ARTH 481: Modern History of Interiors, Furnishings, and Architecture

Course Description

ARTH 481 is an upper-division undergraduate course covering the modern history of architecture, design, and interiors from the 18th century to the present, with some comparative analysis of structures and ideas from earlier historical periods. It is a survey of the language of form and space and stylistic vocabularies related to interiors, furnishings, and architecture for 19th and 20th century European and American art from Colonial and Neoclassical periods forward. A critically-minded, contextual historical survey includes such styles as Arts and Crafts, American Beaux-Arts, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Bauhaus, Modern, Postmodern and 21st-Century Contemporary, and architects and designers such as William Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, Sullivan and Adler, Julia Morgan, Le Corbusier, Philip Johnson, I. M. Pei, and Zaha Hadid, among many others.

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES & ACCESS

Given current, contemporary issues in the 21st century, special focus throughout the semester includes the influences on Interior Architecture and Design of the Coronavirus global pandemic, the war and terrorism in urban space, racial and social justice movements, and environmental and social sustainability. The course also examines the important issue of access: not only who does enter into the life of certain built interior spaces, but also who does not gain the privilege of access. Overall, this class seeks to engage critical thinking about the power of built spaces to symbolize their place and time, and to affect the people who design, occupy, and use them.

Course Modality & DEsign

During Fall 2020, ARTH 481 was an online synchronous course, which met on Zoom in real time once a week for about 3 hours (the required 2 hours, 50 minutes per week of class meeting time).

The primary focus of the course is on the dynamic role that designed interior spaces have played in modern society and culture. Students explore ways of interpreting the meanings and experiences of architectural interiors, their structures, and their contents, from different historical periods, geographic locations, and political contexts. Through lectures, readings, writing assignments, group discussions and analysis projects, students learn to ask and answer such questions as: Why was an architectural interior made? Why does it look the way it does? What does it tell us about history and context?

The online course materials are organized into modules identified by the instructional theme for the week, on Blackboard that includes a table of contents links, with a consistent category link each week, so that every week’s module looks similar.

Sample Blackboard Module Organization

Student Engagement

Students were encouraged to form study groups for weekly study and homework. For the culminating semester assignment, students created Final Presentation Groups of 4 students each, to produce 15-minute research-based slide presentations on topics in 20th and 21st centuries architecture of their choice. During the last 3-hour Zoom course session of Finals Week, the groups presented in the order of the historical time frame of the presentations, allowing for an exceptional student-led overview of the modern, postmodern and contemporary history of architecture and interiors. Commentary and critique by invited faculty and selected guests followed each presentation.
To activate and enliven the on-screen student interaction, students were asked to select an online Zoom background image. Each week, students researched a specific architectural interior in the style of the week’s topic of study, and posted an image of it as their Zoom background. One Breakout Group session each week was dedicated to small group sharing of the visual and historical aspects of their background. Students loved the activity, it provided a natural point of conversation and engagement. Many students cited it in an informal course evaluation session as a course highlight, adding a sense of personal relevance to the course material and a sense of purpose to appearing on screen during a synchronous Zoom lecture.
Most assignments and assessments were essay-style and learning-based, open online for several days before a deadline, allowing for open-book, group study (with certain parameters), designed to allow students to craft thoughtful, studied responses focused on writing excellence.
Frequent individual online student meetings occurred with students with remote-learning issues (there were many), late or missing assignments,
Approximately 9 hours of outside homework assignments per week, as stipulated for 3-unit courses. Two full weeks post-midterm were allowed as an open-ended “catch up” work.

Assessment of Student Learning

Course Student Learning Outcomes

Written Communication: Students will be able to formulate and write visual descriptions and analyses of art, sculpture and architecture that combine vocabulary, visual and historical information, and interpretation.
Critical Thinking: Students will be able to read, describe, and analyze art and architectural history texts, images, plans, drawings and other visual and design elements of art, architecture and visual culture.
Diversity: Students will learn to recognize multiple intellectual and global viewpoints in art history, as well as integrating social, cultural, racial, religious, geographical, and political aspects of the items studied.
Creativity: Students will create their own interpretations of readings and images using knowledge, observation, vocabulary and discussion, in a variety of digital and physical formats.

