PTRSCE019 - Space Cases: Virtual Forays into a Built Present and Future

Course Description

Faculty Author

Roberta Moudry is an architectural and urban historian. She has guided architectural tours of Cornell's campus for Summer Session, CAU, and reunion classes for many years. She has taught undergraduates courses in architectural and urban history at Cornell, and led undergraduate summer programs in Europe for architecture students with her husband, Professor Christian F. Otto. Together with Chris, she taught sections of Cornell's "Mind and Memory" course and participated in the faculty fellows program.

Roberta was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She received a BA from Cornell in 1981 (Arts and Sciences), and after working in the library's Rare and Manuscripts Collection for three years, she began graduate study in the history of architecture and urban development, receiving a MA in 1990 and a PhD in 1995. Her major areas of interest are planned communities and housing, and the cultural history of American urban development. She edited and contributed to The American Skyscraper: Cultural Histories (Cambridge, 2005), and has published essays about the architecture and public health initiatives of the life insurance industry. She continues to work on writing the story of Roosevelt Island, a project she undertook with her husband in 2012.

Benefits to the Learner

This project collects five forays into aspects of our landscapes, using Cornell as our reference point. We will explore spaces of learning, living, memory, movement and survival. These themes have been so much in the news and in our lives in this past year.

Each day, we will consider one theme, through case studies and suggested readings. Our intention is to learn from and celebrate architectural and spatial successes, and to consider ways of thinking differently about the particular theme, to debate and imagine how our heightened awareness can inform the ways we experience the physical form of our present and future.