Florence as a Cultural Artifact: The History of Architecture as the History of the City

3 units

This course combines seminar and workshop activities aiming at the understanding of the rich urban and architectural history of Florence, the place of students' work and temporary living during the study abroad program. These activities will be in dialogue with the design studio and art history courses. The intellectual framework of the course is informed by Giulo Carlo Argan's seminal work La storia dell'arte come storia della città (The history of art as the history of the city, Einaudi, 1983), presenting the city as a complex time-space phenomenology of cultural artifacts. While Florence is well known for its cultural contribution to Western cultural history during the 1400s and 1500s, little is known about the full span of its millennial history, including its contemporary developments. The seminar activities will cover such aspects through readings and lecture-cum-sketching urban and architectural documentation tours in the first part of the semester, leading to the development of individual artists' book projects to be completed in the second part of the semester for the program's semester exhibition.