Architecture and Urbanism in North America
(Wellesley College, Spring 2026).
What is ‘American’ architecture? Or rather, what has been historically construed as such? Taking this question as a premise, this course surveys North American architecture and urbanism from early colonial times to the present, with a particular emphasis on the 19th- and 20th-century United States. Lectures and discussions focus on placing the North American built environment in its political, technological, and environmental contexts. Lectures address topics such as American attitudes toward nature, the role of technology, the politics of American architecture, indigenous ecologies and land practices, colonial encounters, settler colonialism, historicism, organicism, nationalism, materials and resources, domesticity and gender, modernity, post-modernity, environmental and social justice, among others.
Architecture and the Environment
(Rhode Island School of Design, Spring 2026).
Architectural historians and theorists have scrutinized architecture in relation to its cultural, social, political, and aesthetic contexts. What about the environment? The present course proposes to explore environmental perspectives in the history and theory of architecture. It is divided into three 4-week modules: 1. “Architecture, Nature, and Culture” examines architecture as the cultural expression of nature’s transformation; 2. “Architecture, A Material Process” explores architecture’s relation to processes of production and consumption; 3. “Architecture and the Environmental Question” looks how the idea of environment permeated and still permeates architectural discourses and practices as a political question. In this course, students are invited to discuss and reflect on various topics such as matters pertaining to the idea of nature, the definition of environment, cultural landscapes, materiality, gender, labor, extraction, energy, obsolescence, environmental scarcity, colonial environments, environmental justice, and the Anthropocene, among others.