Architecture After 1945

This lecture course will address key developments in architecture during the period from the end of World War II until the early 1990s. The class will cover both the continuation and transformation of modern architecture after the war—including corporate modernism, New Brutalism, regionalism, the variegated work of Team 10, the AA’s Department of Tropical Architecture, and important trajectories of late modern formalism and Good Design—as well as the emergence of diverse practices that in different ways challenged the modernist legacy or even set out to proclaim its end. These include: the turn to systems theory and cybernetics of the 1950s; the experimental and “Pop” architecture of the 1960s such as Megastructure, Metabolism and the turn to environment; the engagement with linguistic theory and notions of “meaning,” the neo-modernism of the New York Five, and the rise of a semantic and historicist post-modernism during the late ‘60s and 1970s; the post-post-modern turn, from the architecture of deconstruction to the architecture of “event”; and their legacy in contemporary experimentations with new programs, sites, materials, and media. The course will pay particular attention to the manner in which architects and architectural institutions (schools, museums, publications) have engaged historical transformations in the aesthetic, socio-economic, political, material, and technological realms, including the impact upon the discipline of globalization and the emergence of the information age. This survey will not be able to cover every aspect of work from this period, but through focusing on specific examples in their historical context will provide a detailed map of important buildings, projects, movements, events, publications, and recent transformations in the discipline, as well as outlining their stakes, strategies, and ongoing impact on the profession. The legacy of this period remains in many ways central to contemporary architectural practice and this course will provide students with both historical knowledge and critical tools vital to positioning their own work within the ever-shifting field of contemporary architecture.