Disegno

Abstract

This essay explores the premise that thinking by drawing—thinking through the crafting of the disegno—is the primary way that architects extend their understandings of architecture. It suggests that drawing is an architect's unique mode of research, inquiry, and is the site for his/her most crucial speculations and constructions. Douglas Darden's drawings are speculative architectural fantasies that demonstrate this argument.     

Writing sensation: Deleuze,literature, architecture and Virginia Woolf's The Waves

This essay poses the question of how to write architecture. It uses as example the writing of Virginia Woolf in the novel The Waves, aiming to show that Woolf employs a particular mode of rendering architecture through sensory means, which in turn offers a way of discussing approaches to writing architecture that are not often foregrounded in architectural discourse. This is elaborated in the context of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, which offers a useful set of conceptual tools through the notions of percept and affect, and, more specifically, the ‘visions and auditions’ pertinent to language. The aim is to show that we can learn from writing methods such as Woolf's both as observers/thinkers in architecture and as writers attempting to recast its material presence in language, while simultaneously developing a finer conceptual palette derived from philosophy.     

Classifying Specimens of Gothic Fenestration: Edmund Sharpe’s New Taxonomy of English Medieval Architecture

This essay investigates the pictorial practices used by Edmund Sharpe (1809–77) to visualize the evolution of English Gothic architecture. Examining his 1849 Treatise on the Rise and Progress of the Decorated Window Tracery in England, this essay emphasizes Sharpe’s singular approach to classifying architecture within the framework of debates about evolutionary descent in studies of natural and architectural history. This essay positions Sharpe’s Treatise in relation to works by naturalists such as Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and alongside histories of medieval architecture by Thomas Rickman, Robert Willis, and Edward Augustus Freeman, to name a few. These examples help contextualize Sharpe’s new classification of English Gothic architecture within the context of images showing evolutionary descent and the typical in species.     

When Past Meets Future

The title of this essay comes from contemporary hermeneutics, a branch of philosophy devoted to interpretation. It refers to the domain between a human artifact and a beholder. Brought to architecture, this worldly concept implicitly questions the conventional role of the individual amidst historical works. It also offers a common ground on which products of architectural interpretation (performances or fictions) may begin to engage our normally independent territories of history and design. This essay examines the concept of the world in front of the work and speculates on its implications for architectural education. The illustrations portray interpretive projects by the author's students.     

Sir Banister Fletcher: pillar to post–colonial readings

Looking at world architecture in a post-colonial light, what is the possibility for a ‘world history of architecture’? This question is approached through thoughts on east-west plunderings in architectural history and in the strange double image of world history portrayed in Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture , which (in all but the earliest and very latest editions) divided the world into ‘The Historical Styles’ and ‘The Non-historical Styles’.

Resonating throughout this text, which began as a paper to a conference on ‘Globalisation and Representation’,1 1. This essay is enlarged from a paper given to the international conference Globalisation and Representation, University of Brighton, UK, 11th to 13th March, 2005. is the knowledge that the author has been commissioned to undertake a completely new text for the next edition of Banister Fletcher, for which work started in November, 2005. Pointers to how that project might proceed include its becoming a dual work, aware of the unspoken space between:

— a narrative with stress on points of cultural intersection and articulation of hybridity (after Homi Bhabha) rather than on the ‘constituent’ as opposed to ‘transitory’ facts of architectural history (after Siegfried Giedion), and:

— an archive of illustrated places, itself a social construct but one which recognises the role of viewer/reader in its [re]construction—for images are there to be plundered and misread, which is always their fate in the hands of creative designers.     

The inconceivable agenda

While the ‘unthinkable doctorate’ conference aimed at forming the ground for an inquiry that is at once legitimate, necessary and important, its premises, as articulated in the call for papers (see above: Introduction), failed to grasp the conceptual (and institutional, and historical) foundations of what its organisers considered to be ‘the current lack’ by posing this question through a rhetoric of ‘inconceivability’. In a direct response to the conference call, this essay argues that the classical separation of architectural science from architectural practice is all but productive as a starting point for rethinking and broadening the scope of the doctorate as a degree and as an academic process. Surpassing discursive and institutional frameworks upholding and consolidating the seemingly immutable division between architectural practice and the intellectualisation of architecture, we propose to position the doctorate as an investigatory ‘project’ implicating in equal measure both the university and the profession. ‘Thinking’ of ‘scientific work in architecture’ as a genuine architectural enterprise, we consider the doctorate as an institutionally authorised challenge to the disciplinary bases and techniques of architecture itself, that mobilises both theory and practice, however specific or traditional the individual project. The role of the doctorate is thus not simply to test the limits of architectural knowledge, but also the academic tools and media addressing that corpus.     

A Multimedia Panopticon: Media,Translation, and History in OMA's S,M,L,XL and the Arnhem Prison

This essay argues that S,M,L,XL is a digital multimedia architectural project that sought to redefine the relationship between architecture and various other media on the cusp of architectural culture's widespread digitization. It uses one design included within the text, OMA's proposed renovations for the Panoptic Prison in Arnhem, the Netherlands, to analyze how Rem Koolhaas and his firm synthesize a wide range of media to create and theorize their own conception of modern architectural history as a fantastical state of imprisonment.     

