This course will explore historical, sociopolitical, and formal facets of architecture as they intersect with disciplines of art history, media studies, and psychoanalysis, since the early 20th century. We will investigate specific moments in architectural history and criticism as a way of considering the built environment as a reflection and container of visual and material culture. Sites of inquiry will range from the 1930s International Style movement and its lubrication of more recent developments of global architecture, to the colonial fantasies of Adolf Loos. We will look at architecture from outside the purview of architects - exploring the dynamic exchange between Minimalism, site-specificity and institutional space, advanced by Dan Graham and Michael Asher, while also considering more embodied architectural interventions by choreographers such as Trisha Brown and Sarah Michelson, and artist Andrea Fraser. In addition to considering the parasitical relationship between architecture and culture, or what Hal Foster has called the “art-architecture complex”, we will consider the socio-political and unconscious relations the built environment crystallizes. How does architecture reproduce social hierarchies? Learning from what Rem Koolhaas calls junkspace, what might be the connection between the remnants of Modernism, urban homogeneity, and racial hegemony? Students will be introduced to a range of readings including architectural theory, artist's writings, as well as art history and criticism. Together we will explore a number of sites in which the concept of architecture and the built environment is reframed or rethought by both architects as well as artists, performers and scholars.