Architecture: Theory & Criticism | Course Overview & Compendium by Konstantin Atanasov

THEORY & CRITICISM COURSE OVERVIEW & COMPENDIUM

POST GRADUATE MASTER PROGRAM | 2014/2015

Financial support: EU Operational Programme HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT, co-financed by the European Social Fund of the European Commission. Framework: THE PROJECT BG051PO001 “Actualization of the existing syllabus in architecture and establishment of new master’s programme in architecture in English language”. Beneficiary: Faculty of Architecture, University of Architecture, Construction and Geodesy, Sofia. The programmes: “Architecture theory and Criticism” & “Contemporary Architecture Technologies” Starting year 2014 / Graduation year 2016 Form of Education: Part Time University Level Program director: Georgi Stanishev Coordinator: Milena Metalkova metalkova_far@uacg.bg +359 2 8650312 WWW.UACG.BG

UACEG

ARCHI TEC TURE

CONTEMPORARY

ARCHI TEC TURAL

THEORY AND CRITICISIM

TECHNOLOGY

Juhani PALLASMAA Antony ROBERTS Hans IBELINGS Georges HEINTZ Oleg YAVEIN Kaivan KARIMI Paul de VROOM Helle JUUL Rudy RICCIOTTI Georgi STANISHEV Alexander KYOSEV Nadezhda DZHAKOVA Milena METALKOVA Vladimir PHILLIPOV Boyko KADINOV Maria DIAMANDIEVA Vesselina PENEVSKA Yara BUBNOVA Georgi STANISHEV JR

Boyan GEORGIEV Gichka KUTOVA Ivaylo HRISTEV Mariana TSVETKOVA Zamfir HADZHIJSKI Slavejko SLAVEJKOV Ivan ZAYKOV

program director: Georgi STANISHEV coordinator: Milena METALKOVA www.archimasters.uacg.bg

photo by Rosina Shatarova

ПРОЕКТ BG051PO001-3.1.07-0010 “АКТУАЛИЗИРАНЕ НА СЪЩЕСТВУВАЩА УЧЕБНА ПРОГРАМА ПО АРХИТЕКТУРА И СЪЗДАВАНЕ НА НОВА МАГИСТЪРСКА ПРОГРАМА ПО АРХИТЕКТУРА НА АНГЛИЙСКИ ЕЗИК” ПРОЕКТЪТ СЕ ОСЪЩЕСТВЯВА С ФИНАНСОВАТА ПОДКРЕПА НА ОПЕРАТИВНА ПРОГРАМА “РАЗВИТИЕ НА ЧОВЕШКИТЕ РЕСУРСИ”, СЪФИНАНСИРАН ОТ ЕВРОПЕЙСКИЯ СОЦИАЛЕН ФОНД НА ЕВРОПЕЙСКИЯ СЪЮЗ.

program director: Jeko TILEV coordinator: Mariana TSVETKOVA www.archimasters.uacg.bg

photo by Rosina Shatarova

ПРОЕКТ BG051PO001-3.1.07-0010 “АКТУАЛИЗИРАНЕ НА СЪЩЕСТВУВАЩА УЧЕБНА ПРОГРАМА ПО АРХИТЕКТУРА И СЪЗДАВАНЕ НА НОВА МАГИСТЪРСКА ПРОГРАМА ПО АРХИТЕКТУРА НА АНГЛИЙСКИ ЕЗИК”

ЕВРОПЕЙСКИ СОЦИАЛЕН ФОНД 2007 - 2013 МИНИСТЕРСТВО НА ОБРАЗОВАНИЕТО И НАУКАТА ОПЕРАТИВНА ПРОГРАМА “РАЗВИТИЕ НА ЧОВЕШКИТЕ РЕСУРСИ

ПРОЕКТЪТ СЕ ОСЪЩЕСТВЯВА С ФИНАНСОВАТА ПОДКРЕПА НА ОПЕРАТИВНА ПРОГРАМА “РАЗВИТИЕ НА ЧОВЕШКИТЕ РЕСУРСИ”, СЪФИНАНСИРАН ОТ ЕВРОПЕЙСКИЯ СОЦИАЛЕН ФОНД НА ЕВРОПЕЙСКИЯ СЪЮЗ.

