architectural history
The Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UCSB has an exceptional architectural history program at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The beginnings of the program stretch back to the early 1960s, to the pioneering efforts of the great scholar of American and California modernist architecture, Dr. David Gebhard (1927-1996). Today ours is one of the largest faculties in the country, with six full-time architectural historians offering an unusual breadth of coverage in various areas of modern, early modern, medieval and ancient architecture.
Employing a comprehensive range of geographical, cultural, technical and methodological approaches, we define architecture broadly, to include vernacular landscapes,
interiors, monuments and urban ensembles. Our faculty is interested both in traditional as well as in theoretical perspectives, often exploring the intersection of them. Rather than considering architectural history only as the history of design, we are concerned with architecture’s relation to the humanities and fine arts in the broadest context.
Edson Armi is an expert in medieval French architecture as well as in modern industrial design. His research into Romanesque architecture integrates the study of design, construction, structure and labor. Swati Chattopadhyay specializes in modern architecture, the landscape of British colonialism and post-colonial theory. Nuha N. N. Khoury’s work includes the art and architecture of the Middle-East in the medieval and modern periods. She is a specialist in excavating early Arabic texts and public
inscriptions in search of meaning and in analyzing the architecture of mosques and their role in the urban realm. Volker M. Welter focuses on the history and theory of urbanism, architecture, and the environment since the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on philosophical, sociological and aesthetic aspects of and approaches to modernity and the debate about the city. Richard Wittman is a cultural historian specializing in the architecture, town planning and theory of early modern and modern Europe. In recent work, he analyzes the transformation of architectural design, theory, and the architectural profession during the eighteenth century, with the expansion of the press, the rise of political public opinion and the changed status of the public as a sociological and discursive category. As both architectural historian and archeologist, Fikret Yegül concentrates on ancient Roman and Greek architecture with a special interest in developing experiential analyses of ancient settings and rituals. His expertise extends to archaeological site works and excavations in Turkey and Italy; he is currently merging traditional and digital technologies in order to reconstruct historical buildings and create virtual reality models.
Students are encouraged to conduct research at the Getty Museum and at other institutions in Los Angeles, and to take frequent advantage of the rich opportunities for fieldwork in southern California. Closer to home, the department interacts frequently with its
next door neighbor in the UCSB Arts building, the Architecture and Design Collection (ADC), one of the leading collections of architecture and design documents in the country. The ADC’s rich holdings of over 750,000 original drawings, photographs, documents, and artifacts (including models and furniture pieces) date roughly from the 1890s to the present. Included in the collection are the papers of many of Southern California’s best known practitioners, including Irving J. Gill (1870-1936), Rudolph M. Schindler (1887-1953), Albert Frey (1903-1998), and Gregory Ain (1908-1987), as well as two of Santa Barbara's most important historic architects, George Washington Smith (1876-1930) and Lutah Maria Riggs (1896-1984)
