Literal and notional force fields in architecture

The Philips Pavilion, design by Le Corbusier's office for the 1958 World's Fair, brought the architectural plan, the optical effects of movement and the ideology of progress into a more intense discursive relationship than virtually any project since his Purist houses of the 1920s. While the Pavilion has long been recognised as a seminal work, scholars have tended to overlook the aesthetic intentions of its chief designer, the composer Iannis Xenakis, often simplistically characterising the building as an architectural ‘translation’ of music. This paper closely examines several of Xenakis's wireframe axonometric sketches along with new diagrammatic renderings to analyse the formal disconnect between the Pavilion's plan and the experience of walking around and through it. The professional friction between its two designers yielded a new variation on the promenade architecturale; its principal tension is not between multiple formal readings but rather between the smooth exterior, whose complex form offers a continuous variation of contours, and the ‘narrative’ experience of the interior, with its multimedia account of human history.     

Architecture is the pattern of human mind in space: Claude F. Bragdon and the spatial concept of architecture

‘Space’ has held a central position within the architectural discourse throughout the twentieth century and a number of twenty-first-century publications suggest interest in this notion is not to be diminished any time soon. Seen from our contemporary perspective, the association between architecture and space could therefore seem ordinary and self-evident. However, existing scholarship has dated the adoption of the term ‘space’ in architectural vocabulary—as a fundamental category of architecture—no earlier than the 1890s. This early phase has been strongly associated with the German language and nineteenth-century German aesthetic philosophy, whereas, by contrast, the adoption of the term in architectural discourse in the English language is considered to have followed several decades later. This paper discusses the largely unknown case of the American Claude Fayette Bragdon (1866–1946), an English-speaking architect who adopted the notion of ‘space’ as early as the 1890s: concurrently with his German contemporaries. Through analysis of existing scholarship, archival material and Bragdon's published writings mainly up to the appearance of his book The Beautiful Necessity in 1910, it throws light on the main sources of Bragdon's ‘spatial’ concept of architecture and demonstrates connections to transcendental aesthetics and ground-breaking advances in nineteenth-century mathematics.     

Making Prefabrication American: The Work of A. Lawrence Kocher

This article discusses the work of A. Lawrence Kocher in order to capture the relationship between the social and technical commitments of early twentieth-century architectural modernism in the United States. It analyzes Kocher's professional activity, scholarship, policy advocacy, design-build pedagogy, and editorship at Architectural Record (1927–1938). In these realms, Kocher helped introduce prefabrication and standardized detailing to the American architectural profession. He emphasized the accessibility of prefabrication in both historical research and cutting-edge material experimentation. In so doing, Kocher provided a version of modernism that appealed to an American audience. While his vision of design as a social good differed from that of his European social democratic contemporaries, it represents an important and too little studied conception of the potential of building technology to support democracy and the fair distribution of housing for all.     

建筑美学的哲学阐释

现象学哲学从存在论范畴研究建筑美学系统哲学把审美客体和审美主体以及审美环境作为三个关联性的子系统置于耗散结构系统中,运用哲学方法对该系统进行分析,论证了建筑功利性空间系统是建筑存在的本质,“公共期待视域”和“共通感”的审美要素构成了建筑艺术美学价值的评价标准,并使系统从混沌走向有序揭示了建筑美学价值系统呈现独特的两重性：科学的建筑技术美学价值和人文的建筑艺术美学价值,建筑美学价值就是二者的对立统一。     

The Project of Modernity: Can Architecture Make It?

The title of this essay suggests that architecture's relation to modernity is a complex one. What needs to be discussed is the specificity of architecture's conflict with modernity. While historical analysis theorizes socio-cultural and political phenomena, the thematic of architecture's entanglement with capitalism necessitates an argument, addressing the dialogical relationship between theory and practice. Historical analysis is one thing; mobilization of history to change the present situation is another. This much is clear from the discourse of thinkers who are associated with ‘critical theory,’ and the work of architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, among others.

