Concrete and Flesh: Modern Architecture and the Body

• Credit value: 30 credits at Level 6
• Convenor: to be confirmed
• Assessment: a 3000-word essay (60%) and three-hour take-home examination (40%)

In this module we introduce you to the many ways that modern architecture related to the people and bodies (real and imagined) for whom it was designed. The material covered is from the period 1890 to 1965, and deals primarily with the great modernist architects:

• Le Corbusier
• Adolf Loos
• Alvar Aalto
• Mies van der Rohe
• Eileen Gray
• Charles and Ray Eames
• Philip Johnson
• Alison and Peter Smithson.

We ask how these architects conceived the architecture-body relation - and thus designed buildings - in different ways in response to the industrial, social and political changes of the modern period. We also consider how the issues of gender, race, class and sexuality were encompassed by modernism or came into friction with it. As well as architecture, we will look at theoretical writings, photography, film, dress and furniture.