This course helps students understand the changes in contemporary theories, function, structure, and esthetics of architecture from the Renaissance to the modern era, from the perspectives of philosophy, religion, politics and environment.

This class explores the historical development of architecture from the Neo- Classicism of the 18th century to the present by introducing students to monumental buildings and to primary literature. This course is not so much concerned with the scientific analysis of past works or the prediction of the future as with situating the present within the continuity of tradition. Its aim is to figure out the ways in which architecture has set conditions to accommodate, and to give endurance to, human praxis that has been repeating itself, but never in the same manner. History is not a horizon foregone and petrified, but operates as the interpretative framework in which the present form of human praxis, its similarity to and difference from historical precedents, can be understood. While following the conventional stylistic classifications of the survey of architecture from the Renaissance to the present, this course seeks to trace some of the issues that are critical to the understanding of the contemporary situation. These issues include the notion of history, the tradition of reason represented by the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in the seventeenth century French Academy, the discourse of the primitive hut, the aesthetics of the sublime, the notion of type, the notion of style and so forth. This series of inquiries will challenge a view which locates the inception of modern architecture within the social and material transformations of the nineteenth century, and relocate it within the historical continuity of the Vitruvian and Albertian tradition. Lastly, this course also balances the conventional primary focus on Western architecture in survey courses. This course introduces the development of architecture in non-Western world such as East Asia, India, and Latin America. By looking into the dynamic inter-cultural relationship between the West and non- West, this course broadens students’ spectrum of architectural history and educates them with intellectual capacity to situate his or her architecture in reference to the dynamic.