This essay attempts to read Tafuri's Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, translated into English in 1976,¹ in the context of current critical theories and to demonstrate the relevance of his argument today. To be more specific, the intention is to approach Tafuri's text from the argument presented in the first chapter of Susan Buck-Morss's Dreamworld and Catastrophe.² The author re-writes the interaction between the early modern states and avant-garde artists in reference to space and time. Her paradigm suspends the idea of Zeitgeist and shows how space (territory) was the subject matter of an idea of progress that was imagined by both capitalist and socialist states of the 1930s. Secondly, Buck-Morss discusses the ways architecture occasionally went out-of-time in the historical cosmology, formulated by the forces of modernization that were unravelling during the early decades of the last century. Her discourse provides a system of periodization that surpasses historicism. Tafuri's vision of history also questions historicism,³ but if read in the light of Buck-Morss's discourse, one can see ideas in Tafuri which are perhaps more relevant to architecture's situation today than when they were written.     

ON ‘THEORISING ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION’

Henry van de Velde's intellectual relation to Nietzsche constitutes one of the interesting episodes in the early developments of Modernism in architecture. On the basic level, it opens the question of the influence of a radical philosopher of Modernity on a contemporary artist: while at another level it raises the question of the correspondence between ‘idea’and ‘form’ in the context of an architectural problem: the project for the Nietzsche Monument in Weimar.

Although this relation has already been explored by other scholars, this paper will look at some of the parallels in the thoughts of the philosopher and the artist, as in their vision of the role of art in culture, while also examining the discrepancies in Henry van de Velde's understanding, or appropriation, of the Nietzschean message. This is evident in the Nietzsche Monument project, a project that showed the artist's difficulty at the time in conceptualizing a project that would concretize the philosopher's vision. Finally, this paper will explore the parallel notions of power and force, the former being a foundational nation in ihe philosopher's thought, the latter afoundational notion in ihe artist's aesthetic theory.     

“Watchful Wandering”

Abstract

Through close readings of John Ruskin's notebooks and diaries (related to The Stones of Venice) and the city itself, this paper explores his “watchful wandering”—as he characterized it—as a mode of urban experience and analysis, and that connected vision wherein the concrete fragment emblematizes the whole. Within a long history of ambulatory urban contemplation and journeyings, the paper locates Ruskin at the cusp of the pre- and early modern, exposing thereby a tension between the ethical and the aesthetic; between Ruskin's threefold vision—imbricating the romantic, scientific, and symbolic—and the blasé detachment of the urban flâneur.     

Architecture,Cigarettes AND THE Dispositif

This paper aims to explore the concept of the dispositif and develop arguments as to its value in reconceptualising the social function of architecture. The notion of the dispositif is derived from the writings of Michel Foucault and is explored in respect to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The notion of the dispositif of concern emerges from Foucault's concepts of an apparatus that manages relationships of power between different bodies and organisations. Foucault considers the dispositif to be at once object and apparatus – a dynamic tension that is well recognised by theorists of architecture as a potentially productive condition. It is upon this dynamic tension that the present paper will focus and present an exploration of Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio as an example of an architectural dispositif.     

构成艺术在建筑装饰设计中的艺术表现

构成艺术在当代建筑设计、装饰设计等领域当中被广泛的应用。这种艺术审美方式主要是通过挖掘现有需要搭配的构成元素,并实现它们之间的有机结合,从而实现对现代建筑设计中的形体关系的分析。通过借助构成艺术的表达方式,将可使建筑设计、装饰设计更加符合人们的居住、生活要求。为此,在本文中作者将结合自身多年从事该领域的研究经验,在通过对大量文献进行阅读与分析基础上,对构成艺术表达美的方式进行分析,并提出有效促使构成艺术与建筑装饰设计相互融合的途径与方法。     

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     

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.     

Objectives in Design Problems

Abstract

In the interplay between scale models and intellectual paradigms, architectural models construct immaterial ideas. This confluence of material and immaterial in architectural modeling is explored through an examination of Gerrit Rietveld's design for the Rietveld Schröder house (1924). His first wood massing model of the project is often considered to have been created before the idea of flowing space and as an instance of Thomas Kuhn's paradigm shift. Instead, through Gaston Bachelard's concept of paradigm nesting, the model is shown to be integral to Rietveld's design process that used three mutually exclusive notions of mass across different conceptual terrains.     