СЪВРЕМЕННА АРХИТЕКТУРНА ТЕХНОЛОГИЯ

CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY

АРХИТЕКТУРНА ТЕОРИЯ И КРИТИКА

ARCHITECTURE: THEORY AND CRITICISM

НАДСТРОЕЧНА МАГИСТЪРСКА ПРОГРАМА

POSTGRADUATE MASTER DEGREE PROGRAM

НАДСТРОЕЧНА МАГИСТЪРСКА ПРОГРАМА

POSTGRADUATE MASTER DEGREE PROGRAM

МАГИСТЪРСКАТА ПРОГРАМА АРХИТЕКТУРНА ТЕОРИЯ И КРИТИКА СТИМУЛИРА КРИТИЧЕН ПОГЛЕД ВЪРХУ РАЗВИТИЕТО НА СЪВРЕМЕННАТА АРХИТЕКТУРА И ГРАДСКО РАЗВИТИЕ НА БАЗАТА НА ПОЗНАНИЕ ЗА ИСТОРИЯ НА АРХИТЕКТУРАТА И ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ НА ТЕОРЕТИЧНИ ПОСТАНОВКИ В АРХИТЕКТУРНАТА ПРАКТИКА. ПРОГРАМАТА СЕ СЪСТОИ ОТ ДИСЦИПЛИНИ В СФЕРА, НАДГРАЖДАЩА СТАНДАРТНОТО ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ ПО АРХИТЕКТУРА, КОИТО ЧРЕЗ СКАНИРАНЕ ОТ ДИСТАНЦИЯ НА ПРОЦЕСА НА ПРОЕКТИРАНЕ ЦЕЛЯТ ДА ОФОРМЯТ НОВА ГЛЕДНА ТОЧКА КЪМ АРХИТЕКТУРНАТА ПРАКТИКА ОТ МЕТА-НИВОТО НА АРХИТЕКТУРНАТА КУЛТУРА. ПРОГРАМАТА ЦЕЛИ ДА РАЗШИРИ ХОРИЗОНТА НА АРХИТЕКТУРНОТО ПОЗНАНИЕ КАТО ОБУЧИ АРХИТЕКТИТЕ ДА АНАЛИЗИРАТ ПРОЦЕСА НА ПРОЕКТИРАНЕ ПРЕЗ ПРИЗМАТА НА АРХИТЕКТУРНАТА ТЕОРИЯ И ОТЧИТАНЕТО НА СПЕЦИФИЧНИЯ КОНТЕКСТ: РЕГИОНАЛНА И УНИВЕРСАЛНА ПРОСТРАНСТВЕНА КУЛТУРА; ТЕНДЕНЦИИ НА РАЗВИТИЕ В СЪВРЕМЕННОТО ИЗКУСТВО; ОБЩЕСТВЕНИ МАСМЕДИИ И ИНФОРМАЦИОННИ МРЕЖИ; СОЦИАЛНИ И ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИ ВИЗИИ; ФИЛОСОФСКИ ИНТЕРПРЕТАЦИИ НА НАСТОЯЩЕТО. МАГИСТЪРЪТ ПО ТЕОРИЯ И КРИТИКА НА АРХИТЕКТУРАТА ЩЕ БЪДЕ ПОДГОТВЕН СЪС ЗНАНИЯ И УМЕНИЯ В СЛЕДНИТЕ НАПРАВЛЕНИЯ: СПОСОБНОСТ ДА САМОАНАЛИЗИРА СВОЯ ПОДХОД И ДА ПРЕВРЪЩА СПОНТАННИЯ ТВОРЧЕСКИ ПРОЦЕС В СИСТЕМАТИЧЕН И ОСЪЗНАТ МЕТОД И СТРАТЕГИЯ; УМЕНИЕ ДА ПРОЕКТИРА, АНАЛИЗИРАЙКИ ТЕОРЕТИЧНО АРХИТЕКТУРЕН ПОДХОД В КОНТЕКСТА НА СЪВРЕМЕННОТО РАЗВИТИЕ НА АРХИТЕКТУРНАТА КУЛТУРА, ПОЗНАВАЙКИ РАЗНООБРАЗНИ ТЕНДЕНЦИИ, КОНТЕКСТИ И СТИЛИСТИЧНИ ЕЗИЦИ; ДА ИНТЕРПРЕТИРА И ФОРМУЛИРА КРИТИЧНА ОЦЕНКА НА НАСТОЯЩАТА АРХИТЕКТУРНА КАРТИНА КАТО ДЕФИНИРА МЯСТОТО НА СЪВРЕМЕННИТЕ АРХИТЕКТУРНИ ПРАКТИКИ. ПРОГРАМАТА РАЗВИВА УМЕНИЯ ЗА ТВОРЧЕСКО КРИТИЧНО МИСЛЕНЕ И СПОСОБНОСТИ ДА СЕ АНАЛИЗИРАТ АРХИТЕКТУРНИТЕ ТВОРБИ КАТО ИНСТРУМЕНТИ, ОТРАЗЯВАЩИ СТАДИЙ НА КУЛТУРНО РАЗВИТИЕ И ПОЛИТИЧЕСКА ПОЗИЦИЯ. ПРОГРАМАТА СЕ СЪСТОИ ОТ ДИСЦИПЛИНИ, КОИТО ИНТЕГРИРАТ В АРХИТЕКТУРНАТА СФЕРА РАЗНООБРАЗНИ ХУМАНИТАРНИ ЗНАНИЯ КАТО ФИЛОСОФИЯ, СЕМИОТИКА, ИСТОРИЯ НА ИЗКУСТВОТО И АРХИТЕКТУРАТА, ТЕОРИЯ НА НАУЧНОТО ПОЗНАНИЕ, ПОЛИТОЛОГИЯ, КУЛТУРОЛОГИЯ, СОЦИОЛОГИЯ И ДР, ОФОРМЯЩИ СИЛНО ИНТЕРДИСЦИПЛИНАРЕН ФОКУС НА МАГИСТРАТУРАТА. ОСНОВНАТА БАЗА НА ДИСЦИПЛИНИТЕ СЕ ГРАДИ ВЪРХУ ПОСТИЖЕНИЯТА НА СТРУКТУРАЛИЗМА И ПОСТ-СТРУКТУРАЛИЗМА, КАКТО И ВЪРХУ ШИРОК СПЕКТЪР ОТ СЪВРЕМЕННИ ФИЛОСОФСКИ ТЕНДЕНЦИИ ОТ НЕО-МАТЕРИАЛИЗЪМ И НЕО-МАРКСИЗЪМ ДО НЕО-КАНТИАНСКИ ФИЛОСОФСКИ ПАРАДИГМИ. ИЗТЪКНАТИ СПЕЦИАЛИСТИ СА ПОКАНЕНИ ДА РАЗВИЯТ ИНТЕРДИСЦИПЛИНАРНИ ЗНАНИЯ ЧРЕЗ ЛЕКЦИИ, РАБОТИЛНИЦИ И РЪКОВОДСТВО НА СТУДЕНТИТЕ, КОНТРОЛИРАЙКИ КАЧЕСТВОТО НА СТУДЕНТСКИТЕ РАЗРАБОТКИ.

THE THEORY AND CRITICISM OF ARCHITECTURE POSTGRADUATE MASTER DEGREE PROGRAM ENCOURAGES A CRITICAL UNDERSTANDING OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN CULTURE GROUNDED IN THE KNOWLEDGE OF HISTORIES AND TERMS OF PRACTICE. IT DEFINES A SECTOR OF DISCIPLINES AND CAPACITIES, WHICH IS SUPER-STRUCTURED ON TOP OF THE STANDARD ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, AND IS FLYING OVER THE ARCHITECTURE PRACTICE PROCESS, ALLOWING TO FORMAT POINTS OF VIEW DISPOSED ON A META-LEVEL OF ARCHITECTURAL CULTURE. THE PROGRAM IS AIMED TO EXTEND THE HORIZON OF THE ARCHITECTURE KNOWLEDGE OF THE ARCHITECTS BY TEACHING THEM CONSIDER THE DESIGN PROCESS THROUGH ITS THEORETICAL RE-THINKING AND PUTTING IT IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS: OF SPECIFIC LOCAL AND UNIVERSAL CULTURE OF SPACE; OF THE GENERAL FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS; OF THE PUBLIC MASS MEDIA AND THE INFORMATION FLOOD; OF THE SOCIAL AND THE POLITICAL VISIONS; OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL PICTURE OF THE EXISTING. THE POSTGRADUATE PROGRAM BRINGS TO ARCHITECTS THE OPPORTUNITY TO ADOPT SPECIFIC UNDERSTANDINGS AND SKILLS: TO SELF-REFLECT OWN DESIGN CAPACITIES AND DESIGN ATTITUDES AND TO CONVERT THE SPONTANEOUS DESIGN PROCESS INTO SYSTEMATIC AND SELF-CONSCIOUS METHOD AND STRATEGY; TO DEVELOP THEORETICAL THINKING IN RELATION TO THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE CULTURE AND TO CONSIDER THEMSELVES IN ITS CONTEXTS, TRENDS, EXPRESSIVE SYSTEMS AND LANGUAGES; TO INTERPRET AND FORMAT A CRITICAL JUDGMENT ON CURRENT ARCHITECTURE HISTORY AND TO ARTICULATE THE FIELD OF CURRENT ARCHITECTURE DESIGN PRACTICES. THIS EDUCATION PROGRAM ALSO DEVELOPS THE CAPACITY OF INDIVIDUAL CRITICAL THINKING AND THE ABILITY TO CONSIDER THE ARCHITECTURE WORK AS AN INSTRUMENT OF PUBLIC ASSERTION OF CULTURAL DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICAL JUDGMENT. THE PROGRAM CONSISTS OF DISCIPLINES THAT ARE INVOLVING INTO THE REALM OF ARCHITECTURE DIFFERENT FIELDS OF HUMANITARIAN KNOWLEDGE LIKE PHILOSOPHY, SEMIOLOGY, ART AND ARCHITECTURE HISTORY, THEORY OF SCIENCE, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL SCIENCES, SOCIOLOGY ETC., WHICH PROVIDES A TRUE INTERDISCIPLINARY TEXTURE TO THE PROGRAM. THE GENERAL BASIS OF THE COURSES IS COMPOSED ON THE STRUCTURALIST AND POST-STRUCTURALIST THOUGHT AS WELL AS WIDE RANGE OF CURRENT PHILOSOPHY TRENDS FROM NEO-MATERIALIST AND NEO-MARXIST TO LIBERTARIAN PHILOSOPHICAL PARADIGMS. FOR THE ACADEMIC COVERAGE OF THE ABOVE SYNOPSIS AND THE CORRESPONDING PROGRAM DISCIPLINES EMINENT SPECIALIST IN THE NEIGHBORING FIELDS ARE INVITED TO GIVE LECTURES, LEAD WORKSHOPS DIRECT THE SUBSTANTIVE WORKS OF THE POST GRADUATE STUDENTS AND CONTROL THE QUALITY OF THEIR OUTPUT.

