Part 1 (Talk): The Rise of the Architect in Britain

Architects: Inigo Jones, Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, John Vanbrugh, James Gibbs.

Buildings: The Banqueting House, St Paul’s Cathedral, City of London Churches, Old Royal Naval College Greenwich, St Martin-in-the-Fields.

Styles: English Baroque, Palladianism

Part 2 (Discussion): Decolonising Architecture – What does it mean?

Facilitated group discussion considering the concept of Decoloniality and what it involves. From reviewing the Eurocentric notions of architects and their patrons to uncovering sources of the colonial wealth that funded buildings (rooted in the exploitation of slave labour) we will consider what we mean by the term Decoloniality.

Part 1 (Talk): The Englishness of English Art

Architects: Lord Burlington, William Kent, Robert Adam, William Chambers, John Soane and John Nash

Buildings: Chiswick House, Buckingham Palace, 12-14 Lincolns Inn Field, Stowe, Kenwood House, The Bank of England, Regent’s Street and Regent’s Park.

Styles: Palladian revival, The Picturesque, Neo-Classicism

Part 2 (Discussion): Decolonising Architecture – How do we do it?

Following on from last weeks’ discussion we will consider what it means to practice decoloniality when looking at historic buildings. What questions should we be asking of our subjects and how do we find answers when the established literature on a topic is often silent on the colonial power system that underpins their creation.

Walking Tour of the City of London

Part 1 (Talk): The Victorians, the Industrial Revolution, and the Making of the Modern World.

Architects: Joseph Bazalgette, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Horace Walpole, William Butterfield, Charles Barry, Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, Alfred Waterhouse, Edwin Lutyens, George Gilbert Scott.

Buildings: Tower Bridge, Thames Embankment, Houses of Parliament, Natural History Museum, The Boundary Estate.

Styles: Gothic Revival, Arts and Crafts, Edwardian Classicism.

Part 2 (Discussion) Race, Class and Systemic Inequality. We will reflect on the birth of the modern world in the Victorian era, not least wrought by major building and infrastructure projects in Britain made possible by colonial wealth, new technology and unprecedented access to building materials. We will consider the issue of systemic power in relation to the exploitation of cheap labour and how class struggle intersects with racial inequity.

Part 1 (Talk): The Empire in Ruins: Post-War Reconstruction and the Modernist Style Wars.

Architects: Giles Gilbert Scott, Basil Spence, Le Corbusier, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, Denys Lasdun, Architects Co-Partnership, Alison and Peter Smithson, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, James Stirling.

Buildings: The British Empire Exhibition, The Festival of Britain, The Barbican, The Southbank, Churchill Gardens, Heygate Estate, Canary Wharf.

Styles: Art Deco, Modernism, Brutalism, High Tech, Post-Modernism.

Part 2 (Discussion): Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘The Heritage’ and its significance for British architectural heritage today. Considering case studies such as Dulwich Picture Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral this discussion will focus on heritage preservation in the London and give us a chance to challenge the significance of the canon of architectural history we have been learning about, considering the issues at stake in its continued reification. The session will be based on a close reading of Hall’s 1999 speech ‘Unsettling the ‘the heritage’, re-imagining the Post-nation, Whose Heritage?’.

Part 1 (Talk) Architecture in an Age of Protest: Neoliberalism and the 21^st Century Built Environment.

Topic: The listing system and new buildings, the rise of ‘iconic’ architecture, sustainability, spatial inequity as exemplified by London’s housing crisis fuelled by globalisation in an age of hyper capitalism. We will learn about the regeneration of post-war housing estates and contemporary architects’ adaptive re-use of the post-industrial city. We will reflect on the deep inequalities in our current system the results of were tragically witnessed in recent years at Grenfell Tower fire. As well as big names in contemporary architecture we will consider the many young designers who are increasingly working as collectives and the ways in which architects engage in acts of protest and activism against systemic injustices.

Architects: Foster and Partners, Rogers, Stirk Harbour and Partners, PLP Architecture, AHMM, SOM, AKT II, Make, Zaha Hadid, OMA, BDP, Will Alsop, Daniel Libeskind, Herzog and DeMeuron.

Buildings: Skyscrapers in the City of London, St Paul’s Heights, 2012 Olympic Park, Aquatics Centre and Village and associated regeneration of Stratford, the Royal Docks, White Collar Factory, Battersea Power Station, Pop-Up and temporary architecture such as The Serpentine Pavilion, Dulwich Pavilion by Yinka Ilori, the Architecture Foundation’s Anti-Pavilion series, etc.

Styles: PFI Architecture, New London Vernacular, Parametricism, Biophilia, Blobitecture, Digital Morphogenesis, Deconstructivism, Neo-futurism, Facadism, Eco Architecture, etc…

Part 2 (Discussion): Black Lives Matter. Our final discussion will look at the role of protest in shaping the built environment of tomorrow whereby those practising collective action are motivated by a desire to speak truth to power, for example by tackling issues of spatial inequity head-on. With reference to the concept of Intersectionality we will finish the course by considering the ways in which architectural historians can be anti-racist by imbedding decoloniality into their practice, as we have explored during this course.