The course sets out to present the development of the modern and contemporary designed environment in order to build a common knowledge base for future architects, designers, landscape architects, planners and others involved in the procurement and management of the designed physical environment. Not withstanding this perspective, it is accessible to all.
The time span of the study is the latter half of the nineteenth century to the latter half of the twentieth. While concentrating on key figures and movements, the course situates changes in the design environment over this time in a wider social, cultural and technological context. Often underpinned by a political agenda, modernity has its roots in a critical reaction to the squalor and inequality of the nineteenth-century industrial city. This module traces how this develops, examining those projects from the modernist canon which are most significant and influential. Furthermore it examines how modern architecture, urbanism and landscapes adapted to changing technologies and structural theories.