Theories of Architecture & Urbanism: Synopsis

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC61303/ARC2224) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (MARCH 2017)

Name: Chan Yi Qin

ID No.: 0315964

Lecturer: Mr. Nicholas

Tutorial Time: 10am

Reader/Text Title: Text 2 (Group B) “Learning From Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form”

Synopsis No: 1 Author: Robert Venturi, et. AL.

The text explores the function of the “appealing”, scenographic and visual architecture, traditionally found in Las Vegas. It covers and studies how the parkings, advertising signs, public lighting or the entrance of the different and varied casinos of Las Vegas work, how they are organized and configured. The signs that appear next to the different constructions do not represent the architecture but they control the space thanks to its shape and visual effects. Nevertheless, they configured an “alive”, complex and contradictory city opposed to the modern traits. The power of the buildings or structures to communicate things emerges from the facade of the building as can be perceived from the advertising signs; the building became the advertisement. This idea looks for the disruption between the facade, turned into a big commercial sign, which represents the connection with the city and the space planned to work in a different way.

Learning from Las Vegas tackles issues of architecture that are often overlooked. Within the analysis of Las Vegas, Venturi's real expertise comes out, as does his passion for chaotic and contradictory images in urban sprawl, a key of our architectural past. Venturi criticizes absolute architecture; architecture that becomes habitable advertisements. He explores the evolution of the city through symbols. It becomes temporary and ephemeral since advertising signs are always competing so they need to be renewed constantly.

Architecture is created and designed to attract people. This kind of architecture achieve that goal of bringing people to Las Vegas since it creates the perfect space and environment to do whatever people want to do, to satisfy people's needs; those things people cannot do in other places.

The lesson from Las Vegas is one of challenging orthodoxies and changing our paradigms of what is visually and politically acceptable and desirable. The application of the lesson of Las Vegas was "Non-Plan," a proposal for the suspension of planning and to encourage a "plunge into heterogeneity" . To summarize, I think the quotation that sums this book up is: “Learning to really look at a place and question how we look, is a way of becoming revolutionary”. Within this phrase is advice that can transcend any architectural movement. It clearly conveys the rejection of simply starting afresh with a Utopia that is disconnected with both its existing situation and historical reference.

Word Count: 386 words

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BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC61303/ARC2224) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (MARCH 2017)

Name: Chan Yi Qin

ID No.: 0315964

Lecturer: Mr. Nicholas

Tutorial Time: 10am

Reader/Text Title: Text 4 (Group B) “The Geometry of Feeling: A Look at Phenomenology of Architecture”

Synopsis No: 2 Author: Juhani Pallasma

The text develops a theoretical position about architectural experience´s reliance on memory, imagination, and the unconscious. Juhani Pallasma asks, “Why do so very few modern buildings appeal to our feelings, when almost any anonymous house...or the most unpretentious farm outbuilding gives us a sense of familiarity and pleasure?” This question implies some inherent difference between ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ architecture. It is not coincidental that architecture, and many other aspects of our culture, tend to get divided into these two categories. There exists, in fact, a discernible point in history where this fracture appeared.

In his paper, Pallasma expressed a critical view on contemporary architecture when he pointed out the lack of spiritual and emotionally rich architecture that seems to characterize postmodern times. He was forthright in pointing out that the “progress of modern architecture has normalized human emotions, and consequently is unable to reflect emotional extremes such as ecstasy and melancholy”. In an attempt to move away from the detached and emotionless type of architecture that Pallasma describes, the focus of this project became an understanding of the qualities involved in a spiritual architecture and the ways in which such an architecture might be designed.

Whilst Pallasma captured the essence of a spiritual experience in his statement, “An impressive architectural experience sensitives our whole physical and mental receptivity. It is difficult to grasp the structure of the feeling because of its vastness and diversity.” Ultimately, it became possible to argue that spirituality can be found in architecture and although perhaps hard to label in concrete terms, it may be an architecture that evokes our inner emotions, appeals to our senses, can potentially alter our mood or can affect us psychologically or emotionally.

Spiritual experience is subjective and people’s perceptions and interpretations will vary. It might be that ultimately society does not need enchanting and spiritual architecture. Like poetry, music and art, it exists as a construct that is in a sense unnecessary, but can enrich our lives if we let it.

Word Count: 333 words

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BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC61303/ARC2224) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (MARCH 2017)

Name: Chan Yi Qin

ID No.: 0315964

Lecturer: Mr. Nicholas

Tutorial Time: 10am

Reader/Text Title: Text 6 (Group B) “Towards Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance, No. 5 & 6”

Synopsis No: 3 Author: Kenneth Frampton

The text establishes the importance of both rootedness to place and also modern innovation when creating a new work of architecture. Kenneth Frampton’s influential essay on modern architecture immediately reveals what he proposes architecture should resist: the homogeneity inherent in modern society. The universalization of human culture has been imposed around the globe, and with the rise of a single-world civilization comes the loss of diversity and the disappearance of local traditional cultures that are the creative nucleus for defining place. The pursuit of a better built environment in developing countries especially requires a delicate balance between rootedness to place and the ability to participate in modern civilization.

Frampton emphasizes however, that his critical regionalism is not synonymous with vernacular architecture.

The climatic conditions, culture, myth, and craft of a region are not to be reduced to indigenous forms. Both ancient and modern cultures are not the product of a single heritage, but rather hybrids of several cultures found in a region's past. A global modernization continues to reduce the relevance of agrarian-based culture, and our connection to past ways of life is broken, as the presence of a universal world culture overpowers regionalist tendencies. Therefore, regional culture must not be taken for granted as automatically imposed by place but, rather, cultivated and presented through the built environment.

While Frampton does critique the uniformity of modernism, he does not dismiss the technical value and cultural possibilities that a century of modernism has contributed to human settlements. Rather, Frampton seeks an architectural language that reinterprets indigenous solutions and also reflects the technological capacities of modernity. Through its tectonic form, adaptability to location, social relevance, and architectural vocabulary, a building may reinterpret old traditions in a modern setting.

Frampton’s densely argued manifesto for a reinvigorated regional architecture, has sufficient roots in the wider motivations – to explore issues of difference and identity in a simultaneously fragmented and homogenized postmodern world – and flexibilities of the spatial turn, that it has been adopted across the humanities, moving beyond its architectural basis and into other social and cultural structures.

Word Count: 345 words

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