The University of Texas at Arlington

This is the second half of a year-long required course for architecture graduate students that is designed to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the history of primarily Western architecture and design from the Renaissance to contemporary architecture. Through the use of lengthy PowerPoints that combine extensive text with numerous images, students receive a more detailed analysis of buildings than that is presented in any standard textbook. Uploaded after each lecture to MavSpace, a secure university website to which only students registered in the course have access, students take an active part in their learning by downloading and printing the lectures. By the end of the course, they have assembled a custom-made textbook over four hundred pages in length that encourages them to examine the historical, political, social, and economic contexts within which structures were built.

Service-Learning Project: Remembering a Vanished Downtown: Oral Histories of Arlington Residents

Architectural history courses such as ARCH 5304 are primarily the history of buildings within urban settings, recording this history becomes crucial when an urban environment is threatened or destroyed. The deliberate, planned dismantling of Arlington’s urban core – its downtown – in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that a service learning component in the course would be of value to both students and residents. As the decades since the dismantling of Arlington’s downtown pass, the collective memory of what used to be a vibrant commercial, social, and residential area is in danger of being lost forever, for photographs only offer a superficial, visual memory of what used to exist. An oral history project, however, has the potential for capturing the memories of citizens and preserving them for future generations. Such a project also can serve as a guide to current municipal officials in their attempts to reestablish a downtown environment of sorts.