The Industrial and the Vernacular

Over the past two centuries, Western architecture has made universal claims. Modernism promised efficiency, functionality, and universality, relying on now-ubiquitous steel, concrete, and glass. Yet such global ambitions have often overlooked climate, culture, and local knowledge. This course examines the tensions, exchanges, and compromises between the universal and the local in architectural practice, exploring not just forms and materials, but the deeper ethics that shape the spaces we inhabit.

Vernaculars

This session introduces vernacular architecture as a sophisticated knowledge system shaped by climate, materials, and culture and its framing by modernist thinkers.

Texts

Le Corbusier (1923) Toward an Architecture.

Loos, A. (1910) Ornament and Crime. (Published 1913.)

Moholy-Nagy, S. (1957) Native Genius in Anonymous Architecture. New York: Horizon Press.

Piesik, S. (2017) Habitat: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet. London: Thames & Hudson.

Rudofsky, B. (1964) ‘Architecture Without Architects’. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Imports I

This session examines how non-Western architectural forms were 'imported' into Europe as exotic fantasies and romantic appropriations.

Texts

Said, E. W. (1979) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Exports I

This session examines how Western architectural forms were exported through colonialism as tools of political control and cultural domination.

Texts

Home, R. (1996) ‘The Grand Modell of Colonial Settlement’, in Of Planting and Planning, pp. 9–40.

Ridley, J. (1998) ‘Edwin Lutyens, New Delhi, and the Architecture of Imperialism’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 26(2), pp. 67–83.

Exports II

This session continues examining architectural exports, focusing on French colonial urbanism in North Africa and Le Corbusier's work in postcolonial India.

Texts

Cohen, J.-L. (2006) ‘Architectural History and the Colonial Question: Casablanca, Algiers and Beyond’. Architectural History, 49, pp. 349–368.

Imports II

This session explores Critical Regionalism—architects who synthesized modernist techniques with local climate, materials, and cultural practices as resistance to both colonial impositions and 'universal' International Style.

Texts

Frampton, K. (1983) ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’.

Correa, C. (1991) ‘The Public, the Private and the Sacred’. Architecture + Design, 8(5), pp. 91–99.

Joy, B. (2021) ‘The Tjibaou Cultural Center: Cultural Agent or Political Foothold?’ Places Journal.