   

	Units of Lecture 3-

	1.	Persia after the Arrival of Islam
	2.	Moment 1: Coalition Between Persian Natives and Arab Families
	3.	Moment 2: Turkish Arrival in Persia
	4.	Moment 3: Consolidation of the Turko-Nomadic Sovereignty, Rise of Timurid Elites with 	Persian Taste

Syria

The first Slavic lecture introduces the origins, name, geographies and the versatility of the 	historic Slavs. It discusses how in Western historiography the Slavs are traditionally 	presented as peripheral to the development of the Western Europe. In response, this lecture 	shifts the perspective to examine how that Slavs’ peripheral geographic and cultural location 	enabled them to develop as a central connective link between different cultural regions, variable	lifestyles and multiple histories. Each of the four chosen moments illustrates a shift in existing 	conditions, wherein the ties and the circumstances of the Slavic World reflected changes in 	internal and external centers of gravity and peripheries. 

	Units of Lecture 4-

	1. 	Historical Geographies of the Slavic Matrix
	2. 	Christianization of the Slavs
	3. 	Golden Horde Invasion
	4. 	Rise of Moscow and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
	5. 	Europeanization of Peter the Great

Ukraine

The second Slavic lecture proceeds to illustrate the architectural consequences of the complex center-periphery relationships throughout pre-modern and early modern periods in Slavic history. The four cultural moments are accompanied by multiple examples of construction in different Rus’ principalities, often in seeming reaction towards external threats and/or potential invasions. How these inventive idioms actually become inherited traits of architecture across generations and the ways in which the Slavs adjusted to them during the several centuries until the 1800s is specific to the examination.

	Units of Lecture 5-

	1.	Christianization of Slavs
	2-3.	Mongol Invasion and the Rise of Moscow
	4.	Peter the Great and The Europeanization of the Russian Tsardom

Chernihiv

The first lecture on the Indian Subcontinent discusses it as a realm of isolated centers and ‘thick’ 	peripheries, controlled by its specific geographies. It illustrates how much of Indian medieval 	history remains replete with the contesting control of these centers and the geographical 	features that ‘contain’ these centers. On these lines, no longer does a linguistic and/or political 	assessment suffice to explain the idea of the subcontinent as a cultural region. Could the 	northwestern mountainous massif of the Himalayan range, combined with the densely-forested 	Gangetic and Central Indian riverine plains, be better definitions to the perceived limits of this c	cultural region? This initially idiosyncratic ‘geographical’ reconstruction is substantiated by the 	realms of control and cultural exchange exercised by the Delhi Sultanate ruling elite, who 	controlled sites located in the north western and northern part of the Indian subcontinent, in 	addition to several more positioned deep in the interior. What is perhaps most critical to the 	cultural resilience of the Indian subcontinent is the continuing interaction between the migrant 	and the indigenous, its transmission facilitated by the porous frontiers located to the northwest. 	This porous frontier connects to the our defined ‘peripheral or matrix’ zone - in itself, constantly 	changing owing to conditions around it.

	Units of Lecture 6-

	1.	Moment 1
	2.	Moment 2
	3.	Moment 3 
	4.	Moment 4

Delhi

The second lecture on the Indian Subcontinent examines the four space-time moments that serve to frame the histories of region's thick and mercurial peripheries, particularly in the northwest and north, often conjoining with aspects of geography and topography to produce unique conditions. India's 'landed' peripheries appear to have behaved rather differently versus its hydro edges - an observation that accounts for the pronounced 'incoming' interactions from mountainous vantages in the north and north-west, versus 'outgoing' interactions along the south west and east. India's 'cultural content' was shared with South Eastern Asia via maritime 	connections.

	Units of Lecture 7-

	1.	Moment 1
	2.	Moment 2
	3.	Moment 3 
	4.	Moment 4

This lecture suggests how Nomadic Eurasia must be viewed as Spatial interregnum or Cultural Matrix, versus as a conventional region. Besides its unbroken geographies, alongside continuous ‘land’ connections and movement ‘corridors’ connected a ‘matrix’ of influence, it was also a conspicuous and transforming, trans-spatial social network of changing nodes, versus fixed and	physically defined centers. It was this confederation of tribal solidarities versus landed empire/s	and their collective, social choreographies that served as the foundation for the so-called mode of Pax-Nomadica.

