ARCH 3402 - Architecture as a Cultural System

Fall or spring. 3 credits.

Co-meets with ARCH 5402.

B. MacDougall.

What have been the major issues in the theory and practice of architectural design through time and across cultures, and how is aesthetic judgment related to more general systems of ordering within a particular society or group? This course draws on concepts, methods, and findings from the broad field of cultural anthropology to address these questions. Case studies and examples are drawn from a wide range of architectural traditions around the world for which there is significant ethnographic literature, with special emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa, India, and the United States. Topics include the ideational and formal relationships between folk and monumental traditions in complex societies; the structure of the ideal social order and its refraction in the material world; cosmological models and architectural form; geometries of non-Western traditions; and the relationship between indigenization and culture change.