数字空间——新的建筑空间形式

建筑随空间概念的改变而改变。在数字技术的冲击下,建筑在功能、形式以及审美等几个方面产生了拓展,建筑设计方法及建筑观念受到了前所未有的挑战。本文提出了新的空间概念——数字空间。在数字空间中,建筑的形体与空间得到了解放,能进行参数化智能设计,计算机成为设计师们思维的工具。结合相应的设计案例对数字空间进行解读和思考,并分析了今后的发展前景。     

From the viewpoint of a client

Collaboration between choreographers and architects still usually takes the traditional form of the latter designing sets for the former, while research on the relationship between architecture and dance is scant. One of the few examples of a choreographer working with then-current architectural concerns is William Forsythe and the Ballett Frankfurt in the late 1980s, particularly in Enemy in the Figure (1989) and Limb's Theorem (1990). These pieces show a profound understanding of and engagement with architectural issues then being addressed by Daniel Libeskind. Forsythe's interest in Libeskind was not his ‘deconstruction’, as has often been asserted, but in his operations on drawing. Their coincidence of intellectual interests and resulting friendship allows us to see clearly how concerns in architecture were also explored through the medium of ballet. It is a reminder too of a period, postmodernism, when architecture led theoretical discussions.     

哈尔滨近代建筑装饰之美“感”

哈尔滨近代建筑从一个侧面映射了西方建筑艺术的发展趋势和美学倾向,具有极高的审美价值。建筑装饰是建筑之美的外在表现形态,其独特的感官价值不仅突出了建筑的艺术走向,而且也深刻表达了建筑的文化内涵。该文以哈尔滨近代建筑的为主要研究对象,通过对现存建筑装饰的调研和测绘,以大量翔实的数据进行比较研究。在此基础上,以完形心理美学和知觉现象学为理论基础,从建筑装饰形态的表现力、装饰形式的感染力以及装饰文化的渗透力三个主要方面剖析哈尔滨近代建筑装饰所引发的审美感受。     

A Dead Sense of Time: Reflections on Architecture,History and Perception

Our current conception of architectural history's normative possibilities return to the emergent surfaces of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where they crystallized around a conceptual framework expressive of a logical, progressive and trans-historical vision of lime. But there is nothing inevitable about this perspective, or absolute When Bergson spoke of the absurdity of teleology, Nietzsche of the congenital defects of the aeterna veritas. or Benjamin of the storm and violence of progress, the certainties of that legacy were compromised. In particular, the impact of such dissension upon the conventional space of architectural history would expose a realm of pure ends, a past that always presupposed its present and a future conceived through a blind lens of infinite perfection. What could also be said to reside in the wake of that same rational, continuous and periodized journey across the surfaces of architecture's past, is a broad trail of destruction left by denying any autonomy of voice or contextual conditions of prior architectural identity. And yet. despite such questions of legitimacy, the gaze of architectural history remains focused upon a traditional view of time. Here there is no appetite for contestation or release, merely indifference, incomprehension or derision. But why such devotion to a marginalized conception of the past? Does such intransigence reflect a failure to recognize or fully articulate the limits of our traditional engagement with history-, an innate desire for the security of familiarity and certilude: or perhaps from fear ofan alternative and its potential dynamic of fragmentary, random and terminal moments of past architectural possibility? these issues that surround the historical authority and perception of architecture's historical subject are pursued in the following.     

Immersed in Aqueous Atmospheres

This article is an examination of Philip Johnson's Crystal Cathedral (1980) as an architectural environment intersecting with the televisual entertainment industry. Although the Crystal Cathedral has been read as a reflective glass building that abandoned the mysticism of transparency to assert its object status, using Peter Sloterdijk's theorization of immersion we may also understand the structure as an aqueous atmosphere into which one dips. Johnson's church speaks to the dual desires of being embedded and of breaking free by retaining the possibility of traveling between immersive territories—a key ethical concern for atmospheres in an age of screen culture.     

