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This dissertation examines links between architectural and colonial discourse in order to provide a new account of England’s fascination with the “all’antica” manner in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. I argue that the allure of classicism during this period was directly related to imperial ambitions awakened by the consolidation of the Scottish and English crowns. Seeking models for their nascent empire, architects and colonial “planters” looked to their own history as a Roman colony. Shared references to antiquity facilitated an unprecedented commerce between artistic and political discourse. Architects in England and colonizers abroad both fashioned themselves as the “new Romans,” reconceiving English identity as a product of Britain’s former subjugation. While classicism provided newly required symbols of empire, it also challenged traditional notions of “Englishness,” embroiling architects in cultural, political, and religious debates that transformed architecture and the status of architects.

This dissertation explores architectural building types as critical components of, and unique points of interface with, three infrastructural systems, built or re-built in New York City in the decades after World War II. While contemporary infrastructure is enmeshed in regional and global networks far beyond the administrative bounds of the five boroughs, an architectural focus reveals these systems as inescapably local, tied to political struggles surrounding the siting, design, and construction of buildings; to socio-technical imperatives of density; to material consequences like traffic and air pollution; and to aesthetic effects like beauty, monotony, and monumentality. Three case studies—in food distribution, telephone service, and sewage treatment—explore different spatial techniques involved in the management of commodities, information, and waste. Reading each through the social history of technology, as well as the disciplinary tools of architectural history, brings to light unique aspects of architecture’s participation in the political, social, and technological landscapes of the contemporary city. This dissertation looks closely at the prewar roots and postwar creation of New York’s present-day systems: the adoption of the infrastructural buildings we see today, and the rejection of alternatives in design, values, and policies. It argues that the city’s vital systems, and their architectural manifestations, were largely designed according to the needs of various elite groups, in ways that supported the long-term deindustrialization and stratification of urban existence, though not according to a consistent or coherent plan. Well-studied postwar phenomena such as decentralization, automation, demographic change, and “urban crisis” take on different casts as familiar characters like politicians, property owners and architects are joined by monopoly corporations, technicians, and neighborhood organizers. Granular study of the processes that led to the adoption of particular plans, and the rejection of alternatives, reveals the city’s visual and functional landscape as one shaped by a wide—though far from democratic—range of actors. Today, these same infrastructures, physically durable even as their social use has been redirected or transformed, continue to participate in an ostensibly postindustrial and rapidly gentrifying city. By reexamining the narratives of these systems’ design and construction, the study of infrastructural architecture illuminates this inequitable history, while revealing moments of resistance and supporting calls for the further democratization of urban life by those whose needs have been discounted.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1986. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Bibliography: leaves 482-490. / William Robert Ware (1832- 1915) planned and directed the first collegiate program in architectural education i n the United States. He was educated in the liberal arts and civil engineering at Harvard University and received further training in architects' offices before entering into practice with Henry Van Brunt (1832-1903). In 1865 Ware was appointed to the newly established Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He remained on the faculty until 1881, when he was called to Columbia University to organize still another collegiate program in architecture. During 1866-67, Ware traveled in Europe, paying particular attention to the role of national schools and professional organizations in the teaching of architecture in Britain and France. Formal instruction in architecture at M.I.T. began in the fall of 1868. Ware devised a curriculum, which he adjusted throughout the 1870s, including drawing and design, architectural history, and construction and practice (i . e., building materials and components, specifications, and contracts). In the spring of 1872, he recruited Eugene Letang (1842-1892), an alumnus of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, to teach design. From this time on, the routine studio problems at M.I.T. began to emulate those of the Ecole, and the eclectic neoclassicism of the Beaux-Arts began to predominate in students' drawings. The Department of Architecture at M.I.T. in these earliest years functioned best in providing a one- or two-year course of special study for persons who were graduates of four-year colleges or who had some experience in architects' offices. It also served to prepare Americans for the formal or informal study they intended to pursue in Paris. Ware's department offered, in effect, a postgraduate program, a program in continuing education, and a preparatory program for advanced study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. By virtue of its location in cosmopolitan Boston, the M.I.T. Department of Architecture emerged in the 1870s as the preeminent American collegiate program, attracting more students from more diverse parts of the country than the other important early programs at Cornell University and the University of Illinois. Ware trained some 235 students at M.I.T., and many of them became the leaders in architecture and architectural education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. / by John Andrew Chewning. / Ph.D.

