Module 1: Source

This Module looks at the 20th Century with a clinical eye towards finding the traces of adornment, decoration and excess.
Students will work in groups of 2, each group will take a text and will analyze it in order to develop a synthesis, along with the written assignment each group will search for examples that illustrate the given text. Examples can belong to all fields: cinema, biology, art, architecture, etc.

Module 1 Reader:

- The Stones of Venice, Chapter XI ‘The Material of Ornament’, Ruskin (first edition 1853)
- Illuminations, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin, 1936.
- Collected Essays, ‘Ornament and Crime’, Adolf Loos, 1908.
- Mechanization Takes Command, ‘Movement’, Sigfried Gideon, 1969.
- In the Footsteps of Le Corbusier, ‘Maison Dom-ino and the self-referential sign’, Peter Eisenman, 1991
- The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Chapter 2 ‘The Historicity of the Avant-Garde: Piranesi and Einstein’; Appendix ‘Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms by Sergei M. Eisenstein, Manfredo Tafuri, 1978.
- Collected Essays, ‘The Principles of Philosophy or, the Monadology (1714)’, Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz.