AHT 375 Nature City Post-1960
The turn of the 1960s-70s, characterized by the rapid acceleration of time-space compression associated with 20th century global processes, prompted a radical transformation in the perception of urban and natural environments. The geographer Henry Lefebvre significantly heralded the advent of an ‘urban revolution’ (1970), which has now spiraled into the prospect of a ‘total urbanization’ of the planet. This paradigmatic shift has been accompanied by increased environmental awareness and activism, as well as a growing recognition of the complex interplay between natural and urban entities. This course looks at a range of aesthetic practices which have been engaging with ecology and ecosystems, energy, world conceptions and the formation of hybrid landscapes and environments since the 1960s. While the processes of urban and territorial transformations take place in the physical world, their design, assessment, alteration and pursuits occur at the level of ‘representation’. With a particular focus on aesthetics and architecture, the course explores the changing urban imaginaries of land, water and skies in the second half of the 20th century, and the rise of a planetary scale supplanting previous cosmological representations on earth.