In the early modern era, architecture and landscape design offered rich fields for experimentation with new models of perception. Christopher Drew Armstrong’s work investigates approaches to observation and the experience of art and architecture in the 18th and 19th centuries. He is especially interested in the construction of the ‘self’ and how this concept shapes the relationship of the individual to temporal and spatial phenomena.
At Columbia, Armstrong worked with Robin Middleton and Barry Bergdoll on travel and the ‘discovery’ of Greek architecture in the18th century. As a master’s student at the University of Toronto, he worked with Douglas Richardson on the British Gothic revival and Hans-Karl Lücke on the mythological frescos of the Venetian artist Giambattista Tiepolo. Armstrong returned to Toronto as an SSHRC post-doctoral fellow where he worked with William McAllister Johnson and taught in the Department of Fine Art and the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.