ARC3310H F
Instructor: Richard Sommer
Meeting Section: L0101
Friday 3:00PM - 6:00PM

Architecture’s political function and its ability to represent societal values and aspirations is most clearly understood through the lens of the monument and the modern history of monument-making. Yet the monument is often proffered as a timeless object fixing the past and embodying the hegemony of persons, places and things. This seminar advances an alternate thesis, one that explores the monument as a timely, prospective art capable of opening history to change, and reshaping public memory.

The recent uprising of consciousness concerning the legacy of racism in the United States, Canada and elsewhere has hastened a much-needed public discourse on the history, meaning and position of monuments in the spaces of society. Black Lives Matter and other anti-racism movements, and the many conflicts and equations between indigenous understandings of land and sovereignty, colonialism and white supremacy, have brought needed attention to the troubled creation, form and counter-democratic legacy of a wide array of monuments.

In the American context, this would include now-contested 20th century monuments celebrating the ‘heritage’ of the Southern Confederacy, and the many monuments devoted to legitimizing the country’s ‘manifest destiny,’ ‘exceptionalism,’ and colonial settlement of the ‘frontier,’ such as Devils Tower (Na Kovehe trans.: Bear Lodge), Mount Rushmore, and The St. Louis Gateway Arch (formerly the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and Museum). Students in the seminar will be asked to identify analogous sites in Canada (for example: Mount MacDonald in BC, The Queens Park Complex in Toronto, Expo 67’ in Montreal, etc.), or other countries, subject them to a cultural “stress test,” and develop analyses and proposals for their potential reform.

Seminar Structure
Following from the proposition that the monument is time-full, the course will engage students in case-based studies and readings organized around a series of overlapping concepts of time that underlie the creation of modern monuments, including deep/geological time, linear/historical time, technological/mediated time and memory/dream time. We will expand the class of objects and sites we might consider as fulfilling the function of a monument, beyond statuary and other quasi-classical markers, to include more performance-based phenomena such as trails, pageants, festivals, and museological/heritage zones. We will examine how certain monuments intertwine landscape, infrastructure, urbanization and technology, and study the contemporary, critical and experimental approaches taken by designers and artists such as Nona Faustine, Dahn Vo, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Kara Walker, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Students from all graduate programs interested in the nexus between art, design and politics, and in questioning the purpose, place and value of practices associated with monument-making are encouraged to join the seminar.