UCLA ARCH&UD 98T (2024)

THIS AMERICAN HOUSE: CLAIMS & INVESTMENTS, DISPOSSESSION & REPOSSESSION

This undergraduate-level seminar explores an ordinary object with extraordinary influence: the American house. It posits that the American house has alternately served as a site for the reproduction and resistance of dominant value systems, from the colonization of North America to the globalization of credit markets. It asks questions such as How has the house affected the transformation of land from physical asset to abstract potential? and How has its assessed value reflected and reinforced state-sanctioned mechanisms of social control? This seminar aims to introduce undergraduate students to new and essential scholarship, hone methodological approaches, and survey United States history by interrogating the nation’s landscape as a terrain of diverse moral, political, social, and aesthetic objects in which people live and work.

This seminar proceeds (more or less) chronologically and thematically across key historical developments. We start by looking at the European colonization of North America, asking how English, Spanish, and French conceptions of property supplanted indigenous land systems and influenced American settlement patterns (1785–1862). We then examine the United States’ association of property value with residential security, asking how the financial architecture of the detached single-family home exacerbated class, gender, and racial inequalities and contributed to urban segregation (1862–1933). We end by looking at moral reckonings with national housing policy, asking how we might challenge existing paradigms of ownership and domesticity (1933–present).

Although rooted in architecture, the topics cross academic disciplines—including but not limited to American studies, urban planning, political economy, law, philosophy, and literature—to provide us with various lenses of inquiry. Similarly, the authors span time periods and geographies to help us engage with discourse and social change.