Rebecca Houze
Ph. D., University of Chicago
Assistant Professor, Art History
Architecture, Design and Decorative Arts
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ARTH 601/685 Art History Seminar/Special Topics
Vienna 1900: Art and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, simmered with radical
artistic and intellectual innovation at the
turn-of-the-twentieth-century. While Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and
Oskar Kokoschka painted the tormented Habsburg psyche beneath its
glittering façade, Sigmund Freud and Arthur Schnitzler probed
its psychological interior in clinical case studies, novels, and
theater. The political and cultural milieu of “Vienna 1900”
was a place in which journalists, physicists, philosophers, and
physicians mingled in the coffeehouse with actors, painters,
musicians, and businessmen. This class explores the astonishing
pursuit of the “modern” that crossed disciplinary
boundaries in ways that would be unthinkable, and perhaps impossible
today.
ARTH 493 History of Architecture III: 1900 to the Present
This course explores the history of twentieth-century architecture by
considering various themes that have shaped its course: industry,
commerce, and entertainment; the identification of public and private
spaces; the development of coherent visual languages of form;
understanding the way in which communities function in urban and
suburban environments; sensitivity to issues of race, class, gender,
and ecology; and the role of built structures in preserving cultural
memory. Rather than follow a comprehensive survey of buildings, we
examine a number of case studies in conjunction with influential
texts written by architects and architectural critics over the past
one hundred years.
ARTH 496A History of the Decorative Arts: Furniture
Decoration”
is one of the most contested terms in the history of modern art.
Bitterly disparaged by modern architects such as Adolf Loos and Le
Corbusier, the concept of decorative art was at the center of debates
surrounding the development of design in the early twentieth-century.
This course investigates the historical relationship of art to
industry by looking at examples of material culture—fashions,
furnishings, and utensils of daily living— from the
eighteenth-century to the present. What can the style of a shoe,
spoon, or chair tell us about gender, commerce, or national identity?
By examining numerous primary and secondary sources, and looking at
a few important cases, we will begin to understand the place of
“decoration” in modern and contemporary theories of
design.
ARTH 381/603 History of Visual Communication
This
course examines topics in the history of graphic design from the
Industrial Revolution to the present, including the emergence of
modernism in design and its relationship to popular culture through
such venues as advertising, propaganda and fashion magazines in the
early twentieth centuries, the influence of linguistic theory on the
discipline of Visual Communication, and the shift from modernism to
postmodernism at the end of the twentieth century. Throughout the
course we examine the recurrent themes of new technology, innovation,
and social responsibility, in texts written by nineteenth and
twentieth-century designers as well as contemporary design critics.
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