МАГИСТЪРСКАТА ПРОГРАМА СЪВРЕМЕННА АРХИТЕКТУРНА ТЕХНОЛОГИЯ ИМА ЗА ЦЕЛ ДА ПОДГОТВИ СПЕЦИАЛИСТИ (МАГИСТРИ-АРХИТЕКТИ) В ОБЛАСТТА НА АКТУАЛНАТА ПРОБЛЕМАТИКА НА СЪВРЕМЕННИТЕ АРХИТЕКТУРНИ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ. ОБУЧЕНИЕТО ПРЕДОСТАВЯ АДЕКВАТНИ ЗНАНИЯ И УМЕНИЯ, СВЪРЗАНИ СЪС СЪВРЕМЕННИ АРХИТЕКТУРНО-КОНСТРУКТИВНИ РЕШЕНИЯ, РЕАЛИЗИРАНИ В ПОСЛЕДНИТЕ ПОКОЛЕНИЯ ВИСОКОТЕХНОЛОГИЧНИ СГРАДИ. В ОБРАЗОВАТЕЛНИЯ ПРОЦЕС Е ЗАЛОЖЕН ТЕОРИТИЧНО-ПРАКТИЧЕСКИ ПОДХОД ЗА СТИМУЛИРАНЕ ПРИЛАГАНЕТО НА ЗНАНИЯ В РАЗРАБОТВАНЕТО НА ПРОЕКТИ, А В ПОСЛЕДСТВИЕ И В РЕАЛНАТА ПРАКТИКА. ПРОГРАМАТА ВКЛЮЧВА ДИСЦИПЛИНИ С НАДСТРОЕЧЕН ХАРАКТЕР. ТЕ СА СВЪРЗАНИ С ПРЕДСТАВЯНЕ И АНАЛИЗ НА СЪВРЕМЕННИ РЕШЕНИЯ, КОИТО ПРОМЕНЯТ АРХИТЕКТУРНОТО СЪЗНАНИЕ КЪМ СЪЗДАВАНЕ НА АРХИТЕКТУРА ЧРЕЗ ВИСОКОТЕХНОЛОГИЧНА КОНСТРУКЦИЯ И ДЕТАЙЛ. В ДИСЦИПЛИНИТЕ СЕ ПРОСЛЕДЯВАТ СПЕЦИФИЧНИ ТЕНДЕНЦИИ В РАЗВИТИЕТО НА НЯКОИ УНИКАЛНИ КОНСТРУКЦИИ ЗА ПОКРИТИЯ И ФАСАДНИ СТРУКТУРИ И ТЕХНИТЕ СПЕЦИФИЧНИ АКУСТИЧНИ, СВЕТЛИННИ И ЕНЕРГО-ЕФЕКТИВНИ ПРОБЛЕМИ. СГРАДАТА СЕ РАЗГЛЕЖДА КАТО СЛОЖНА СТРУКТУРА СЪС СПЕЦИФИЧНА ТЕХНОЛОГИЯ ЗА РЕШАВАНЕ НА НЯКОИ СГРАДОСТРОИТЕЛНИ ПРОБЛЕМИ. ОБУЧЕНИЕТО ПО СЪВРЕМЕННА АРХИТЕКТУРНА ТЕХНОЛОГИЯ СТИМУЛИРА СТУДЕНТА ДА АНАЛИЗИРА ВСИЧКИ СЛОЖНИ СГРАДОСТРОИТЕЛНИ ПРОБЛЕМИ В ЕДНА СЪВРЕМЕННА ВИСОКОТЕХНОЛОГИЧНА СГРАДА ЧРЕЗ АНАЛИЗ НА ВРЪЗКИТЕ МЕЖДУ: ФУНКЦИЯ, ВИСОКОТЕХНОЛОГИЧНА КОНСТРУКЦИЯ, АРХИТЕКТУРНА ФОРМА, СГРАДНА ОБВИВКА, ВИСОКОТЕХНОЛОГИЧНИ ПОКРИТИЯ. МАГИСТЪР ПО СЪВРЕМЕННА АРХИТЕКТУРНА ТЕХНОЛОГИЯ ЩЕ БЪДЕ ПОДГОТВЕН: ДА ПОЗНАВА СЪВРЕМЕННИ СИСТЕМИ И МАТЕРИАЛИ ЗА ИЗГРАЖДАНЕ НА ФАСАДНИ СТРУКТУРИ ЗА ЕТАЖНИ И ЗАЛНИ СГРАДИ С ТЕХНИТЕ СПЕЦИФИЧНИ КОНСТРУКТИВНИ, ЕКСПЛОАТАЦИОННИ И ФУНКЦИОНАЛНИ ПРОБЛЕМИ; ДА ПОЗНАВА СЪВРЕМЕННИ ПОКРИТИЯ ЗА ГОЛЕМИ ЗАЛНИ СГРАДИ С ТЕХНИТЕ ПРОБЛЕМИ И НАЧИНИ НА РЕШАВАНЕ; ДА АНАЛИЗИРА АРХИТЕКТУРНОТО ПРОСТРАНСТВО, С ЦЕЛ СЪЗДАВАНЕ НА БЛАГОПРИЯТНА АКУСТИЧНА, СВЕТЛИННА И ЕНЕРГОЕФЕКТИВНА СРЕДА; УСПЕШНО ДА ПРОЕКТИРА, ПРИЛАГАЙКИ ЗНАНИЯТА ОТ ТЕОРИТИЧНИТЕ ДИСЦИПЛИНИ; СПОСОБНОСТ ЗА ПРЕОСМИСЛЯНЕ И САМОАНАЛИЗИРАНЕ НА СОБСТВЕНИЯ СИ ПРОЕКТАНТСКИ ПОДХОД, ПОЛЗВАЙКИ ПРИДОБИТИТЕ ЗНАНИЯ ОТ ОБУЧЕНИЕТО; ДА ФОРМИРА КРИТИЧНА ОЦЕНКА КЪМ НАСТОЯЩАТА АРХИТЕКТУРНА СРЕДА. ПРОГРАМАТА РАЗВИВА ТВОРЧЕСКОТО И КРИТИЧНО МИСЛЕНЕ НА СТУДЕНТИТЕ И СПОСОБНОСТИТЕ ЗА АНАЛИЗ НА СЪЩЕСТВУВАЩАТА АРХИТЕКТУРНА СРЕДА. ДИСЦИПЛИНИТЕ В ПРОГРАМАТА СА БАЗИРАНИ НА НАЙ-НОВИ ТЕХНОЛОГИЧНИ ПОСТИЖЕНИЯ И РЕАЛИЗАЦИИ НА ВОДЕЩИ СВЕТОВНИ ФИРМИ. ЛЕКТОРИТЕ СА ИЗЯВЕНИ ИНЖЕНЕРИ И АРХИТЕКТИ, ПРЕДСТАВИТЕЛИ ИЛИ ПРЕКИ УЧАСТНИЦИ В ТЕЗИ ПРОУЧВАНИЯ.