Personalising Architecture: The Contribution of Neorealism to Italian Architecture through the INA-Casa Programme (1949–56)

Abstract

After the Second World War, neorealism was fundamental as a spatial register of the time while simultaneously contributing to the creation of a visual culture at a key moment in Italian history. Although the term has been adopted ad hoc in architecture, transfers between neorealism and architecture are still not fully understood and significant grey areas remain. Against this backdrop, recent studies have suggested approaching neorealism not from the standpoint of the disciplinary autonomy of architecture, but from its active and bidirectional link with other forms of artistic expression, approached through the cultural climate of the time in Italy. Within the field of architectural theory, a significant number of works that have been linked to neorealism belong to new neighbourhoods that were developed through state social housing programmes. For this reason, this article uses the INA-Casa programme as a lens for examining neorealism’s penetration in architecture, based on the hypothesis that this programme’s written regulations were inflected by the neorealist environment during its first settennio (1949–56). It sets out to consider if and how a neorealist making existed in architecture by analysing the first two INA-Casa design manuals, which are seen here as an example of a rule book for the theory of architecture.     

I: Architectural Education UIA in Paris

Abstract

In this essay we address the issue of poverty in Latin America and attempt to explain why this region of the world is so desperately poor despite its tremendous natural resources, indigenous skills, and proximity to the United States. We argue that a philanthropic architectural response is required in Latin America that stresses the importance of client/user design education and a respect for indigenous cultures. We describe the work of two NGOs, report on two grass roots projects, and describe how collaboration between Western university architecture departments and local NGOs can involve the community in successful building projects.     

Haptic Diagrams: From Cinematography to Architectural Performance

Abstract

Contemporary design practices use the diagram as an active agent in the development of form and matter into architectural space. Deleuze and Guattari, following Foucault,¹ defined the diagram as an “abstract machine,” which “does not function to represent even something real, but rather constructed a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality.”² This formulation emphasizes the diagram's configuration and its modes of operation through virtuality and potentiality. In this sense, the diagram is the architects' way of dreaming, the “no-place” encompassing the utopian act. Simultaneously being reality and process, the diagram delays the relation between sign and meaning and promotes a shift from architecture as form or sign to an architecture of forces, performance, and performativity.³     

DRAWING THE LINE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND NATURE IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY: Blade Runner's Critique of the Intention of the ‘Primitive Hut’

This essay examines our struggle with the technology of architecture by considering the conceptions of the ‘primitive hut’ put forward by Vitruvius, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Gottfried Semper, and Joseph Rykwert. In claiming the ‘natural origins’ of architecture, the notion of the ‘primitive hut’ has paradoxically supported the intention of architecture to cut itself free of nature and the earth. Architecture has, in this way, held open the possibility that it might overcome the limitations that frustrate its attempts to accommodate. In the film Blade Runner, both the depiction of a futuristic urbanism in a state of decay and the expression of an ambiguous relation between the built and the natural provoke a reassessment of the architectural ‘blade’ that desires the separation between nature and technology. Both Rem Koolhaas' discussion of the skyscraper and Piranesi's etchings depicting classical scenes will be viewed as similar critiques of this dichotomy. By framing the examination within K. Michael Hays' critique of the extreme positions of determinism and autonomy in architectural theory, the paper concludes that criticism has a responsibility to mediate these extremes by expressing the nature of the technological/architectural struggle.     

Open Sourcery

Abstract

The reappropriation of abandoned technology is a long-standing practice with a deep history. This is particularly the case when deprived cultures overlap with privileged. Often associated with the underside of emergent technologies, hacker or maker culture provides us with an alternative approach to engaging technology. This article discusses the potential of implementing hacking as a way of making architecture and poetic program. The Dedale studio at the University of Manitoba investigates the civic and architectural implications of discarded technology in the Point Douglas neighborhood in Winnipeg, Manitoba.     

Plenty of Action in the Square

Abstract

The architectural reenactments presented here study moments of architectural history through performing acts of architecture, undertaking large-scale design-and-build speculation based upon evidence found in action and the transformation of material as well as in text, drawing, and photograph. In analysis, projection, and making, these reenactments propose an understanding of architecture as action and construction as a verb, and seek to engage the nonverbal discourse of the making hand.     

The Palmach History Museum,Tel Aviv

In 1928 the Austrian architect and engineer Franz Löwitsch (1894–1946) published the article ‘Sensation of Space and Modern Architecture’ in Imago , the psychoanalytical journal edited by Sigmund Freud. Based on Richard Semon's theories of Mneme, which Löwitsch connected to psychoanalytical theories, the prevalence of dissimilar sensations of space throughout the stages of the development of western architectural history is presupposed, and Löwitsch offered an explanation of how their symbolic meanings reflected psychological conditions of a particular time and culture.

By connecting Semon's theory with psychoanalytical deliberations that equip the inherited memory of spatial sensations with pleasurable or unpleasurable emotions, Löwitsch furthermore argued that spatial sensations produce spatial concepts, and that the dominating shapes and forms of the architecture of a time therefore reflect the dominance of a particular inherited sensation of space. The unifying psychological make-up of a populace thus leads to spatial concepts that form an architecture which reflects these concepts and contain symbols that possess ‘satisfying powers’ valued by the majority of people of that particular time and place.

