Professor: Marcel Brousseau
4 credits
In the late 19th century urban landscapes became permanently transformed, as a new architectural type, the steel-framed high-rise, or skyscraper, appeared. As architect Louis Sullivan asserted, these dramatic buildings were not only a new architectural arrangement of materials; they correlated to a “new grouping of social conditions.” Now, over a century after the skyscraper’s emergence, we will explore its past, present, and future across a range of media. To account for the skyscraper as a structure, a symbol, and a mechanical and social system, our analyses will encompass architectural plans, paintings, photography, essays, television shows, films, and a novel. Within the broad global history of the skyscraper, we will focus on technologies such as the elevator and tubular construction; buildings such as the Empire State Building and the Burj Khalifa; events such as the construction and destruction of the World Trade Center; architects and engineers such as Minoru Yamasaki, Leslie Robertson, Ruth Gordon Schnapp, and Zaha Hadid; and communities such as the Mohawk ironworkers of Akwesasne and Kahnawake. Our diverse analyses will allow us to explore the aesthetic, technical, and social conditions of the skyscraper through the frames of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Students will build a term-length project in which they study a skyscraper of their choosing from top to bottom in as many scholarly dimensions as they wish.