Assembly by Design: Diplomacy, Worldmaking, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century

To gather, in protest or in diplomacy, is never neutral. Every space of assembly is a small experiment in worldmaking and a rehearsal for power. From plenary halls to socialist workers’ clubs, from the ballot box to the roundtable, design shapes how people appear before one another, how publics take form, how ideas acquire a stage. This course examines design and architectural responses to debates on democratic form and diplomatic culture during the 20th century, when global organizations emerged to replace empires. Governments and institutions used design, media, and architecture to exert soft power, hide imperial ambitions, and build geopolitical alliances in a changing world. We will trace the architects and designers who gave physical form to political and diplomatic visions, but also the activists, lawyers, and diplomats who subverted existing structures to reimagine modes of worldmaking and community building. Drawing mainly from Europe and North America, the course is organized around key sites and themes of worldmaking—the assembly hall, the courtroom, the street, situating modernist design within the political and social projects of its time: human rights, socialism, humanitarian aid, solidarity building, and internationalism. The aim of the course is to reveal the intertwining of political imagination and modernist design in the twentieth century. Course readings will explore the spatial politics of worldmaking from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining methods from material culture and the history of architecture with political theory and media studies. Students will be responsible for leading one class conversation and will pursue original research on a site, building, or example of material culture related to the course topics for their final paper (approximately 4,000 words in length). 3 credits.