The Barnes Foundation Controversy

This article reconsiders a joint seminar and studio that studied how an expanded vision of site and culture influences architectural production. The Barnes Foundation controversy provided a vehicle for this study. The Barnes is a private, world-renowned collection of art situated in an unlikely suburban Philadelphia neighborhood. Arguing that its current home was untenable, in 2002 the foundation announced plans to relocate—a move that runs counter to its founding charter, which bars any change to the collection, its content, or its location. Against a background of continued public protest and legal appeals, the Barnes decision prompts myriad vexing questions that are valuable for consideration in architectural education. Chief among these: is replication a valid, meaningful, or sufficient way to preserve cultural value, and if so, how?     

Architecture theory in graphic narrative: The Strange Case of Mister X

This essay begins with a review of Mister X, a comic serial taking architectural modernism as its point of departure. The graphic narrative renders a dystopian view of architecture and urbanism, as well as a biting critique of the architect as theorist. Rather than demonstrating that architecture is mute and impotent, however, the Mister X story theorises architecture as unpredictably powerful and effective, albeit malicious. The essay examines four architectural failures suggested by the Mister X text, identifying how these limitations of the formal, material object of architecture are, paradoxically, its very possibilities for social effect.     

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.     

Brutalism Exposed

Abstract

Photography was instrumental in conceiving representation as the effort to grasp the variable rather than the objective appraisal of reality. This paper explores how avant-garde practitioners in the mid-1960s harnessed reproductive technology for its momentary meanings. Using the confluence of the Economist complex, the film Blow-Up, and Archigram 7, the phenomenon is examined in the context of London-based architectural discourse. While the embrace of unstable signification would present further challenges, possibility still dominated over loss at this critical juncture. The allusiveness of representation intimated the potentials of a milieu where nothing stagnated and images, in and of themselves, constituted architectural practice.     

Toward a Theory of Architecture Machines

Abstract

The fall 2009 option design studio at MIT—Ferry Slip Mashup—was the site of a pedagogical experiment in engaging the vast historical archive of disciplinary knowledge for the purposes of designing a ferry terminal on the Maine State Pier in Portland, Maine. While the first premise of the studio was that we needed to relearn how to think historically, its second premise was that we had to find an appropriately contemporary way to do that. And if the first premise pointed us to engaging the issue of precedent head on, the second ensured for our precedents the status of entries in a vast archive of architectural knowledge.     

The Building as a Deleuzoguattarian Strata/Machinic Assemblage

Abstract

What do we mean when we say that a building is an assemblage? To answer this question, we must first decide what we mean by ‘the assemblage’ and which areas of Deleuze and Guattari’s corpus we will use. In this paper I focus on one of two kinds of assemblage from A Thousand Plateaus: the machinic assemblage. Drawing on the third chapter of this core text, I show how and why this concept should be understood as complementary yet distinct from the often-neglected concept of the strata. I then illustrate these concepts through the architectural design process by discussing the creation of a physical and functional building, acts of (architectural) expression and as a contribution to one or more architectural languages. Using this insight, I argue that architecture provides us with a way to usefully illustrate and explore some of the complex and abstract concepts within Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy.     

Details Around the Corner

Munich-based DETAIL magazine is an internationally renowned architecture and construction publication, uniquely focused on the architectural detail. Here, its Editor-in-Chief Christian Schittich acknowledges how design concepts provide the key driver for architectural detailing, as details combine to provide the overall character or aesthetic quality of a building. However, how might an increasingly diverse design team collaborate on the execution of high-quality detailing when designing large-scale schemes?     

The Canon and the Void

Abstract

Architectural history books play a significant role in conveying the culture, norms, and values of the architectural discipline to newcomers. In recent years, numerous publications have spotlighted the importance of women and African Americans as critics, creators, and consumers of the built environment. Yet, to what extent is this recent discourse on gender and racial issues included in architectural history texts? And how gender or racially inclusive are they? Are twenty-first-century architectural educators presenting newly uncovered architectural histories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Building upon prior research, this article seeks to address these issues by examining history texts currently assigned at fourteen leading architectural schools accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board. In textbooks with multiple editions, we compared relevant information in both earlier and later versions. Our analysis of these history texts revealed that contributions of women remain only marginally represented in the grand narrative of architecture. And for the most part, African Americans are omitted altogether. We challenge authors to reassess the next generation of architectural history texts and suggest ways to do so.     

Historicizing Pedagogy: A Critique of Kostof's A History of Architecture

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the practical problem of shaping a “History of Architecture” in a way that expands the dominant canon while acknowledging the complex and difficult realities of articulating difference. Through a critical analysis of Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture and an exposition of the shortcomings of Kostof's attempts to discuss “alternative” histories, this paper investigates how architectural history textbooks could play an important role in initiating a broader, critical teaching of history.     

