cool sounding class

Since the schedules go live this weekend, this is a fun time to look for unexpected course offerings. Here is one I stumbled onto at Art History that is focusing on New Jersey as a state, not just a loose collection of historic sites and places:

441. (SPECIAL TOPICS IN HISTORIC PRESERVATION)
Index: 12466
CAC W67 VH104, Hewitt

Architectural historians have generally written about the human-made environment as a story of individuals constructing individual buildings during discrete and separate historical moments. More recently the discipline has turned to a more holistic methodology that emphasizes the cultural and geographical locus or “site” as essential to the understanding of how buildings are designed and constructed. This seminar will explore how the entire “state” of New Jersey,with its diverse landscape and multiple ethnic and cultural actors, has evolved over three centuries. Rather than looking only at individual buildings, we will explore the vernacular and designed environment as a web of human and natural artifacts changing and growing over the course of decades.