Open only to students in the Florence Architecture Program. This course will explore architecture’s manifold entanglements with the natural environment. Rather than focusing on debates on its ‘greenness,’ we will consider environment as a way of seeing, to embed architecture within a network of territorial transformations, practices of material extraction, resource management and their social uses. We will use Italy as a case study in the transformation of environmental aesthetics, from medieval rural communities with their collective use of resources (commons), through modernism, the rise of capital and Italy’s late path to industrialization, to the environmental urgencies of the present moment. Working through these various notions of the environment as socially and politically constructed, students taking this course will problematize the way in which Architecture reflects this relationship, and in turn they will be encouraged to embed this way of thinking in their research.
This course has an associated course fee. See the Course Fees webpage for more information.
Department: Architecture
Location: Florence
Semesters: Fall, Spring
Credits: 3