History by Time Cuts

This module encourages a closer look at the emergence of architectural commonalities and differences within the span of a “time cut.” By discussing examples of architectural innovations representing different parts of the world, we hope to better understand how social, cultural, and economic interactions on a global scale are essential pieces that form our global history and the manner in which architectural production is always triangulated by the exigencies of time and location. Comprising of five chronological slices of time, beginning with the 1400s and ending with modernism in the 1900, each time-cut is presented in terms of its own challenges and the history of architecture as the history of successive and often dynamic changes spurred on by new materials, new technologies, changing political situations and changing aesthetic and religious ideals.