Università Roma Tre

This course covers a temporal space between the last decade of the XIX century and the end of the XX century and gets through the complexity of historical tangles, which carried out to the birth of the modern forms and their rise. It is considered as a wide-ranging space that comprises not only the works of the innovative architects, bound up with the avant-garde or with the great ideals (like the design of machinery or the organicism), but also the works sometimes revolutionary that refers to the vernacular tradition.
This course is divided into different lines: the great, general themes (the historical contest, the programmes, the ideas, Modern and Tradition); the great figures of architects; the philology and constructive analysis of works (both realized and only planned) and the historiographical interpretations.

Sigfried Giedion, Space,Time and Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1954.
William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, London: Phaidon Press,1996.
Elie G. Haddad, David Rifkind (ed.), A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture:1960-2010,Oxford: Routledge, 2014.

This course aims at providing a critical approach towards the “changing ideals” of contemporary architecture, starting from the opposing forces of the notions of classical and modern during the Age of Enlightenment. Through descriptions of different historical and geographical contexts, a selected series of masterworks from XIX to XX Century will be discussed in terms of form, structure, functions, specifically considering how they have contributed to past and contemporary architectural debate.

R. Middleton, D. Watkin, Neoclassical and Nineteenth Century Architecture , New York 1987
W. Curtis, Modern Architecture since 1900, London 1996
N. Pevsner, J. Fleming, H. Honour, A Dictionary of Architecture, London 1975
W. Benjamin, L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica, Torino 1966 (1936)
N. Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Movement, London 1936
M. Tafuri, Progetto e utopia, Roma-Bari 1973
P. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde 1974
P.R. Banham, Megastructures. Urban futures for recent past, 1976
C. Rowe, Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays 1976
M. Tafuri, La sfera e il labirinto, Torino 1980
F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism , 1991
M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention, 1985
J. Ackerman, Distance Points, Milano 2001 (1991)