ARCH 3397: Three Urbanisms: New York, Houston, Detroit  

Undergraduate

 

The course studies New York, Houston, and Detroit as three specific urbanisms, three morphological and spatial descriptors that are unique, yet have properties that allow us to draw intersections and translations between them. The course is broken into four modules: Infrastructure, Land, Publics, and Image. We examine infrastructures, environmentalism, zoning, preservation, suburbanization, corporate modernism, crises narratives, the rise of privately-owned public plazas, and gentrification, among other issues through close readings of texts audio, and video clips, and case studies. Histories of race, class, gender, labor, and capital underlies the readings and discussions every week. New York, Houston, and Detroit offer us the backdrop or anchors to unpack architecture's relationship with the urban and its many sites of conflicting cultural, social, economic, political, aesthetic ideologies and discourses. While comparisons and contrasts are inevitable, the class does not dwell on simplified analogies.