Methods of Assessment

Attendance In Class (weekly synchronous Zoom meeting, Friday, 2.5 hours): used the attendance function on Zoom to keep attendance each week. Allowed for 3 “absences” and graded based on percentage of minutes in attendance.
Weekly assignments in Blackboard: rotation of varied-item-type Quiz, and/or Reading Response writing assignment of 500-1,000 words, meant to integrate and apply reading, media/video, lecture and discussion concepts.
Final Project (in lieu of a final exam): All students created and delivered a final group presentation during the last synchronous Zoom class session.
Independent Assessment on Zoom: Each student is required to have at least one individual meeting with me on Zoom to discuss their grade/performance and critique the class.

Sample Guiding Question

Challenges

My primary learning curve was teaching online for the first time and learning how to use Zoom.
The most time-consuming problem to solve was the ongoing issue of ensuring that online materials and instructions are concise but clear, consistent, user-friendly, timely and relevant to student experience. The online/COVID situation seemed to make this more difficult.
Assessing the amount of time online materials will take to process, digest and turnaround in terms of reading, writing and testing.
I spent a lot of time focusing on building and maintaining authentic interactions possible with Breakout Rooms. Maximizing Breakout Room interactions is a fine balance between number of students per BR, design of a relevant task, appropriate time on the task, preparation of students for the task before the BR, organization of the instructor during BR to observe, comment, question, and problem-solve. Also always giving a “second” task for students to engage in after “finishing” the BR was critical. In addition, the first few weeks of class used BR activities only for students to get to know each other, since students will talk more with people they know.
I early on abandoned interactive assignments within Blackboard outside of the synchronous Zoom lecture.
Kaltura media posed a huge challenge. Trouble-shooting took major time with uploading, editing and publishing difficulties among the three video-recording tools at hand: Zoom, Kaltura, and Camtasia. By far Camtasia is easiest to use for recording and editing and its transcript accuracy is far greater than Kaltura/Zoom. Editing videos is painfully time-consuming and needlessly difficult in several ways for a newcomer, especially in Kaltura, so I resorted to publishing videos filmed in a single “take” so that I only had to edit out the tail ends. I did not worry about “glitches” within the recorded sessions themselves.
Editing transcripts of videos became incredibly time-consuming, so many times I would publish a video without editing the transcript. Getting video and sound to be true in video media played within a Zoom lecture was a learning curve that took a long time to solve.
Unusually great amount of time spent on individual student meetings for students having a range of difficulties related to COVID.

Technology & Tools

• This was my first semester ever teaching online, so initially I relied heavily on advice sessions, workshops, drop-in sessions, breakout strategy sessions, and individual appointments provided by the units that organized and presented Go Virtual! During Summer 2020.

• I used Zoom, Kaltura and Camtasia to create videos to post on Blackboard.

• The Merriam Library staff purchased multiple user online access to several texts so that I could keep my course low-cost. I did require purchase/rent of one hard-copy textbook not available in digital format.

• Blackboard weekly module folders with a linked table of contents in an identical format each week were invaluable and highly appreciated by students for its consistency. I used colored text to highlight features in Blackboard.

• For certain tasks, I used Google Drive (Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets) when interactive sharing was needed. For example, for administrative purposes, my TA and I shared Google documents as evidence of processes for grades, assessments and assignments recorded on Blackboard.

• Various options for uploading video media from YouTube and other safe internet locations.

• For supplementary material I posted open-access links to art digital art history materials on www.smarthistory.org, Khan Academy, nonprofit educational and university websites.

• Kaltura’s automatic transfer of the Zoom lecture into Kaltura media for editing and publishing to my class was invaluable (although it is slow to edit and load, and its transcript feature is less reliable than Camtasia’s).

• The interactive functions within Zoom were helpful for in-class synchronous work, discussion, presentations and feedback during the class session (features I used: Zoom Room meetings recorded with the auto-record feature, Waiting Room, Recurring Meeting scheduling, various on-screen view modes in class, required students to select a new Zoom background for each class related to the week’s topic, Chat feature, Breakout Rooms, Polling, and virtual individual office hours scheduled as a Recurring Meeting unrecorded).

Go Virtual Course Design

The main point that struck me throughout the entire Go Virtual was: What are you doing differently: What do you need to do differently to reach students now, and to make sure that I do my best job with student outcomes?

Another goal for me was to bring in discussions about Racial and Social Justice and to create connections with natural and man-made disasters that we are experiencing both globally and locally. I see, looking at the big picture, that Go Virtual is really a call to respond pedagogically to these large crises that we're seeing in the world. This is what we called "Pandemic Pedagogy."

Go Virtual Video

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