	Units of Lecture 8 -

	1.	Introduction
	2.	Space-Time Moments in Central Asia & the Nomadic World

his lecture continues stories from the Nomadic Steppe, in particular describing the four space-	time moments that served as the critical disruptions with this cultural region. All of these moments were catalyzed by the mass movements of populations across this 'unbroken' land(ed) terrain, stretching substantially east-west and north-south. That nomads—often viewed as peoples with no permanent artifacts and iconographic imageries—were able to 'carry' and 	'transfer' cultural content (including the choreographies, makings and expressions of built form), often in intangible form, across vast distances, is central towards this understanding.

Samarqand

The concluding lecture presents how the four cultural regions were part of a world system that effectively inter-connected distant regions, often encompassing ’landed’ and/or ‘hydro’ connections. By the thirteenth century, these inter-connected regions included substantially 	large areas—inherently removed from each other, but almost always related via ‘accessible’ 	networks of trade and exchange, which began at the peripheries and displayed relevance as  these elements of interaction moved towards at the center. By the eighteenth century, the political fragmentation of the once global world caused these inter-connections to fall into the 	background, once sea-based connection eclipsed land connections (early 1700s - twentieth century), and eventually air-routes, and now cyber-lines bind the globe.

Asia

Peripheries of Contact: Beyond Geographies and Historical Flatland

Earth is 70 percent water, but only 2.5 percent of this superabundant liquid is fresh. And, two-thirds of this minuscule amount of fresh water is inaccessible— locked away in ice caps, glaciers, and rocky underground aquifers. Only a tiny fraction of Earth’s potable water is readily available to humans. Even though this hydro-ecological view of the planet is a modern one, it should, nonetheless, paint a broader historical picture of how both access to and management of water were as critical to the Neolithic farming communities in the Levant or the Yellow River valley of northern China, as they are to 21st-century society. The domestication of water was at the epicenter of first-society geopolitics of agriculture, migration, division of human labor, and production of space.

This lecture module examines the role of two rivers—the Euphrates and the Tigris—in shaping both the Mesopotamian perceptions of water and hydraulic infrastructures that made Mesopotamia a thriving river-valley civilization. Rising in Turkey/Armenia, the Euphrates and the Tigris flew southward through a harsh desert environment for 2,430 km and 1,850 km, respectively. On entry to modern-day Iraq, the two rivers form a Jezira, or “island,” between them. The rivers unite at Al Qurna for their final stretch to the Persian Gulf. The Greek word “mesopotamia” means “between two rivers.”

Crete

This lecture examines how the Nile laid the sociocultural, political, and economic foundations of the Egyptian civilization. 
The ancient Egyptians didn’t know the source of the Nile River. They thought that this “mysterious” river came to the earth from heaven. For them, it was a deific force of the universe, “the Great River,” itr-âa, or “the Sea,” iumâ. They called it Hapi, a god in human form. As recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus, the Egyptian priests considered Egypt “a gift of the river.” The cult of the Nile defined the lives of early Egyptians.

New kingdom

The shift from a subsistence economy based on hunting and gathering to one based on food production by cultivating plants and domesticating animals and water is a watershed in human history. The shift to an agriculture-based economy, and the complex systems of water management that it warranted, transpired only in a few independent centers around the world. One such center was Peru, where advanced settlements and agro-pastoral activities flourished as early as 5000 BCE. Small-scale gravity canals in the western Andean foothills in northern Peru made farming possible on low terraced hills. From the city of Caral-Supe in Peru to Teotihuacan and the Mayan city of Tikal, both in Mesoamerica, hydraulic engineering became central to civilizational growth in the Americas.

Central america

The Indus Valley civilization (also known as the Harappan civilization or Indus-Saraswati civilization) was virtually unknown until 1921, when excavations in the Indian Subcontinent revealed the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Archaeology demonstrates that these cities were highly urbanized, served by sophisticated water-management infrastructures. With contested provenance, this “mysterious” civilization reached a mature urban phase around 2500 BCE and thrived for a thousand years, profiting from the highly fertile lands of the Indus/Saraswati river floodplain and trade with the civilizations of nearby Mesopotamia. The rather abrupt decline of the civilization, concomitant with the so-called Aryan invasion of the Indian subcontinent, is subject to much historical debate. 

