Dr. Douglas Klahr

For Faculty

Assistant Professor
Architectural History & Theory
School of Architecture

UT Arlington Faculty

Dr. Klahr received a Ph.D. in the History of Architecture from Brown University, an M.A. in the History of Architecture from the University of Virginia, and a B.A. from Brown University. He has taught at UT Arlington since Fall 2005. Educated also in France and Germany he is a scholar of nineteenth and twentieth century German architecture and urbanism. As an historian, his research focuses upon permutations of German identity, often examining the interface between architecture, politics, and law. In his other role as an investigator of contemporary architectural issues, he focuses upon matters of sustainability, from slum housing in the developing world to the viability of German housing cooperatives (Wohnungsgenossenschaften) as a potential model for the creation of localized and sustainable communities within American cities.

Service Learning Class

ARCH 5304 History of Architecture and Design II.

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.

Academic Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to do the following:

Identify the major stylistic, structural, and material characteristics of each period.
Explain the structural innovations of each period.
Explain the political, religious, social, and economic contexts of each building type.

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.

Teams and responsibilities and Partners

Instead of writing a research paper, graduate students in the course (whose students are primarily undergraduates) will be required to record and transcribe a set number of oral history interviews with Arlington residents. The residents will be drawn from the Texas Masonic Home as well as from other institutions, such as public libraries. Students will be instructed how to conduct an oral history interview, how to transcribe it, and also how to maintain a journal of reflections, which will be another requirement.

Product/Result

Transcriptions will become the property of Special Collections at the Central Library of the university. It is possible that they also will form a chapter for a book about service learning.