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DRPS : Course Catalogue : Edinburgh College of Art : Architecture - History

Postgraduate Course: Intermediality in Early Modern Architecture (ARHI11013)

Course Outline
SchoolEdinburgh College of Art CollegeCollege of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Credit level (Normal year taken)SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) AvailabilityAvailable to all students
SCQF Credits20 ECTS Credits10
SummaryThis course explores the multiplying links between architecture and other media from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and the ramifications of those relationships for architectural intermediality in the present day. Through first-hand encounters with buildings, painting, sculpture, historic books, and graphic art, you will study how architecture's interactions with other media shaped the rise of the modern architectural profession.
Course description Architecture's current status as an art that combines expertise in multiple media--technologies such as drawing, modelling, and publishing--began in the early modern period. While medieval builders conceived architectural design through the lens of building, Renaissance and Baroque architects from Michelangelo to Dürer, Bernini, and Rubens also employed design practices from drawing, engineering, sculpture, and painting. Metalsmiths devised architecture manuals, theatre designers shaped urban planning, and printmakers canonized the Classical Orders. But how did such experts use knowledge from other media in architecture, and what did building teach architects about the other arts?

This postgraduate course investigates the links between architecture and other media from the rise of architectural prints in the Renaissance to the proliferation of architecture academies during the Enlightenment. Through discussions around first-hand investigations of buildings, prints, drawings, treatises, and sculptures, as well as primary and secondary texts, you will study how architecture's changing relationships with other media gave rise to the modern architectural profession. The goal of this course is to empower you to explore how architectural culture thrives across multiple media platforms.
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
Pre-requisites Co-requisites
Prohibited Combinations Other requirements None
Information for Visiting Students
Pre-requisitesNone
High Demand Course? Yes
Course Delivery Information
Not being delivered
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
  1. Compare different modes of intermediality in early modern architecture and how they operated in relation to each other.
  2. Evaluate how early modern architecture's interactions with other media created conditions for the emergence of the modern architectural profession, as well as architecture's present entanglements with other arts.
  3. Critically engage with diverse textual, visual, and built primary sources and revise the terms of debate as established in key secondary literature.
  4. Appraise the histories and theories of early modern architecture as a medium, explaining how writing on this subject has shifted over time.
Reading List
Kristeller, Oskar Paul, "The Modern System of the Arts." In Renaissance Thought and the Arts, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 163-227.

MacLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor, 1964).

Lavin, Irving. Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. 2 vols. New York: Published for the Pierpont Morgan Library by Oxford University Press, 1980.

Payne, Alina A. "Materiality, Crafting, and Scale in Renaissance Architecture." Oxford Art Journal 32, no. 3 (2009): 365-86.

Preimesberger, Rudolf. Paragons and Paragone: Van Eyck, Raphael, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Bernini. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2011.

Vasari, Giorgio. Vasari on Technique. Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, Prefixed to the Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. 2nd ed. Translated by Louisa S. Maclehose, and edited with introduction and notes by G. Baldwin Brown. New York: Dover, 1960.
Additional Information
Graduate Attributes and Skills SCQF - Level 11
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
1. Use insights from engagement with original artworks and historical texts as well as secondary literature to critically review, consolidate and extend knowledge, skills, practices and thinking in early modern architectural history.
2. Apply experience from research and classroom discussion to communicate with peers, senior colleagues and specialists about the early modern architectural history in written and oral form.
3. Demonstrate leadership and/or initiative and make an identifiable contribution to change and development and/or new thinking in early modern architectural history by recognising how scholars discussed in class have changed the field.
Special Arrangements Students enrolled on the MSc in Architectural History will have priority enrollment on this course.
KeywordsArchitecture,Media,Intermediality,Early Modern,Print Culture,Cultural History,Visual Culture
Contacts
Course organiserDr Elizabeth Petcu
Tel: (0131 6)50 2619
Email:
Course secretaryMiss Amanda Fleet
Tel: (0131 6)50 2328
Email:
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