MARK JARZOMBEK: Architecture shapes our
culture, our identities, our way
of life, and even our understanding
of the cosmos.
It continues to shape our current
reality, just as it's shaped our
reality for thousands of years.
To know who we are today requires that
we know who we were, for as William
Faulkner once said, "The
past is never dead.
It's not even past."
Some buildings are admittedly in ruins
or have disappeared altogether.
But buildings have amazing longevity.
Even buildings that are hundreds and
thousands of years old can still serve
as living elements in our culture.
We no longer build pyramids,
of course.
But the pyramids are certainly a
permanent element in our cultural
imagination.
In this course I've picked up some
important moments in the history of
architecture, that if you begin to add
them together constitute a global
perspective.
First societies still exist in
many parts of the world.
We, as modern and agriculturalists,
our history is only 5,000 years.
The buildings I talk about
place architecture in
the dynamics of history.
Someone had to make the first pyramid.
Someone had to design the first
church or the Buddhist temple.
Someone had even to design
the first tipi.
Architectural history is filled with
moments of transition and innovation,
brought on by changes in power,
religion, trade, ecology, and
techniques of production.
We'll start with the architecture of
our first society ancestors, some
150,000 years ago, and take the story
to about 1400 CE to the doorstep of
our modern age.
But in all cases, we're talking about
buildings at shaped our modernity in
one way or another.
So the caves, these are
not cave people.
They're not living in the caves.
The caves are the sacred places of
discourse, if you will, with animals
and ancestors.
I will cover some buildings that might
be well-known, but just as many that
might be new to you if you are coming
to architectural history
for the first time.
Having visited many of these places
myself over the years I want to try to
bring some of the excitement of these
buildings into the classroom as they
are part of our global civilizational
legacy.
In these lectures, I try to give you
the context of the buildings.
I'll try to give you also the larger
geopolitical story and framework
architecture within that.
I also try to explain how buildings
function, which is not just a question
of how they're used, but how buildings
evoke or even model certain
imaginaries, which I think is an
important part of how architecture
works, and why buildings are such
exciting things to study.
