A step into Radcliffe is a step into a living textbook of American architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This seven-week seminar examines the aesthetics and meanings of American architecture via the laboratory of the Cambridge environs.
Students explore architectural history in situ, or on the site.
From the historicizing Greek and Gothic revivals, to the indigenous New England shingle style, through the progressive modernism of the international style, students explore the works of major American architects from H.H. Richardson and Ralph Adams Cram, to Walter Gropius, Graham Gund, and Joan Goody. The provinces of central France, from the extinct volcanic cones of the Massif Central to the fertile plains south of the Loire, contain an extraordinary wealth of medieval monuments rarely visited by the modern traveler. This twelve-week seminar concentrates on the region's innovative art and architecture, from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. The seminar concludes with consideration of the impact on the arts of central France by Jean, Duc de Berry, and the development of fifteenth-century secular architecture. In contemporary times, this motif is extensively explored in American and European domestic architecture.