Spring 2001 HONR Course Descriptions - HONR 219F

HONR 219F World's Fairs: Social & Architectural History
T-TH 2-3:15
Dr. Isabel Gournay, Associate Professor, School of Architecture

Since the first World's Fair was held in London's gigantic Crystal Palace in 1851, international expositions have served as key agents of modernization and major "historical markers" in Europe and North America. Such spectacular events have stimulated the exchange of ideas in the field of urbanism, architecture, the fine and decorative arts, and created opportunities for personal discovery among designers and critics, as well as members of the many professional groups who attended international meetings in the precincts of the Fairs. Special attention will be paid to the evolving political, economic, and cultural agenda (avowed or hidden) of International Expositions, as they related to complementary or conflicting issues of national pride and colonial expansion, race and gender, technological and artistic supremacy, social welfare and conspicuous consumption, popular education and entertainment. The master plans for major fairs, their legacy of permanent civic improvements and structures as well as the exterior and exhibition designs for their national, regional, foreign, thematic, and commercial pavilions will be compared and contrasted. Additionally, we shall study the symbolic and physical impact of the 1889, 1900 and 1925 ("Art Deco") Paris Fairs, as well as Chicago's 1893 Colombian Exposition on the urbanism and architecture of Washington, D.C.

In addition to commenting on presentations of specific fairs and their artistic, urban and architectural context by the instructor, students will annotate and discuss major primary and interpretive sources, and participate in "pin-up" reviews of assignments, mixing text with graphics and involving historical research, critical appraisal and visual analysis. They will examine the archival and library material preserved in the Rare Book room of the University of Maryland School of Architecture. This collection includes books, portfolios, periodicals and pamphlets (official reports, guidebooks, viewbooks...), prints and photographs, ephemera (leaflets, maps, schedules, trade, and advertising cards, tickets, postcards, menus, games, souvenir ribbons, and scarves, stereograph viewer, scrapbooks). The library staff has set up an Online Exhibition (http:///www.lib.umd.edu/UMCP/ARCH/exhibition) highlighting the collection, with digitized images of the most interesting holdings. Honors students will contribute captions and entries identifying and describing artifacts illustrated on the exhibition's site, as well as thematic essays which will establish the historical and artistic context allowing us to fully understand the significance of these objects.

Class attendance and participation: 20% of grade; analysis and discussions of required readings, "pin-up" reviews: 40% of grade; contribution(s) to the Architecture Library Web site (amounting to approximately 16 type written pages): 40% of grade

Readings discussed in class will include:
Zeynep Celik, Displaying the Orient: Architecture of Islam at Nineteenth-Century World's Fairs
John E. Findling, editor Historical Dictionary of World's Fairs and Expositions, 1851-1988
Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions, and World's Fairs, 1851-1939
Arnold Lewis, An Early Encounter With Tomorrow: Europeans, Chicago's Loop, and The World's Columbian Exposition
Richard Wilson, Challenge and Response: Americans and the Architecture of the 1889 Exhibition, in Annette Blaugrund (ed.) Paris 1889.
American Artists at the Universal Exposition
Frank Lloyd Wright, Another Pseudo, Architectural Forum (July 1933) 25
Reviews of the 1937 Paris Fair by Talbot Faulkner Hamlin (American Architect), Henry Russell Hitchcock (Architectural Forum), Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (Architectural Record), Elizabeth Mock (Magazine of Art)

CORE: History or Theory of the Arts