This lecture module explores different philosophical and engineering approaches to early Chinese water management systems and how they related to various political contexts and dynastic rules. By taking this course, students are expected to learn how “water politics” informed and shaped the early Chinese civilization.

The module begins with the Xia Dynasty (2100–1600 BCE) and its legendary founder Yu the Great’s “Taoist approach” to river management and concludes with the construction of the Grand Canal during the Sui Dynasty in the 7th century CE. The overarching theme is to understand the social, political, economic, architectural, and urban implications of early Chinese hydraulic engineering that, in various ways, utilized four key Chinese river basins: the Yellow River in the north, the Huai and the Yangtze Rivers in the central and eastern regions, and the Pearl River in the south. 

Focusing on Varanasi, the most sacred Hindu pilgrimage city on the bank of the Ganges, this lecture module demonstrates how a particular land-water confluence creates a sacrosanct urban center. Varanasi’s urban experience is marked by an elaborate system of ghats (steps leading to the river) that serve as “temples” dedicated to the sacred water of the Ganges. Hindus come to Varanasi to worship the Ganges water, perform funeral rites, and attain moksha or nirvana. The flowing waters of the Ganges offer to them the ultimate redemption. 

Kaveri

This lecture module examines how the Aegean world’s “islandscape” and hot and semiarid Mediterranean climate warranted architecture and city design driven by strategic water management systems. In many ways, hydraulic engineering in Greek mainland and islands were different than those in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations predominantly relied on the exploitation of the discharge of large rivers (i.e., Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile). Although Mesopotamian rivers were less predictable in terms of their flooding as opposed to the Nile floods, both Mesopotamia and Egypt benefitted from an abundance of flood water. On the other hand, water infrastructure developments in Greece were necessitated by limited and often inadequate natural water resources. Rain falls only during winter months. Only modest rivers and lakes exist in Greece.

This lecture module explains how “supplying water, displaying hygiene, and extending authority” became intertwined narratives in the administrative bureaucracy of the Roman Empire. In the late first century CE, Rome’s water commissioner Sextus Julius Frontinus proudly wrote in his water-related treatise, De aquaeductu urbis Romae: "Just compare with the vast monuments of this vital aqueduct network those useless Pyramids, or the good-for-nothing tourist attractions of the Greeks.“ In many ways, this statement encapsulated how Roman emperors and officials viewed hydraulic engineering as the foundation of the empire’s political authority and economy. From monumental aqueducts to luxurious baths to flush toilet technologies, the Romans made water management as an essential part of their imperial identity politics.

This lecture modules examines how the strategic and economic rise of the Nabataean city of Petra—located at the crucial intersection of trade routes, connecting the Mediterranean world, Arabia, Africa, and the Far East—also provided the impetus to develop sophisticated hydraulic systems to sustain a burgeoning urban population and various water needs. Steadily rising since 300 BCE as a nomadic settlement, Petra came under the Roman fold in 106 CE and continued on as an important trading hub under the Byzantines till the 7th century CE. Petra’s strategic location led to an urban center with a thriving economy. It was no surprise that Petra would absorb the cultural, architectural, and technological influences of Egyptian, Seleucid, Syro-Phoenician, Greek, Roman, and Far Eastern civilizations. The city’s hydraulic technologies derived from a ingenuous synthesis of native and foreign water-management systems that transformed Petra into a veritable “aquatic paradise” in the desert. The desert city’s water systems, consisting of dams, cisterns, channels, pipeline networks, and groundwater storage utilized multiple springs and wadis (a ravine that channels rainwater runoffs or spring water) that dotted the surrounding areas, as well as rainfall runoff storage. Petra’s limited water resource situation, in combination with its complex topography and hot-arid climate, led to many innovations in water storage methodologies at an urban scale, one in which stored runoff water met part of yearly demands, while also connecting natural springs with highly efficient pipeline networks.    

Menu

General Information

Interactive Map

Member Directory

Follow us