But Löwitsch's theory speaks of more than a mere justification for the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory as a methodology for the humanities. Löwitsch contrasted his findings meticulously with Oswald Spengler's controversially critiqued book The Decline of the West , Karl Scheffler's The Spirit of the Gothic and Eckhart von Sydow's Primitive Art and Psychoanalysis . The discussion of these contemporaneous writings that essentially sought to find the driving forces for the development of styles helps in formulating Löwitsch's final hypothesis. Here, he proposes the emergence of an ‘energetic space’ in architecture, which is the prevalent sensation of space that he predicts to emerge in the near future. His ultimate aim was not to enter academic discourse but rather to provide a scientifically based explanation, with which the impact of space on the inhabitant can be measured, explained and utilised in architectural practice.     

Issue PDF

Abstract

As increasing numbers of architecture schools introduce new degree programs based on postgraduate research, often engaging other disciplines, emerging technologies, materials and environmental concerns, this new species of architectural education demands an approach distinct from those that dominate professional programs. The authors present The Stratus Project—an ongoing body of design research investigating kinetic environment-responsive interior envelope systems, as a means of identifying a potential range of issues, models of inquiry and disciplinary influences for postgraduate research.     

Epilogue: on meaning and experience (or images versus practices)

The essay presents an alternative idea of what Islamic architecture could be from what is termed as a ‘value-centred’ approach. To date, the theory of Islamic architecture has been mainly derived either from a formalistic analysis of historically selected buildings from the past, or from the works of Sufism which claim to be the form generator of the Islamic spirit. There are also the works of regionalist architects that maintain the idea of Islamic architecture as being a product of cultural and environmental as well as geographical forces. The essay instead presents the argument that since modernist architecture was the product of a value-centred discourse ranging across political, religious and environmental issues, then Islamic architecture could also be derived from an examination of the values inherent in the hadith or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. The body of hadiths contains many accounts of the Prophet's values concerning life practices of which some can be used in order to derive a framework of architectural design. With this framework, a re-evaluation of past historical works can be carried out and new building designs can be made from the interpretation of hadiths within the context of the cultural, geographical, economic and political settings of each project.     

The New Urban Scale in Italy

Abstract

The publication of Aldo Rossi's L' architettura della città in 1966 marked the conclusion of several years of research and writing on architecture and urbanism. Rossi wrote the book as a treatise for a science of urbanism in an attempt to establish the principles and terms for analyzing existing urban conditions. His thesis responded to a polemical debate within Italian architecture of the early 1960s over the future form of the city brought about, in part, by unprecedented transformations in the postwar city. In this essay, I chronicle the cultural context of the debate over urbanism in Italy that motivated Rossi to establish objective principles for a new urban theory, distinguishing between “the architecture of the city,” autonomy, and the concept of la nuova dimensione.     

Architecture as Conciliator: Toward a Unifying Principle in Architectural Education

We believe that architecture has lost its role as conciliator between humanity and the universe, it has lost much of its meaning. We use an example of a studio problem and process to explore issues in architecture, science, and meaning as they relate to architectural education. The confrontation of this problem in architectural education should involve the infusion of scientific thought and theoretical issues into the design studio, as well as other courses, to aid students in formulating their own world view in order to create an architecture of meaning. A seven-week design studio offered to second-year students included reading Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time and analyzing the spatial theories outlined in the book. This research informed site analysis as well as the architectural and landscape design.     

History as Drawing

This essay examines the assimilation and progressive devaluation of typological theory into American post-modern historicism between the late seventies and early eighties, when theory was transformed from a critical means of resistance to the commodified architecture and urbanism of multinational capitalism into an affirmative instrument of the forces it was initially intended to oppose. This episode raises issues that are central to a critical understanding of the production and consumption of ideas and images within the contemporary architectural “culture industry” and illuminates some of the broader conditions of contemporary culture that have profoundly affected the role of architecture within it. Most significantly, perhaps, it exemplifies the unwillingness or inability of most recent “avant-garde” positions within architecture to address substantially the role of architecture and the city as economic and cultural commodities. This essay addresses two points along the brief trajectory of type theory in the United States that underscore its significance—its initial mode of reception within architectural academia and its selective assimilation into post-modernist architectural practice—and concludes with an examination of its defenselessness against the broader realities of architecture's role as an instrumentalized symbol within a mass-mediated, market-driven culture.     

S,M,L,XL

In this essay, I explore Performances of Spatial Labor—a set of practices that emerge at the intersection of the architectural and performative, the political and (in)visible—as critical actions that not only reveal hidden labor and laborers within processes of “making up” and “making real” works of architecture but also scrutinize questionable disciplinary acts that are themselves fraught with multiple forms of invisibility. Through this practice-as-research, I ask how labor associated with architecture may be reconsidered and revealed through the lens and practices of performance and how this shift in perspective may bring into focus not only the “thing done” but also the act of “doing.”