This dissertation examines key examples of foliate carving from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, re-evaluating its historiographic context while refracting foliate decoration through the lens of climate in the medieval West. Looking to medieval ideas about plant life, weather, and religious devotion in France and England, this study posits that ecological change, rather than the influx of ideas in medieval universities, was a key factor in changing attitudes towards nature in the Middle Ages. The foliate program on the west façade of Notre-Dame of Amiens illustrates connections to environmental miracles, authenticity of local relics, and the Church’s attempts to intervene in natural disasters. Taking one of the most significant examples of medieval foliate sculpture, the interior foliate frieze of Amiens, a new analysis argues that sculptors knowingly made this monumental frieze look as if it were organic and alive, rather than reproducing each segment identically. Crockets, on the other hand, a site of repetition and modular adaptation, are considered an important aspect of Gothic design, especially in the quire and west front of Wells Cathedral, where innovative crocket designs appear to complement the visual identity crafted by the diocese.

In this dissertation, I investigate connections between French philosophy and the theory of architecture from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s. In the mid-1960s, many architects became acutely aware of the crisis of modern architecture embodied in the failings of social housing, the routinized corporate modernism of the postwar period, and the commodification of design. They questioned the principles of the Modern Movement and emphasized the “arbitrary” nature of the relationship between form and function while turning to French structuralism, semiology, and post-structuralism for potential answers. My period of study spans from the the period of political uprisings of the 1960s to the advent of digital design in the early 1990s.To date, little in-depth research has been done on the close relation between French philosophy and architecture in this period and its role in foreshadowing postmodern developments. My dissertation addresses this gap by presenting case studies of the theoretical work of six different architects: Aldo Rossi, Alan Colquhoun, Mario Gandelsonas and Diana Agrest, Bernard Tschumi, and Peter Eisenman. These case studies share a common thread: a preoccupation with structuralist and poststructuralist concerns with language. However, concepts such as “structure,” “event,” and “meaning” often have different meanings for each of these architects. Thus, my project could be described as a history and criticism of architectural theory—one that focuses specifically on the dissonances and contradictions present within the theoretical writings of these architects, while examining the polemics and discussions between them. I consider their built work only to the extent that it helps to elucidate or challenge theoretical concepts. Thus, in my case study on Aldo Rossi’s writings, I interrogate the analogy between the structuralist concern for articulating discrete and finite linguistic units and the latter’s notion of “type” and urban morphology. In the chapter on Alan Colquhoun, I discuss the influence that the work of Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Ferdinand de Saussure had on his reflections about “meaning” and “convention” in architecture. In the case study on the work of Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas, I examine the extent to which their understanding of “theory” and of “ideology” is indebted to the work of Louis Althusser and trace the influence of Roland Barthes, whose seminar on S/Z they attended in Paris before moving to New York in 1971. Likewise, I analyze the role that thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, and the Tel Quel circle in the late 1970s, and Jacques Derrida in the early 1980s had on Bernard Tschumi’s writings on the “polysemy of meaning” and on the “event.” Finally, I examine Peter Eisenman’s collaboration with Jacques Derrida in the 1980s questioning Eisenman’s eclectic appropriation of Derrida’s philosophical concepts. Besides elucidating this significant period of architecture in which many of the fundamental principles of modern architecture were overturned, in the conclusion of this study, I discuss briefly the “post-critical turn” in the architectural scholarship of the past two decades with the hope of challenging its basic assumptions. My hope is to contribute, through its critical reevaluation, to theory’s renewal.