Other Europes: Design and Architecture in Central Europe, 1880–1956

This course offers a different view of European-wide tendencies in design and architecture by examining a remarkable body of work that has often been ignored in conventional accounts of the period. Focusing on the visual and material culture of Central Europe (in particular Hungary, Romania, Poland and Czechoslovakia), this course will explore issues of national identity, the vernacular and modernity as expressed in a range of architecture, design, dress and craft items. Encompassing both urban and rural centers, it explores how the particular political and cultural conditions of Central Europe shaped such design activities. Much of the course will be concerned with the movements of National Romanticism and Modernism, and with the relationship between regional, national and international tendencies in this politically turbulent era. 3 credits.