What does architectural history look like from the globe's northernmost places? How has human engagement with the Arctic shaped unique built environments while also sparking social, political, and environmental concerns? This seminar will introduce students to architecture and spatial practices in Northern Asia, Arctic North America, and Greenland. This ecologically complex region is home to diverse Indigenous communities who have used architecture to cultivate belonging for millennia. We will delve into the rich history of transregional creative expression before European colonization. We will look at materials used in dynamic northern ecologies, including iglus and whalebone houses. And we will explore alterations to the built environment imposed by forms of conquest, including imperial resource exploitation, colonial science, and Soviet and capitalist industrialization. We will conclude with present-day proposals for rewilding Siberia with the extinct mammoth and the uses of Indigenous visual culture in land-based political movements.

Through exposure to material culture, oral history, maps, engineering diagrams, archaeology, and Native literature, students will develop methodological tools for analyzing built environments in the context of colonialism, empire, ideas of race, and climate. Our aim is to use case studies to challenge received ideas of architectural history and to think critically about how different forms of historical evidence structure perspectives of the Arctic.

HISTART Concentration Distributions: Early Modern, Modern and Contemporary, Asia, Europe and the United States

Course Readings: All readings are available on Canvas

Course Requirements: Reading responses (20%); architecture/object presentation (20%); final paper (2,000 – 2,500 words) (30%); attendance and participation (30%)

Intended Audience: No prerequisites; all students are welcome

Class Format: Two eighty-minute seminar sessions per week