GRADUATE ART HISTORY & ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY COURSE OFFERINGS Spring 2010

* Please check the Online COD to confirm the following information. Updates can occur at any time and the information here is to be used as a guideline.

ARAH 5525 Raphael and his Times

1:00-3:30 W
FHL 208
BAROLSKY

Designed both for graduate students seeking an introductory course in the field of Renaissance art in order to fulfill a requirement and for those specializing in Renaissance art, this course offers an overview of Raphael’s work in the broad context of Renaissance culture: the art of Raphael’s contemporaries, including, above all, Leonardo and Michelangelo; the aesthetics and theory of art in the Book of the Courtier, written by Raphael’s friend Baldasar Castiglione; and the monumental, indeed foundational, biography of the artist by Giorgio Vasari. As in all graduate courses, we will be especially attentive to a wide variety of art historical “methods” and “theories of art.” This course is designed with an eye to the forthcoming exhibition of the late works of Raphael scheduled for the National Gallery in London in 2012.

ARAH 5585 Art of the Silk Road

3:30-6:00 W
FHL 206
WONG

Stretching some 8,000 kilometers from east to west, the Silk Road is a network of trade routes that provided a bridge between the east and the west. Although the eastern part of the routes had been in use for millennia, the opening of the Silk Road occurred during the first century BCE, when China secured control over the eastern section and began trading with the Roman Empire through intermediary states in Central Asia. From this time until the end of the Mongol Yuan period in the fourteenth century, with periods of disruptions, the Silk Road flourished as a commercial and at times military highway. But more than that, the Silk Road was a channel for the transmission of ideas, technologies, and artistic forms and styles, with far-reaching impact beyond China and the Mediterranean world, extending to Southwest Asia, Africa, the Atlantic shores of Europe, and Japan to the east. This seminar will examine the art forms that flourished along the Silk Road between the first and fourteenth centuries CE., ranging from ceramics, glass, gold and silverware, textiles, to religious art. Special attention will be paid to important sites such as Dunhuang (a Buddhist cave-temple site), Chang’an (capital of Han and Tang China), and Shosoin (the imperial art treasure house of Nara Japan).
This seminar is open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

ARAH 7703 19th Century American Architecture

Monday and Wednesday, 9:00 - 10:15
CAM 158
WILSON

Prerequisites
Open to all students. Graduate students should sign up for ARH 7703

Description
A survey of American Architecture from approximately 1780 to the eve of World War One. The course will stress the multi-dimensional nature of American architecture over this 140-year period. Considered will be the continuities of expression and the breaks with tradition and the search for a new architecture. Attention will be paid to foreign influences, social and cultural issues, landscape and city planning, and related developments in furniture, interiors, design, and painting. Considered will be the work of Jefferson, Mills, Downing, Davis, Richardson, Olmsted, McKim, Mead & White, Wright, and many others.

Methods
Lectures, in-class discussion (where possible), a few discussion sections, readings, and paper. This will be a lecture class and in-class discussion can be difficult. I will try to pose questions during class and ask for your response. I will set up a few discussion sections outside of class; see handouts. Field Trip--if there is interest I will try and hold one to Washington or Richmond.

Objectives
1. To understand American architecture and related developments in cities, landscape, interiors, art, and culture in the period, 1780-1914. 2. To identify the major themes, and sub-themes that animated American developments and how American identity was projected. 3. Recognize major buildings and architects and designers.

Evaluation
There will be discussion sections, a mid-term examination and final examination and a paper. The exams will be composed of slides, short answer and longer essay questions. The final will cover the entire course.

ARAH 8092--MA Thesis Writing

10:00-12:30 W
FHL 208
AFFRON

This course is for M.A. students who are writing their thesis. Class time is spent developing work plans, presenting and discussing topics, revising drafts, bringing the thesis to completion, and preparing for the thesis defense.

