This course examines the historical development of architecture, interiors, city planning, and landscape architecture, beginning from the first inhabited villages and concluding in the mid-eighteenth century, exposing the wide range of factors that influenced the design and the interpretation of the built environment, including religious faith, movement, culture, economics, and politics. Moving beyond the dominant nationalist or ethnic categories, the class places special emphasis on the global connections between nations and empires and examines how trade routes, military conflicts, colonial efforts, and religious ideas helped transfer concepts about architecture and city planning around the world. The course gives students the tools to understand how buildings and landscapes reflect the lives of the people who created or used these spaces, but also how buildings perform an integral role in constructing identity, including gender and familial identities, as well as reflecting images of class, ethnicity, power, and politics.