HST7711 – Architecture and Space in Modern Intellectual History 2025/26

What role do built environments play in the history of ideas? How might the tools and methods of intellectual history be calibrated to engage architecture and space as `sources'? Can architects themselves be studied as thinkers? In this module, we will explore how buildings have both staged and prompted key debates in twentieth century political and social thought. We will move across the globe from the `primitive hut' to the prison, the housing estate to the hospital, and the shopping arcade to the slum, reading philosophers and political theorists (Heidegger, Benjamin, Lefebvre, Massey and beyond) alongside architects and planners (from Le Corbusier to Marina Tabassum).