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.     

A review of computerized hospital layout modelling techniques and their ethical implications

PurposeThis paper reviews an area of interdisciplinary collaboration in the design of healthcare facilities that attempts to optimize hospital space-planning using automated statistical techniques from the discipline of Operations Research (OR). This review articulates Facility Layout Problems (FLPs) as a general class of OR problems. Furthermore, the review highlights limitations of these techniques, which necessitate an ethical and participatory engagement with computerized processes of healthcare architecture.Design/methodology/approachAn in-depth critical review was carried out, which revealed a number of common themes, collectively theorized as metamodeling processes, or models of models, through which various FLP modelling techniques can be challenged and debated in terms of their architectural viability, and ethical ramifications.FindingsThis review provides a methodological basis for the further evaluation of computational models. It was found that most of the reviewed studies are functionally focused on flow efficiency and, in general, do not consider broader contextual, relational, social, or salutogenic design values.Originality/valueThis review is the first on the subject written from an architectural perspective. It can be used by a broad range of readers as its critical review of past and present hospital layout modelling techniques discusses their capabilities and limitations. As such, it also enables them to consider ethical values while critiquing the epistemology of computational processes hidden beneath algorithmic outputs.     

The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments and The See-through Years: Creation and Destruction in Texas Architecture and Real Estate, 1981–1991

Abstract

The Planwerk Innenstadt (“master plan for the inner city”) was passed in 1999 by the Berlin local government as the official model for local architectural projects in an extended area that includes the historic city center. The plan is based on the urbanistic concept of the “European City” and has been the subject of a heated debate since its first publication.     

Books of Drawings,Books on Drawing,Books about Drawings

This article shows how the development of the modern public sphere in eighteenth-century France led to a significant change in architectural theory, a change in which the notion of convenance, centered on the representation of social status, was replaced by that of caractère, which provided an internal criterion by which to conceive and evaluate architectural projects. By looking at texts by Fremin, Cordemoy, Laugier, Briseux, Blondel, and Boullèe, we examine some of the motives that can explain the negative formulation of the rule of convenance during the reign of Louis XIV and its gradual transformation into caractère in the second half of the eighteenth century.     

About Tom Schumacher

Abstract

Ethics based on subjectivity and freedom is little recognized as a plausible ground for informing the ethical practice of architectural design. Sartre's existentialism is suited to address the ethical issue of architectural design freedom and subjectivity, and, as such, to contribute to an ethical framework for architectural design practice. Sartre's philosophy is concerned with subjectivity and freedom and focuses on making choices in full awareness and acceptance of personal freedom and responsibility. Drawing on Sartrean concepts, an ethical framework for architectural design practice is proposed. It takes the form of a reflective process aiming at encouraging a clearer awareness of individual design freedom and responsibility that can lead to “authentic” architectural design practice. In this lies the value and significance of the framework for architectural design practice with regard to ethical design dilemmas.     

Architecture,Writing And Criticism In The 1960S And 1970S

If current architectural magazines seem more and more condemned to an a-critical role, they once constituted important breathing spaces for criticism. The two decades between 1958 and 1978 are particularly interesting in this regard, as they saw the explosion of a large number of “little magazines”. Independent, non-commercial and unconventional, these periodicals functioned as laboratories of thought, exploring both the boundaries of the discipline and diverse ways of critical writing. Retracing the little magazines' origins into literature and examining two concrete examples, this paper hopes to reveal the critical potential of these journals both as platforms for debate, as instigators of change and as agents provocateurs challenging the architectural discipline and renewing criticism's relation to architectural practice.     

Cullinan Hall: A Window on Modern Houston

Abstract

Cullinan Hall, an addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, demonstrates how technology was transformed through social construction. The construction technology embedded in Mies's architectural practices became a symbol that materialized a cultural politics in Houston in the 1950s. It provided a segment of the city's elite with an identity as they sought to assert cultural authority. It was constitutive of exhilirating spaces that supported emancipatory modernist narratives, but also sustained interior narratives that exerted a contradictory appeal.     

47 frames a Collaborative Production between a Second-Year Studio at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the Cypher Collective of New York City

Abstract

An interactive collaboration with two actors and a visual artist, this design studio investigated the generation of form and space through the study of theater and performance art. The project asked specifically how an architectural perception might be enriched and informed by the theatrical process, and vice versa. The resultant built works and performances were tangible explorations of design in an arena of complex and often shifting variables.     

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.     

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.