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Architecture and Culture: Built Environment, Landscape and Society

This course examines the relationship between architecture, culture, and landscape through history. It will analyze the meanings and functions of buildings from ancient civilizations like Egypt, Indus Valley, Greece, and Rome. Case studies may explore architectural developments from these eras like religious structures, residences, and monuments. The course also considers how geography, environment, and culture shaped architectural design. It provides an introduction to studying buildings as representations of cultural values and records of the past. Methods used to understand architecture historically and as expressions of culture will be surveyed.

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86 views

Architecture and Culture: Built Environment, Landscape and Society

This course examines the relationship between architecture, culture, and landscape through history. It will analyze the meanings and functions of buildings from ancient civilizations like Egypt, Indus Valley, Greece, and Rome. Case studies may explore architectural developments from these eras like religious structures, residences, and monuments. The course also considers how geography, environment, and culture shaped architectural design. It provides an introduction to studying buildings as representations of cultural values and records of the past. Methods used to understand architecture historically and as expressions of culture will be surveyed.

Uploaded by

Malavika
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Architecture and Culture: Built Environment, Landscape and Society

The course would be concerned primarily with human-built environment interactions and
would probe into the role of culture, geography and landscape in the making of living spaces
and monumental architecture. The course would be concerned with the meanings of
buildings, their contents and an overview of their biographical journeys across time. It will
provide the learners with an introduction to the historical approach of understanding
buildings as texts of culture and records of time while also surveying some of the methods of
architectural design adopted and later adapted by people who use, live and engage with the
buildings in multiple ways. Case studies may range from Ancient Egypt and Indus Valley
Civilization to Greco-Roman and colonial architecture.

I. An Introduction to Architectural History


a) Your grass is greener than mine !- Environment and Architecture (2h)
b) Home is where the hearth is. - Form, Meaning and Content (2h)

II. Human, the builders


a) Caves, Camps and the meadows: The first Shelters (2h)
b) The wild and the domestic – A case study of Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük (4h)

III. Early Civilizations and Monumentality


a) The Mighty, the sacred and the Common –Defining Religious and Residential spaces (4h)
b) Displaying power: A survey of the Pyramids (Early Egyptian Architecture) (3h)

IV. Architecture and the State


a) Why don’t you build a house in Harappa?: Urban Planning in the Indus Valley
Civilization (3h)
b) Into the Labyrinth of the Minotaur : Knossos and the Minoa (2 h)

V. Culture(s) and ways of building


a) What’s a Mandala? The Stupa; temple and tomb (Buddhist architecture) ( 3h )
b) Let’s build a house for god - Vastu-shastra ; (Puranic Hindu architecture) ( 3h )
c) Design a Roman city - A stroll through Pompeii (Greco-Roman Architecture) ( 2h)
Readings:
Amos Rapoport, The Meaning of the Built Environment (Chapters 1&2), University of
Arizona Press, 1990.
Ian Hodder and Peter Pels, ‘History houses: A new interpretation of architectural elaboration
at Catalhoyuk’ in Ian Hodder, (ed.) Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Catal Hoyuk
As A Case Study, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp.163-186
Shereen Ratnagar, Understanding Harappa; Civilization in the Greater Indus Valley, Tulika
Books, 2015.
Lars Fogelin, ‘Ritual and Presentation in Early Buddhist Religious Architecture’, Asian
Perspectives, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2003), pp. 129-154.
Francis D. K. Ching, Mark M. Jarzombek, Vikramaditya Prakash, (eds.) A Global History of
Architecture, Wiley Publishers, 2011.
Diana E. E. Kleiner, Roman Architecture; A Visual Guide, Ch.5, Yale University Press, 2014.

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