Looking through axonometric windows

From Frank Lloyd Wright's box-breaking corner windows to Le Corbusier's fenêtre en longueur and Mies van der Rohe's reflective glass walls, modernist architectural space emerged through the transformation of the window. As a mechanism for articulating the primordial architectural distinction between inside and outside, the window has long been a primary architectural element. In modern architecture, however, the types of window multiplied in response to new technologies, structural systems and cultural conditions. The window increased in importance as architects explored its capacity not only to control the transmission of light, air, heat, vision and information, but also to produce different kinds of space and to transform social distinctions such as those between public and private, self and other. In this essay I present a little-known chapter in that story: the series of windows American architect Claude Bragdon designed in 1915 using his system of ‘projective ornament’ (Fig. 1).     

Critical practice

Exploring the potential of musical indeterminacy is an area of interest in architectural research yet to be examined in great detail.1 1. Even though architects are interested in problems of space and its relationship to the human body, they rarely consider a design relationship between the two through the medium of sound, outside spaces organised for musical purposes (such as performance halls and opera theatres, wherein the consideration is limited to achieving specific acoustic and visual engineering requirements). Although recently there have been developments in this area of inquiry, still of particular value is the involvement of Iannis Xenakis and Edgard Varèse with the Philips Pavilion, designed with Le Corbusier, and built for the 1958 World Show in Brussels. For further reading, see M. Treib, Space calculated in seconds: the Philips Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse (New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1996). It should be noted that while Xenakis had a degree in civil engineering, he worked as an architect, composer, mathematician and engineer. His interest in stochastic compositional processes is pertinent to his other architectural endeavours, including those undertaken whilst working in Le Corbusier's atelier such as Le Couvent Sainte Marie de La Tourette. Xenakis also separately published the mathematical thinking behind his compositional processes: see I. Xenakis, Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (New York, Pendragon Press, 1991). For a biographical discussion of Xenakis, including further information on La Tourette and the Philips Pavilion, see A. B. Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis (London, Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 21–25, 70–71, and N. Matossian, Xenakis (Cyprus, Moufflon Publications, 2005), pp. 121–140. One possible explanation for this is that design strategies in architecture attempt to define and/or enclose space in particular visual ways, whereas sound itself asserts new and specific vibrations that are non-visual, only aurally decoded. However, the disciplines of architecture and music both conventionally communicate their ideas through notational systems made up of temporal and spatial symbols. These symbols are extensions of their authors' ideas or instructions, generally manifested through the drawing or score, which are visual modes of defining arrangements of activity waiting to be interpreted by the viewer. It is through notational systems that I began my PhD in Architecture by Project with a focus on techniques that advance strategies of indeterminacy developed in music since the 1950s, initially through a musical score of the American composer John Cage.2 2. J. Cage, Concert for Piano and Orchestra (New York, Henmar Press Inc., [C.F. Peters Corp.], 1960).

For the purposes of this paper, I will limit the discussion on Cage to this score, and demonstrate how an understanding is being established that his work has consequences for other creative disciplines. I will then briefly discuss a series of architectural drawings by the architect Daniel Libeskind, and how the two interrelate.3 3. D. Libeskind, Chamber Works: Architectural Meditations on Themes from Heraclitus (London, Architecture Association, 1983). In the second part of this paper I will extend the understanding of Cage's and Libeskind's respective temporal imagery and notation, and illustrate how these are contributing to two projects addressing ideas of space, sound and notation as part of my architectural doctorate. Underpinning the heuristic method of all my doctoral project work are ideas of indeterminacy as originally presented by Cage in the discipline of music. When taken up within the discipline of architecture, these ideas provoke difficult questions requiring answers yet to be fully resolved and as such, my two projects in this paper may appear aesthetically complete, however, they are not conclusive in content. Although it will be shown in this paper how inconclusive investigations are a necessary problem within my research, contributing to an understanding of these questions is the distinctive in(ter)vention of interdisciplinary media, how they inform, contest and support the research. To address this, and in summary, I will position my research's design-based approach within two contexts; first, within an Australian context of the PhD in Architecture by Project, and secondly, within ‘The Unthinkable Doctorate’ conference's thematic subcategory of ‘media’.