Courses

This seminar will examine how fiction in postwar Britain was transformed by developments in architecture and urban design in the 20th and 21st centuries. From high-rises and high-density housing to suburbs and urban sprawl, from the privatization of public space to the rise of surveillance architecture, we will examine how writers after WWII turned new developments in architecture into new kinds of stories and storytelling. We’ll learn about developments in urban design while centering our attention on close reading and narrative. While emphasizing the novel, we’ll also read short stories, architectural criticism, essays, and zines. We’ll read novels by George Orwell, Zadie Smith, J.G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, Pat Barker, and Jenni Fagan as well as architectural writings by Le Corbusier, Alison and Peter Smithson, Archigram, and Denise Scott Brown. We’ll consider both architecture and fiction as speculative arts, in which unbuilt projects can tell us as much about cities, society, and storytelling as the built environment can. Through practices of close reading and research, we’ll learn to think across disciplines and explore how both architecture and fiction imagine utopia, dystopia, and the architecture of everyday life.