THE MASTER PROGRAM CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY AIMS TO PREPARE SPECIALISTS (MASTERS IN ARCHITECTURE) IN THE CURRENT ISSUES OF CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY. THE TRAINING PROVIDES ADEQUATE KNOWLEDGES AND SKILLS RELATED TO CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE-CONSTRUCTIVE SOLUTIONS, IMPLEMENTED IN THE LAST GENERATIONS HIGH-TECHNOLOGY BUILDINGS AND FACILITIES. IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS IS BASED ON THE THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL APPROACH FOR STIMULATING THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE IN PROJECT DEVELOPMENT, AND LATER IN REAL PRACTICE. THE PROGRAM INCLUDES A GROUP OF SUBJECTS, WHICH HAVE AN UPGRADING CHARACTER. THEY ARE RELATED TO PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF CONTEMPORARY SOLUTIONS THAT CHANGE ARCHITECTURAL MIND TO CREATE ARCHITECTURE THROUGH HIGH-TECH CONSTRUCTIONS AND DETAILS. THE COURSE FOLLOWS SPECIFIC TENDENCES IN DEVELOPING SOME UNIQUE COATING AND FACADE STRUCTURES AND THEIR SPECIFIC ACOUSTIC, LIGHTING AND ENERGY EFFICIENT PROBLEMS. THE BUILDING IS CONSIDERED AS A COMPLEX STRUCTURE WITH A SPECIFIC TECHNOLOGY TO SOLVE SOME BUILDING-CONSTRUCTION PROBLEMS. THE TRAINING IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGIES ENCOURAGE STUDENTS TO ANALYZE CORRECTLY ALL THE COMPLEX BUILDING-CONSTRUCTION PROBLEMS IN ONE MODERN HIGH-TECH BUILDING THROUGH ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONS BETWEEN: FUNCTION, HIGH-TECH CONSTRUCTION, ARCHITECTURAL FORM, BUILDING ENVELOPE, HIGH-TECH COATINGS. THE MASTER IN CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY WILL BE PREPARED IN THE FOLLOWING AREAS: BE FAMILIAR WITH CONTEMPORARY SYSTEMS AND MATERIALS FOR BUILDING FACADES STRUCTURES FOR STOREY AND HALL BUILDINGS WITH THEIR SPECIFIC CONSTRUCTIVE, OPERATIONAL AND FUNCTIONAL PROBLEMS; BE FAMILIAR WITH CONTEMPORARY COATINGS FOR LONG SPAN BUILDINGS AND HOW TO RESOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS; TO ANALYZE THE ARCHITECTURAL SPACE IN ORDER TO CREATE A FAVORABLE ACOUSTIC, LIGHTING AND ENERGY EFFICIENT ENVIRONMENT; ABBILITY TO DESIGN PROJECTS SUCCESSFULLY AND TO APPLY KNOWLEDGE FROM THEORETICAL SUBJECTS; ABILITY TO RETHINK AND SELF-REFLECT ON THEIR OWN DESIGN APPROACH, USING GAINED KNOWLEDGE FROM THE TRAINING; TO FORM A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT TO THE CURRENT ARCHITECTURAL ENVIRONMENT. THE PROGRAM DEVELOPS CREATIVE AND CRITICAL THINKING OF STUDENTS AND THEIR ABILITY TO ANALYZE THE EXISTING ARCHITECTURAL ENVIRONMENT. DISCIPLINES IN THE PROGRAM ARE BASED ON THE LATEST TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS AND REALIZATIONS OF LEADING WORLD COMPANIES. THE LECTURERS ARE PROMINENT SPECIALIST - ENGINEERS AND ARCHITECTS, REPRESENTATIVES OR DIRECT PARTICIPANTS IN THESE STUDIES.

НАЧАЛО: МАРТ 2014/КРАЙ: ЮНИ 2015

S TA R T: M A R C H 2 0 1 4 / E N D : J U N E 2 0 1 5

НАЧАЛО: ФЕВРУАРИ 2014/КРАЙ: ЮНИ 2015

S TAR T: F EB R UAR Y 2 0 1 4 / END: JUNE 2015

ТЕОРИЯ НА АРХИТЕКТУРАТА: GEORGI STANISHEV/АРХИТЕКТУРА И ФИЛОСОФИЯ: JUHANI PALLASMAA, ANTHONY ROBERTS/ КУЛТУРОЛОГИЯ: ALEXANDER KYOSEV/ АРХИТЕКТУРА И ИЗКУСТВА: NADEZHDA DZHAKOVA, GEORGES HEINTZ/ СЪВРЕМЕННИ ЯВЛЕНИЯ В АРХИТЕКТУРАТА: MILENA METALKOVA/АКАДЕМИЧНА РАБОТА НА АНГЛИЙСКИ ЕЗИК: VLADIMIR PHILLIPOV/АРХИТЕКТУРА И МЕДИИ: MARIA DIAMANDIEVA, BOYKO KADINOV/СОЦИОЛОГИЯ И АРХИТЕКТУРА: ANDREI RAYCHEV/КРИТИЧНИ ДЕБАТИ В СЪВРЕМЕННОТО ИЗКУСТВО: YARA BUBNOVA/ИСТОРИЯ НА СЪВРЕМЕННАТА АРХИТЕКТУРА В ЕВРОПА: HANS IBELINGS/КРИТИЧЕН АНАЛИЗ В АРХИТЕКТУРАТА: OLEG YAVEIN/ГРАДОУСТРОЙСТВЕН СИНТАКСИС-ТЕОРИЯ И ПРАКТИКА: KAIVAN KARIMI/МЕТОДИКИ НА АРХИТЕКТУРНО ПРОЕКТИРАНЕ: GEORGI STANISHEV JR, PAUL DE VROOM, HELLE JUUL, RUDY RICCIOTTI

THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE: GEORGI STANISHEV/ARCHITECTURE AND PHILOSOPHY: JUHANI PALLASMAA, ANTHONY ROBERTS/ CULTURAL STUDIES OF SOCIALIZED SPACE: ALEXANDER KYOSEV/ ARCHITECTURE AND THE ARTS: NADEZHDA DZHAKOVA, GEORGES HEINTZ/CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENA: MILENA METALKOVA/ACADEMIC WRITING AND EDITING IN ENGLISH: VLADIMIR PHILLIPOV/ARCHITECTURE AS PUBLIC MEDIA: MARIA DIAMANDIEVA, BOYKO KADINOV/SOCIOLOGY AND ARCHITECTURE: ANDREI RAYCHEV/CRITICAL DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTS: YARA BUBNOVA/HISTORY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN EUROPE: HANS IBELINGS/CRITICAL ANALYSIS IN ARCHITECTURE: OLEG YAVEIN/SPACE SYNTAX THEORY AND PRACTICE: KAIVAN KARIMI/DESIGN METHODS IN ARCHITECTURE: GEORGI STANISHEV JR, PAUL DE VROOM, HELLE JUUL, RUDY RICCIOTTI

