Monuments, Monumentality, and Meaning

Harvard GSD

This seminar explores how architecture and urbanism foster, or fail to foster, meaningful human communities by exploring the conflicting claims of Historicism and Modernism through particular built examples in the United States from about 1800 to 1940. We will need to think critically about what monuments are and how they succeed or fail to embody memories of the past in the present for the future. And to distinguish monuments, which are objects, from monumentality, a quality promoted, if not…