ARAH 9505 Issues Roman Arch & Urbanism

10:00-12:30 R
FHL 215
DOBBINS

TBA

ARAH 9515 Art and Science for the Medieval People of the Book

10:00-12:30 M
FHL 215
RAMIREZ-WEAVER

During the medieval period, the Christian church exerted a hegemonic influence over all aspects of western medieval and Byzantine life. When Charlemagne was honored in 800 as the Holy Roman Emperor at Saint Peter’s church in Rome, the political implications of a union between church and government were clear. Power and knowledge relied upon the approval and support of churchmen. Rather than demonstrate a division between science and the spiritual culture of the middle ages, this unification in Christendom revealed an interpenetration of science and religion that found expression in exceptional works of art. This intersection of spiritual and intellectual cultural life in the middle ages had never really ceased to exist in the eastern Byzantine empire, since Constantine established his new eastern capital in modern-day Istanbul, Turkey. There in Byzantium the cultural legacy of Greek artistic developments and learning, once celebrated by the Romans, flourished throughout this time period. Similarly, the scientific advancements, especially in medicine and astronomy, advanced by Arabic, Islamic and Jewish scientists during the middle ages fostered points of connection between the secular and spiritual aspects of the lives of those communities, as well.

Recent research has problematized the relationship between the sacred and the secular aspects of life in the middle ages. In this thematic survey of the kinds of artworks, which express a relationship between scientific and spiritual themes in the middle ages, we will examine objects of fine distinction, illuminated manuscripts, and building sites. Each of the participants in the seminar will be expected to contribute a seminar report, developing one or more of the themes covered by our course. Particular attention will be paid to the following questions, which will also help to focus our discussions of class readings weekly: (1) How does an artwork display an intersection of art and science in the middle ages? (2) When does a particular artwork inform us about the ways that standard iconographies can be altered to express nuances of meaning? (3) How does the artwork display aspects of both sacred and secular life? (4) When is a scientific illustration an artwork and when is it merely a conceptual model or diagram? (5) Which spiritual traditions are relevant to the discussion of certain artworks under consideration?

ARAH 9520 Islamic and Renaissance Spain

10:00-12:30 W
FHL 215
BROTHERS

Between the 9th and the 16th centuries, Spain was the site of a remarkable series of political and architectural transformations. Conquered by Muslim and Berber forces from North Africa and the Middle East and reconquered by Christian armies, it was also the center of a lively and integrated Jewish population. The architecture and landscape bear the traces of this layered political history of conflict and assimilation. The seminar will consider both first hand accounts of the people, culture, architecture, cities and landscape of the region, as well as the mythology that has developed about the period. It will focus on Granada, Cordoba, Seville, Madrid and El Escorial. Broader questions to be addressed will include: What aspects of Islamic architecture and landscape in Spain distinguish it from other geographies? What is the legacy of the centuries of Muslim domination after the reconquest? What is the relationship between Spain and Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? To what extent are the hybrid terms “mudejar,” “moresco,” “mozarabic” still useful ways of describing the cultural products of Spain? What is the status of Spain in relation to the Mediterranean and to Europe?

ARAH 9525 History and Connoisseurship of Prints and Drawings

10:00-12:30 R
FHL 208
GOEDDE

Working with original works of art in the collections of the University of Virginia Art Museum, this seminar explores the fundamental issues of the history, connoisseurship, evaluation, and care of prints and drawings from about1450 to 1850. Each student presents in class four reports on individual drawings or prints. These reports are also revised and submitted as five-to-seven-page catalogue entries, in preparation for an exhibition in 2011.

ARAH/ARH 9530 Thomas Jefferson, Architect

3:30-6:00 M
CAM 108
WILSON

Description:
Thomas Jefferson's architecture is very highly regarded (as we all know), and yet exactly what is the nature of Jefferson's accomplishments and how it should be viewed causes problems. No book on American architecture can avoid noting Jefferson, so important does his architecture seem. Equally his role in other areas, politics, science, farming, literature, has the same quality. Not uncommon is Lewis Mumford's observation that Thomas Jefferson was "one of the last true figures of the Renaissance." He ranks as among the most intensely investigates individuals in American history, perhaps only Lincoln has had more written about him. Thomas Jefferson's considerable achievements would stand without his ever having designed a building, but alternatively, his architectural accomplishments would be of interest even if he had done nothing else--but of course he did a lot of things and they are all part of the picture.