АРХИТЕКТУРНА АКУСТИКА: IVAYLO HRISTEV, MARIANA TSVETKOVA/ПРОБЛЕМИ НА СГРАДНАТА ОБВИВКА: GICHKA KUTOVA/ ЛЕКИ МЕМБРАННИ КОНСТРУКЦИИ: SLAVEJKO SLAVEJKOV, MARIANA TSVETKOVA/ЕТАЖНА СГРАДА - ИДЕЕН ПРОЕКТ: GICHKA KUTOVA/КОМПЮТЪРНИ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ I: BOYAN GEORGIEV/АРХИТЕКТУРНО ОСВЕТЛЕНИЕ: ZAMFIR HADZHIJSKI, GICHKA KUTOVA/СЪВРЕМЕННИ АСПЕКТИ НА АРХИТЕКТУРНАТА ТЕХНОЛОГИЯ: MARIANA TSVETKOVA /АРХИТЕКТУРНО - КОНСТРУКТИВЕН АНАЛИЗ НА СГРАДИТЕ: MARIANA TSVETKOVA/ ЗАЛНА СГРАДА (СРЕДНИ И ГОЛЕМИ ПОДПОРНИ РАЗСТОЯНИЯ) - ИДЕЕН ПРОЕКТ: MARIANA TSVETKOVA/ АРХИТЕКТУРЕН ДЕТАЙЛ (ЕТАЖНА СГРАДА) ТЕХНИЧЕСКИ ПРОЕКТ: GICHKA KUTOVA/КОМПЮТЪРНИ ТЕХНОЛОГИИ II: BOYAN GEORGIEV

ARCHITECTURAL ACOUSTICS: IVAYLO HRISTEV, MARIANA TSVETKOVA/PROBLEMS OF BUILDING ENVELOPE: GICHKA KUTOVA/ LIGHT MEMBRANE STRUSTURES: SLAVEJKO SLAVEJKOV, MARIANA TSVETKOVA/STOREY BUILDING - CONCEPT DESIGN: GICHKA KUTOVA/COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY I: BOYAN GEORGIEV/ARCHITECTURAL LIGHTING: ZAMFIR HADZHIJSKI, GICHKA KUTOVA/CONTEMPORARY ASPECTS OF ARCHITECTURAL TECHNOLOGY: MARIANA TSVETKOVA/ ARCHITECTURAL- STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS OF BUILDINGS: MARIANA TSVETKOVA/ HALL BUILDING (MEDIUM AND LARGE SPAN BUILDINGS) - CONCEPT DESIGN: MARIANA TSVETKOVA/ ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL (STOREY BUILDING) - TECHNICAL DESIGN: GICHKA KUTOVA/COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY II: BOYAN GEORGIEV

АРХИТЕКТУРЕН ФАКУЛТЕТ/УАСГ/СОФИЯ

ARCHITECTURE FACULTY/UACEG/SOFIA

АРХИТЕКТУРЕН ФАКУЛТЕТ/УАСГ/СОФИЯ

ARCHITECTURE FACULTY/UACEG/SOFIA

ЗА ПОВЕЧЕ ИНФОРМАЦИЯ, СВЪРЖЕТЕ СЕ С: ПРОГРАМЕН ДИРЕКТОР ГЕОРГИЙ СТАНИШЕВ КООРДИНАТОР МИЛЕНА МЕТАЛКОВА/METALKOVA_FAR@UACG.BG/+359 2 8650312

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: PROGRAM DIRECTOR GEORGI STANISHEV COORDINATOR MILENA METALKOVA/METALKOVA_FAR@UACG.BG/+359 2 8650312

ЗА ПОВЕЧЕ ИНФОРМАЦИЯ, МОЛЯ СВЪРЖЕТЕ СЕ С: ПРОГРАМЕН ДИРЕКТОР ЖЕКО ТИЛЕВ КООРДИНАТОР МАРИАНА ЦВЕТКОВА/MARIANADIO@ABV.BG/+359 2 9635245

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: PROGRAM DIRECTOR JEKO TILEV COORDINATOR MARIANA TSVETKOVA/MARIANADIO@ABV.BG/+359 2 9635245

WWW.UACG.BG

ПРОЕКТ BG051PO001-3.1.07-0010: “АКТУАЛИЗИРАНЕ НА СЪЩЕСТВУВАЩА УЧЕБНА ПРОГРАМА ПО АРХИТЕКТУРА И СЪЗДАВАНЕТО НА НОВА МАГИСТЪРСКИ ПРОГРАМА ПО АРХИТЕКТУРА НА АНГЛИЙСКИ ЕЗИК”

ПРОЕКТЪТ СЕ ОСЪЩЕСТВЯВА С ФИНАНСОВА ПОДКРЕПА НА ОПЕРАТИВНА ПРОГРАМА “РАЗВИТИЕ НА ЧОВЕШКИТЕ РЕСУРСИ”, СЪФИНАНСИРАН ОТ ЕВРОПЕЙСКИЯ СОЦИАЛЕН ФОНД НА ЕВРОПЕЙСКИЯ СЪЮЗ.

THE COURSE VIEW R E V O E S R 9 - 11 COU VIEW R E V O T C E J 12 - 15 SUB MME A R G O R P C 16 - 17 AT

THE COURSE

Architecture Theory & Criticism The

post

graduate

master

degree

program is meant to distinguish itself by stressing the importance of the relationship between architectural creativity and the complex context of the broader humanitarian knowledge. It seeks to impart analytical skills and critical understanding of the contemporary architecture practices, while maintaining intense exposure to a complex spectrum of philosophical and cultural attitudes. The program defines an educational matrix of academic subjects, building on the standard syllabus of the architectural education, and thus aims to provoke students to a new perspective of experiencing architecture as a complex and pluralistic cultural endeavor. It is targeted to architects or graduating students, already familiar with the basic principles of the profession, and interested to consider the design process apt to theoretical rethinking, required by the dynamics and conventions of contemporaneity.

THE COURSE

10 Such an overlooking of the idea of the urban through the logic of the diverse cultural situations forms a multidisciplinary educational matrix, presenting architecture in different contexts: • • • • •

Of Of Of Of Of

the the the the the

local and the universal idea of space general field of contemporary art public mass media and the information flood social and political visions known philosophical view

Disciplinary aspects covered by the curriculum like philosophy, semiology, art and architecture history, theory and science, political and cultural sciences, sociology, etc., provide a comprehensive educational platform, generally composed on the assumptions of the structuralist and poststructuralist thought. The post graduate program grants an opportunity of enhancing the professional abilities like to: • Examine the forces that define the architectural object and master them with the available architectural means, developing the capacity of professional selfreflection. • Develop basics of theoretical and critical thinking, relevant to the pluralistic essence of the contemporary architecture as a variety of multivalence channels as trends, expressive systems and languages. • Interpret and articulate the manifestations of contemporary architecture as urban events in the logic of the multilayer organism of cultural realty. This program is instigation to the acknowledgement of architectural criticism as a social instrument which asserts architecture as a valid intellectual factor in the cultural core of the strategies of reproduction of contemporary societies. For academic coverage of the syllabus, the program draws upon the large and diverse selection of eminent architects, theorists, practitioners, scholars, invited to teach, lead workshops, make presentations and guide the integral output of the resultant students’ response.

