Home can be a real place, a fond memory, a skeleton in one's closet, a distant dream, or a glossy image in a trendy magazine. As aesthetic objects, status symbols, expressions of selfhood, and containers of values, houses and homes are dense with personal, social, and national meanings. Bridging American architecture and fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this course examines many different kinds of shelters - from mail-order homes to McMansions, suburban boxes to temporary cardboard dwellings, urban tenements to unbuilt experiments - to study the cultural and political significance of domestic spaces. We will explore the ideal of the detached private dwelling that powerfully emerges into the nineteenth century and persists today. And we will uncover other living arrangements that were built and imagined alongside and in tension with it. We will pay close attention to the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, and class figure into past and contemporary assumptions about what makes a good home and what breaks one. And we will critically examine divisions that are often taken for granted when we talk about homes: boundaries between private and public, between the personal and the marketplace, between the feminine and the masculine, between the individual and the social, and between one family unit and another.

Course materials include literature, architecture, urban planning, art, social theory, and philosophy. Requirements include "site analysis" and 3 short papers or final project.