Some issues of course:
To place Jefferson's architectural accomplishments into perspective.
Was Jefferson an architect? How does he relate to our present conception of the profession of architect? To the conception of the architect then?
What exactly did Jefferson design?
What were his design processes?
What were his architectural sources?
Did he exert influence and how?
Did his work have political meanings or symbolism?
When did interest in Jefferson's architecture arise?
Review the histiography on Jefferson and his architecture--What have scholars seen as important?
What did Jefferson actually say about architecture?
How does Jefferson's architectural activity relate to his other activities?

Class work:
Course is limited to graduate students--maximum size 14. Class attendance is required. Each student will be expected to accomplish the assigned class reading on time, contribute to class discussion, write several small discussion papers (2 pages maximum, double-spaced, ie: 500 words), make a class report on an assigned topic, and research and write a major paper dealing with an aspect of Jefferson's architecture. There will be several field trips.

ARAH 9535 Allegory and European Art, 1700-1900

3:30-6:00 T
FHL 215
FORDHAM

Firmly associated with Baroque and post-modern art, allegory has received limited attention in the years between 1700-1900. Turning to the interpretative frameworks of Walter Benjamin, Angus Fletcher, and others, this seminar examines allegory as a visual and interpretative mode in Europe and America.

ARAH/ARH 9540 Spaces of the Modern City

T 10:00-12:30,
CAM 108
CRANE

Prerequisites
• graduate standing, or permission of the instructor

Select Readings
• David Harvey, Paris, Capital of Modernity (2006)
• Govind Narayan, Mumbai (2009)
• Georg Simmel, select writings
• Rayner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971)
• Anthony King, Global Cities: Post-Imperialism and the Internationalization of London (1990)
• Mamadou Diouf, “(Re)Imagining an African City: Performing Culture, Arts & Citizenship in Dakar” (2008)
• Achille Mbembe, “The Aesthetics of Superfluidity,” Public Culture (2004).

Requirements
• Weekly readings, discussion, written responses & seminar presentations
• Final term paper (20-25 pages) & presentation

Course Description
This seminar reexamines the 20th-century metropolis and the so-called “urbanism without urbanity” of 21st-century megacities. Through consideration of key heoretical texts and the cities that helped to shape them (Harvey on Paris, Narayan on Mumbai, Simmel on Vienna, Fanon on Algiers, Banham on Los Angeles, Koolhaas on Lagos, and Mbembe on Johannesburg) we will interrogate the multiple forms and experiences of urban modernity. Presentations by students on individual cities will help to situate our discussions of shared readings, which will explore critical issues including creative destruction, the urban effects of capitalism and globalization, the relationship of formal and informal cities, everyday life, urban memory, colonialism and its aftermaths, and the rise of mass culture and urban society.

AR H 5601 HISTORIC PRESERVATION THEORY AND PRACTICE

Wednesdays, 11-1:45
CAM 425
BLUESTONE

In its relation to the existing environment, preservation is essentially a conservative act. It often privileges the past over the future. However, depending on the local context, making historic preservation a priority can work to either conservative or radical ends. This course surveys a broad spectrum of preservation activities and grapples with the ways in which people have come to understand and value the past. Preservation will be discussed in the context of cultural history and the changing relationship between existing buildings and landscapes and attitudes toward history, memory, invented tradition, and place. Reviewing both European and American material, the course scrutinizes disparate forms of preservation including natural conservation, building restoration, monument and memorial construction, rituals of ancestor worship, philosophies of treating historic materials, and strategies for rebuilding after war. The course will foster an understanding of the social, cultural, and ideological complexity of preservation and promote a critical understanding of various concepts of history as they inform contemporary preservation projects.