THE COURSE

12 Theory of Architecture I

Credits: 8

Auditorium work: 45

Theory of Architecture II

Credits: 8

1ST SEMESTER

The discipline articulates the principal themes in the theoretical debate on architecture as cultural phenomenon. Space in field conditions, boundaries in architecture space, functions and semantics in architecture language, orders in space, methods of architecture design, and poetics of architecture as expressive system, are some of the principal subjects of analytical discourse, critical articulation and assessment in the course. The program formats the abilities of the students to critically judge the architecture phenomena in their different contexts and to put their own works in relation to the universalities of architecture culture. Auditorium work: 45

2ND SEMESTER

The discipline considers the development of architectural profession through formation of expressive systems. The principle space-form-structure invariants that constitute the basis of the individual architecture languages as well as their evolution and metamorphoses through personal history, are analyzed through the works of Rem Koolhaas, Frank Gehry, Alvaro Siza, Louis Kahn, Kazuo Sejima and other architects. The profiles of the architects evolutionary phases are presented in synchronic and diachronic formats.

Contemporary Architectural Phenomena I

Credits: 4

Auditorium work: 60 1ST SEMESTER

The course gives a revision of principle trends and names which actively form the field of contemporary architecture landscape. The material is articulated by principal figures in the architecture practice today, and profiles the historic background, the conceptual and visionary specificity of each presented architecture person and/or trend, The material researched and presented is on the basis of the Japanese historic architectural tradition and contemporary architecture of Japan.

Contemporary Architectural Phenomena II

Credits: 5

Auditorium work: 60

THE COURSE

2ND SEMESTER

The second part of the course gives a revision of principle trends which actively form the field of contemporary architecture landscape. These trends will be elucidated by analyzing some seminal writings by contemporary architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Fumihiko Maki, Daniel Liebeskind, Toyo Ito, Bernard Tschumi, Arata Isozaki and others. The goal is to underline the role of text and writing in the development of contemporary architectural practice.

13 Architecture & Philosophy

Credits: 6

Auditorium work: 45

Cultural Studies of Socialized Space

Credits: 4

Auditorium work: 30

Credits: 2

Auditorium work: 30

in English

Credits: 3

Auditorium work: 30 1ST SEMESTER

The course is aimed to form the postgraduate studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; capacity to professionally self-express in English language in write and in speech. The different types of academic genres like: study, article, essay, critical analysis etc. are formatted and given as invariant structures and are exemplified by contemporary and historic critical and theoretical texts.

THE COURSE

1ST SEMESTER

The discipline profiles the interdependence between the worlds of artistic expression to the trends emerging in architecture. Specific accents are given to visual and acting arts like: photography, cinema, theatre and performance arts, but also parallels and correlations are configured and disclosed in the architecture to music and to dance resonances. The exposed and analyzed artistic relations of architecture to arts are given in historic perspective.

Academic Writing and Editing

1ST SEMESTER

The course defines a critical vision towards the interactions between the cultural models of urban life and their spatial correlations. The analysis is given through the structural oppositions of public-private, sacred-profane, ours-theirs, and their application to space-use by the different social strata and cultures. Recent history of the city life in in relation to the urban space habitation in Europe and the US is exposed in its diachronic transition from industrial to post-industrial city.

Architecture & the Arts

1ST SEMESTER

The interdependence between the philosophical and the development of scientific paradigm â&#x20AC;&#x201C; from one hand, and the architecture conversions and revolutions in history is the topic of the discourse in this discipline. The course also covers the reflections of concrete philosophical and scientific models in the individual architecture languages of sensitive to this discourse architects. The philosophy of understanding space in context of changing visions of the universe is the principle preoccupation of the debate.

14 Architecture as Public Media

Credits: 3

Auditorium work: 15

Sociology and Architecture

Credits: 4

Auditorium work: 60

Credits: 4

Auditorium work: 30

Credits: 3

Auditorium work: 30 2ND SEMESTER

The discipline profiles the development of the European Architecture tradition in different regional contexts, considering the interactions between Western and Eastern as well as Southern and Northern zones of the continent. The accent is made to the development of specificity of the modernist doctrine in its two layers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the universalist and the localist, giving birth to different types of regional mixtures and hybrids of both. The model of centre and periphery is analyzed in its historic modernist context.

THE COURSE

2ND SEMESTER

Contemporary arts are reflected in the course as a field of existential and expressive forms. The artistic world is presented as a field of concepts. The balances in this field are coordinated by the competitive artistic gestures directed towards extension of the boundaries of understanding what art actually is. Principal contemporary art trends of the 20 1nd 21 st centuries: conceptual art, minimalism, fluxus, etc, in visual arts, are formatted in a concise survey with reflections on their influences on architecture.

History of Modern architecture in Europe

2ND SEMESTER

Critical Discourse in Contemporary Visual Arts

1ST SEMESTER

The discipline outlines the dependence of architecture to its media presentation and the phenomena of formation of media-images of architecture works and personalities. The mechanisms of interactions are shown through numerous examples. Constant rules and principles are shown as development in different phases of media image formation. The culture of starchitects is analyzed as specific appearance in the media field of the 21st century. Practical use of media mechanics for the benefit of architecture work is extracted from the course in its conclusion.

15 Critical Analysis in Architecture

Credits: 3

Auditorium work: 30

Space syntax: Theory & Practice

Credits: 3

Auditorium work: 30

Credits: 3

Auditorium work: 30

Seminars: 195h

Homework: 570h

THE COURSE

Overall occupation: 900h

2ND SEMESTER

The course gives a critical survey on contemporary design methods and personal design strategies. Lectured by a series of representatives of both categories: architects practically using their own design methods as working instruments, from one hand, and architecture critics and theoreticians, who research the design methods as specific professional and cultural instruments. The spectrum of design attitudes considered range from subjective, intuitive and random, to most self conscious and scientifically rigid.

Lectures: 135h.

2ND SEMESTER

The discipline is dedicated to the well known methodology of investigation of urban space through mapping and measuring the communication capacities of the urban space networks, elaborated in the UCL, Bartlett School of Architecture. The research method - widely used as an instrument for assessment of project design solutions, is taught as principle theory of city formation dependent of people’s perception of space directions and vectors, but also as specific software to be applied onto urban fabric.

Design Methods in Architecture

2ND SEMESTER

The course considers the critical analysis as the form of “practice of the architectural theory”. The different methodologies of architectural analysis are classified in accordance with the dominant system of thought that has catalyzed their appearance and evolution. Analitical systems of thought and critical surveys of Woelflin, Zeddlemayer, Panofski, Wittkower, Rowe and others. Samples of analytical studies are given at the course to illustrate the different attitudes and analytical instrumentariums.

