| Title: | Caesar Builds Wabash |
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| Course Section Number: | FRT-101-14 |
| Department: | Freshman Tutorial |
| Description: | FACE TO FACE COURSE. FRT-101-14: Caesar Builds Wabash: How Ancient Rome Can Help Us Design Our Next Campus Center Jeremy Hartnett teaches archaeology, history, and Latin in the Classics department; when he's not traveling to Italy, conducting research, cooking, or hanging out with his family, he's usually playing in the Wabash Pep Band. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said, "We shape our buildings; and afterwards our buildings shape us." Taking a cue from Churchill, this tutorial is concerned with how architecture affects the ways people interact, both in the past and the present, both in the ancient world and in the modern US. Along the way, in order to test-drive our ideas, we will try our hand at designing a new structure for Wabash's campus. The raw material for our exploration will come from the Romans, a society that was obsessed with using buildings to unify, divide, and separate groups of people. Structures like the Colosseum, for example, herded different social classes through specific entrances and then into different levels of seating. The result was a space where society was literally stratified, as few senators rubbed elbows with the common rabble. By contrast, Rome's huge public baths removed many of these barriers, and, with everyone stripped down amid resplendent surroundings, even the lowliest plebs might feel on equal footing with fancy folk. Examining houses from Pompeii will add more techniques to our analytical toolkit, which we'll employ as we turn our attention to our own campus and assess how its buildings draw our community together or serve to separate it. How, for example, might the layout of a dormitory, a fraternity house, a library, or an academic building help or hinder social interactions? This work will set the stage for the last portion of the term, when we will assume the role of designers and architects to contemplate possibilities for a new Wabash campus center. What practical needs should such a building serve? How might this structure shape our college community for the better? On the basis of interviews, surveys, field trips, meetings with practicing architects, and their own ingenuity and creativity, students will create and present virtual designs for the building as their final project in the course. |
| Credits: | 1.00 |
| Start Date: | August 12, 2020 |
| End Date: | November 24, 2020 |
| Meeting Information: |
08/13/2020-11/24/2020 Lecture Tuesday, Thursday 09:45AM - 11:00AM, Detchon, Room 111
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| Faculty: | Hartnett, Jeremy |
Course Status
| Section Name/Title | Status | Dept. | Capacity |
Enrolled/ Available/ Waitlist |
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