The course emphasizes class discussion of the required reading. Each week each class member will submit two questions on the weekly reading that she or he feels can be usefully pursued by the class. Further requirements include a journal that concisely explores the arguments, theories, and issues raised in the reading. Finally, study teams with two members each will investigate particular historic sites and analyze their presentation and interpretation of history. The teams will present their findings in the final meetings of the course.

AR H 5603. ELMEAD - SAINT EMMA - SAINT FRANCIS PROJECT

Fridays,14:00-15:44
CAM 425
BLUESTONE

The course will focus on the site in Powhatan County, Virginia that encompasses the historic Belmead Plantation/St. Emma School/ St. Francis de Sales School. Belmead is a James River plantation, originally purchased by Phillip St. George Cocke in 1838. Cocke was among the South’s wealthiest planters and largest owners of enslaved people. In 1845 Cocke commissioned the prominent New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis to design his Gothic Revival style mansion house. The house and its immediate landscape drew directly from the notable work of landscape gardener Andrew Jackson Downing and English landscape theorist John Claudius Loudon. This put the house and landscape at the center of nineteenth-century picturesque design.

Katharine Drexel and her sister and brother-in-law Louise Drexel Morrell and Edward Morrell and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament purchased Belmead in the 1890s and developed it for two schools for African American students. St. Emma Agricultural and Industrial Institute, for boys, and St. Francis De Sales Institute, for girls, were operated along the lines of the pedagogical vision of Booker T. Washington. The curriculum emphasized uplift through agricultural, industrial, and domestic service.

This course will collaborate with the option studio led by Professor WG Clark that will work on the Belmead site. Historians and planners in this course will explore preservation planning issues on the site and strategies for public history presentations, including developing exhibitions, guidebooks, and web sites of Belmead history.

ARH 5604 Field Methods: Preservation at UVA

Wednesday, 9:30 – 12:00
CAM 302
NELSON

Course Description:
Focusing not on monumental or public architecture but instead vernacular landscapes, “Field Methods in Historic Preservation” introduces students to the essential field techniques of building analysis and recordation. Through a series of lectures, the instructor will first introduce the students to traditional materials and technologies. The students will also be introduced to the Historic American Building Survey (HABS) conventions used in the process of recording a historic building through measured drawings. In the field, students will be introduced to the methods of “reading” a building, i.e. correctly interpreting its various historical layers through an assessment of materials, technologies, and stylistic clues. The students will also be introduced to the basic conventions used in the process of recording a historic building through measured drawings. As a field-based course, some of our class time will be spent in the field examining, measuring, and recording buildings. Students will be expected to apply those assessment and recording techniques that are central to the class to a building on their own.

Pedagogical Intention:
This class will introduce students to a variety of field-based skills central to both the study of vernacular architecture and the practice of historic preservation. These skills are useful to any architect interested in working with the historic built environment, any preservationist, and any architectural historian interested in working with vernacular architecture or engaging in a rigorous assessment of the material qualities of American architecture.

Requirements:
The students will be required to complete two major requirements. The first, driven by the class lectures, is an essay examination of the student’s command of the knowledge base of traditional materials and technologies, information essential to reading and recording a building in the field. The second, more significant requirement is a building-centered project. Focusing on a threatened historic building in the Charlottesville-Albemarle environs, students working in teams will generate exacting measured drawings of the building and a substantial assessment of their building’s materials, technologies, and change over time.

Readings:
Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes (University of Tennessee, 2005)
John A. Burns, Recording Historic Structures, 2nd edition (John Wiley and Sons, 2004)
W. Brown Morton III, The Secretary of the Interior's Standards for Rehabilitation & Illustrated Guidelines for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings, (Washington DC, reprinted 1997)

Class maximum: 30 students
Satisfies Requirements: This course serves as one of the four “foundations” courses required for the graduate certificate in Historic Preservation and as one of the electives for the undergraduate minor in Historic Preservation. The course is also recommended preparation for the 2006 Summer Field School in Historic Preservation held on site in Falmouth, Jamaica.