16 Semester I

ARCHITECTURE- THEORY AND CRITICISM

Signature

Discipline

ATCTAI

Theory of Architecture I

ATCAP

Architecture and Philosophy

ATCCSSS

Culture Studies of Socialized Space

ATCAA

Architecture and the Arts

Lecturer

M. Arch. Georgi Stanishev, PhD

M. Arch. Juhani Pallasmaa, PhD M. Arch. Anthony Roberts, PhD

Period

10-20.12.2014 UNIT 3

19-31.10.2014 UNIT 1

Alexander Kyosev, PhD

Nadya Dzhakova, MSc Georges Heintz, PhD

20-30.11.2014 UNIT 2

ATCCAPI

Contemporary Architectural Phenomena I

M. Arch. Milena Metalkova, PhD

10-20.12.2014 UNIT 3

ATCAWE

Academic Writing in English

Vladimir Philipov, PhD

20-30.11.2014 UNIT 2

Architecture as

M. Arch. Maria Diamandieva, PhD

Public Media

M. Arch. Boyko Kadinov, PhD

ATCAPM

THE COURSE

17 Semester II

ARCHITECTURE- THEORY AND CRITICISM

Signature

Discipline

Lecturer

ATCTAIII

Theory of Architecture II

M. Arch. Georgi Stanishev, PhD

ATCSA

Sociology of Architecture

M.Arch. Vesselina Penevska, PhD

ATCCDCA

Critical Discourse in Contemporary

Yara Bubnova, PhD

ATCCAPII

Contemporary Architectura Phenomena II

M. Arch. Milena Metalkova, PhD

ATCHMAE

History of Modern Architecture in Europe

M. Arch. Hans Ibelings, PhD

ATCCAA

Critical Analysis in Architecture

M. Arch. Oleg Yavein, PhD

ATCSSTP

Space syntax: theory and practice

Kinda Al-Sayed, PhD

ATCDMA

Design Methods in Architecture

M. Arch. Georgi Stanishev , PhD, MSc M. Arch. Paul de Vroom M. Arch. Helle Juul

THE COURSE

Period

13-17.10.2014 UNIT 1

Y T L U C A F

FACULTY

19 Georgi Stanishev I UACEG THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE I & II I 3 0 H . L . , 6 0 H . E X .

MA (UACEG, Sofia), PHD (Marchi Moscow), Professor of IAA since 2003, Member CICA (Paris), Affiliate Member RIBA (London) Architect and architecture publicist. Founder of Projects GS, an awarded bureau for architecture and urban design projects. Exhibition participant in RIBA, London, AA, London, Rundeturm, Vienna, MAA-Manezh, Moscow, etc. Curator of the Bulgarian pavilion at Biennale di Venecia (2008). Associated Professor and head of Architecture History and Theory department of the Architectural Faculty at the University for Architecture, Civil engineering and Geodesy, Sofia.

FACULTY

20 Juhani Pallasmaa I Helsinki ARCHITECTURE & PHILOSOPHY I 1 5 H . L . , 3 0 H . E X .

In my way of thinking, the motif of teaching architectural theory is to evoke personal interest in architectural phenomena, understand the ingredients of architectural experience and their interactions, as well as the grounding of this art form in human historicity and life. In addition to conveying information on various seminal architectural phenomena, the course aimed at evoking interest in new interactions of our phenomenal and experiential worlds, and stimulating personal observation and critical thinking. The course aimed deliberately at personal growth and the evocation of critical individuality. For me, an integrated and sensitized sense of self is the first aim of architectural education. The course introduced basic concepts of architectural theory, especially of its phenomenological understanding, which aim at grasping the existential, experiential, mental and emotive dimensions of architecture. It also aimed at revealing how architectural phenomena are integrated with historical, socioeconomic and cultural realities, and how architecture is related to and in interaction with other art forms, such as landscape architecture, visual arts, object design, cinema and literature, as well as philosophy and sciences. The lecture course consisted of an introductory lecture on my personal design work and writings, and nine thematic lectures on theoretically relevant issues, loosely based on the book Understanding Architecture by Robert McCarter and Juhani Pallasmaa (Phaidon, New York, 2014). All the lectures were accompanied by a host of images, which also contained aspects of interpreting and criticising architectural works. The lecture titles: • Personal introduction: form, thought and word in my work; • Space: existential and architectural space; • Time: the space of time, • Matter: hapticity and time; • Light: materiality and tactility of light, • Silence: the silent language of architecture; • Dwelling and primary images: architecture, dwelling and home; • Memory: memory and the life world; • Place, space and atmosphere: peripheral vision and the power of place; • The complexity of simplicity: the inner structure of the artistic image. The design task: The intellectual message of the lectures was expanded by a design assignment that called primarily for a personal emotive input. The task was to conceive, design and execute in full scale a funerary urn for the ashes of two alternative globally renown artists: Kazimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). The full scale of the object was aimed at emphasizing the emotional intimacy of the task.

FACULTY

21 Anthony Roberts I University of Brighton ARCHITECTURE & PHILOSOPHY I 1 5 H . L . , 3 0 H . E X .

All of my architectural / building work is small to mid scale and necessarily quiet in the choice of materials and intimate in detailing. at the same time i have nearly always found the opportunity to produce event surprises (material / form twists and turns). my architectural life has always been purposely punctuated by extended periods of work in other fields; particularly painting, film work, graphics, design, photography, research, and physically making exhibitions. i have never seen this work as “other than” architecture, but have always drawn upon being an “architect with ideology”, pushing my architectural ideas into more theoretical and painterly directions. i have always been an amalgam of architect,photographer, painter, designer, builder. it is diversity and the pushing of the envelope, more than the contained ideaof “being an architect”, which has interested me. each move, seemingly away from architectural practice, has brought me back to architecture (as a pattern of thought, of process) re-created and necessarily changed. (the maverick way).

FACULTY

22 Alexander Kyosev I Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski“ CULTURAL STUDIES OF SOCIALIZED SPACE I 1 5 H . L . ,

Professor of European Culture History 19th -20th c. Teacher in the Theory and History of Culture Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Sofia University “ST. Kliment Ohridski” since 1988. Former lecturer of Bulgarian Language, Culture and Literature in the Slavic Philology Seminar of the “Carl Augustus” University in Gottingen and the University of Saarbrucken. Professor of History of Culture in New Bulgarian University and the University of Plovdiv. Awarded numerous prizes for literature. Director of the Culture Center of Sofia University since 2009. The course is aimed to introduce basic concepts of the contemporary visual cultural studies and situate visuality in urban contexts. Using methods of sociology, cultural studies and semiology it teaches the students to read and interpret the visual messages of the city as well as the cultural negotiations and political conflicts between visual codes in the contemporary global/local societies of the spectacle. The objectives are to develop competences for visual analysis and visual urban research and to motivate students of architecture to use this approach in their complex work. I. What is visual culture? • Primary categories. Visual arts, history of visual arts and visual culture • Secondary categories: “Gestalt-quality’ of images. Historical images and visual codes. Semiotic problems of visuality. Differences between linguistic codes and visual codes. • What are visual cultures? Scopic regimes: visual culture, power perspectives, epistemology and visuality. Visuality, visual messages, visual persuasion: visual rhetoric and ideology. Images and contexts. • Visual politics. Symbolic and visual actions. Public sphere, private life and visuality. Aesthetization of politics. • Market and images. Image production, image communication and distribution, image consumption. Images usages. • The Society of Spectacle. • The Visual turn in the humanities.

