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ARCH4543/5543— Architecture Theory & Criticism

University of Oklahoma, Division of Architecture, Graduate/Undergraduate Seminar


The final required seminar in the history-theory sequence at OU, the course is mixed graduate and undergraduate from students of all majors in the college—architecture, interior design, construction science, environmental design, landscape architecture—and covers a wide range of topics from urban planning, to race and gender, disability, climate change and decarbonization, monuments, and more. With two other faculty in Spring 2024, we redesigned the entire curriculum to refresh the selected readings and discourage the use of generative AI to encourage students to hone their critical voice through in class writings and project based assignments.

Project 1: Beyond Bronze, Rethinking Oklahoma Monuments


Emily Haas - A Conspiracy of Silence
Jordan Hughes - Black Wall Street
Audrey Owen - Virtual Expansion, Digital Monuments
Alan Jackson II - Blossoming of the Flower Moon


Project 2: Mapping Controversies


Jordan Hughes - Lower Manhattan Expressway 
Nameethae Ganapathiseril Baburaj - Pruitt Igoe
Emily Haas - Manzanar Internment Camp
Hiroki Mishima - Hudson Yards

Reading List (texts in order of assignment)


  1. Langdon. “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedalus 109, no. 1 (1980): 121–36.
  2. Scott, James C. “The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique,” from Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
  3. McLeod, Mary. "Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life: An Introduction." In Architecture of the Everyday, edited by Steven Harris, and Deborah Berke, 9-29. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2020.
  4. Rothstein, Richard. Preface, Chapters 1 & 2, in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2017.
  5. Heynen, Hilde. "Petrifying Memories: Architecture and the Construction of Identity." The Journal of Architecture 4, no. 4 (1999): 369-90.
  6. Inwood, Joshua F.J. "Contested Memory in the Birthplace of a King: A Case Study of Auburn Avenue and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Park." Cultural Geographies 16 (2009): 87–109.
  7. Gissen, David, “Impaired Monuments: Architecture, History, and the Preservation of Disability,” in The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
  8. Hayden, Dolores. "What Would a Non-Sexist City Be Like? Speculations on Housing, Urban Design, And human Work." Signs 5, no. 3 (1980): 170-187.
  9. Colomina, Beatriz, “Intimacy and Spectacle: The Interiors of Adolf Loos,” AA Files No. 20 (Autumn 1990), 5-15.
  10. Weizman, Ines. "Tuning into the Void: The Aurality of Adolf Loos’s Architecture." Harvard Design Magazine Do you read me? no. 38 (2014): 8-16.
  11. Serlin, David. "Constructing Autonomy: Smart Homes for Disabled Veterans and the Politics of Normative Citizenship." Critical Military Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 38-46.
  12. Nixon, Rob. "Introduction." In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 1-44. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Pages 1-22, at minimum.
  13. Abramson, Daniel M. “Architectures of Obsolescence: Lessons for History” in: Tischleder, B.B., Wasserman, S. (eds) Cultures of Obsolescence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York (2015).
  14. Daniel A. Barber, “Drawing the Line,” Places Journal, January 2024. Accessed 06 Nov 2024. https://doi.org/10.22269/240130
  15. Till, Jeremy. “Who Builds Your Architecture”? in Architecture Depends. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009, 171-187.
  16. Wilson, Mabel O, Jordan Carver and Kadambari Baxi. "Who Builds Your Architecture? – an Advocacy Project." In The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor, edited by Andrew Ross, 100-13. New York: OR Books, 2015.