FACULTY

II. Urban visual culture: • The city as spatial, social, cultural and media phenomenon. The visuality of urban space. • Regimes of urban visual power. Axes, levels and foci. Urban channels of image distribution. Official visual policy. • Multiple layers of urban visual culture o Co-existence of durable, ephemeral and momentous images o Co-existence of images with different goals and functions. o Coexistence of emblems of different cultural identities. Competitions, hybridizations and conflicts: global, national, local vs. urban and sub-urban. Visual resistance, visual activism o Co-existence of images with different technological origin o Co-existence of architectural environment and visual environment • City and social imagination. The City as Phantasm. • The legacy of the “Visual seminar”: the City-Screen or the City-Interface. III. Visual urban sociology; visual urban anthropology, visual cultural studies: Visual research: diagnostics. Reading and interpreting of visual messages. Description of contexts and contrasts. Identification of visual conflicts; interpretation of visual conflicts. Analysis of concrete and complex visual urban enviroment. Practice of visual analysis. IV. Practice of visual analysis V. Conference: the students present their visual home works

FACULTY

24 Nadezhda Dzhakova I Sofia ARCHITECTURE & THE ARTS I 1 5 H . L . , 3 0 H . E X .

This lecture based course provides special knowledge in the area of History of Architectural Photography and its practical value nowadays. The target audience of the offered cycle of lectures is people with a Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in Architecture who want to widen their understanding of Architecture and deepen their comprehension of its connection with the Visual Arts and in particular with Photography. The main purpose is to familiarize students with the subject of Architectural Photography and its application in their future professional development as architects. In order to achieve this, the topics of this course have been selected with the aim of building up the mandatory basics in the specifics of Architectural Photography and the details of how it can be used. The main themes follow not only the greatest achievements in the field of Photography from around the world and their connection with Architecture but they also examine the different types of Architectural Photography and their utility in completing different kinds of projects and assignments. Objectives: The main skills, which will be gained and deepened in the course of this class, are as follows: ability to work with the main types of Architectural Photography and the skill to choose, which type would be best suited to different architectural projects and sites, as well as fields and ways, in which this can be applied; familiarization with the contemporary practices and widening of the visual culture of the architect and deeper self-reflection in the process of putting together and presenting architectural projects. Exercises: The exercises in this course include practical tasks connected to the photographing of architectural sites and ways of presenting them; knowledge and practical application of the main terms and methods of Architectural Photography, developing the visual thinking of the architect and following the good practices in the working partnership between architect and photographer.

FACULTY

25 Georges Heintz I Strasbourg ARCHITECTURE & THE ARTS I 1 5 H . L . , 3 0 H . E X .

Cinema: Jean-Luc Godard – Le mépris, Alphaville; Peter Greenaway – Le ventre de l’architecte, Meurtre dans; Rossellini – Rome ville ouverte; Francis Lawrence – I am a legend; Matt Reeves – Cloverfield; Fritz Lang – Metropolis Photography: Philippe Ruault; Frank Kunert; Simon Boudvin; Berenice Abbott; Filip Dujardin; Georges Rousse Litterature: Julie Gracqu « Au château d’Argol »; Orwell Georges, Dans la dèche à Paris et à Londres; Emile Verhaeren - Les villes tentaculaires; Italo Calvino; Auster Paul – Moon Palace Comic Strips: Enki Bilal; Blutch – Vitesse Moderne; Winsor Mc Cay; Joost Swarte; Moebius – Blueberry / Metal Hurlant / Arzach / L’incal Street Art: Banksy; Blu; Ernest Pignon Ernest; JR; M-City; Eltono; 1024p; Felice Varini; Edgard Müller; Julian Beever

FACULTY

26 Milena Metalkova I UASG CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURAL PHENOMENA I & II I 6 0 H . L . , 6 0 H . E X .

Contemporary Architectural Phenomena I The course gives a revision of principle trends and names which actively form the field of contemporary architecture landscape in Japan. The material is articulated by principal figures in the architecture practice today, and profiles the historic background, the conceptual and visionary specificity of each presented architecture person and/or trend. The material researched and presented is on the basis of the Japanese historic architectural tradition and contemporary architecture of Japan. Contemporary architectural phenomena after the Second World War are analyzed as a continuation of some architectural design principles within the rich palette of Japanese architectural and design tradition. The first part of the course presents some of the roots of architectural tradition in Japan such as historic evolution of religious and residential architecture, the role of Japanese garden design in the way of thinking about space and the evolution of architectural preservation doctrine in 20th century. On this base the second part of the course presents some key trends and their representative architects in contemporary Japanese architecture trying to elucidate the relationship between architecture, spatial thinking and Japanese socio-cultural identity. Contemporary Architectural Phenomena II The course gives a revision of principle trends which actively form the field of contemporary architecture landscape since the second half of 20th century. These trends will be elucidated by analyzing some seminal writings by contemporary architects such as Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman, Fumihiko Maki, Daniel Liebeskind, Toyo Ito, Bernard Tschumi, Arata Isozaki and texts by prominent architectural critics and historians such as Manfredo Tafuri, Colin Rowe, Charles Jencks, Anthony Vidler, Kenneth Frampton and others. The goal is to underline the role of text and writing in the development of contemporary architectural theory and practice.

FACULTY

27 Rudi Ricciotti I France DESIGN METHODS I 1 5 H . L . , 4 5 H . E X .

Awarded France’s Grand Prix National d’Architecture in 2006, Medaille d’or de la Fondation de l’Academie d’Architecture in 2013 and member of Academie des Technologies, Rudy Ricciotti is one of the foremost representatives of a generation of architects combining great creative prowess with a genuine constructive approach. Pioneer and ambassador of concrete, Rudy Ricciotti sublimes innovative concretes in significant constructions such as the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM) in Marseille, the new wing of the Louvre in Paris to host its Islamic art collection, Jean-Bouin Stadium in Paris, Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton the Bridge of the Republic in Montpellier, Philharmonic Nikolaisaal in Potsdam (Germany), Philharmonic Les Arts Gstaad 9 Switzerland) for the festival created by yehudi Menuhin or the Footbridge of Peace over the Han River Seoul (South-Korea). Rudy Ricciotti is also the author of several books.

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28 Diamandieva I BAS, Sofia ARCHITECTURE AS PUBLIC MEDIA I 1 3 H . L .

Representing architecture as a form of communication is a theoretical challenge – it is a speculative quest of identification of analogues behaviors. Serving the purposes of the course this complex theoretical matter is summarized as a three parts structure: • a basic introduction to theory of communication; • the exemplary illustration of one of its principal elements of the communication model – the addresser, represented by the star architect culture; • and finally the reliance of the result – the demeanor of the contemporary architectural production, the carrier of the architectural message – the building of the 21st century as object and appearance of clearly visible media transformations. To talk about architecture is to talk about everything. But the essential underlying point is the future of visual presentation – of the notion of media understood as a mode of presentation, the future expectations of the contexts of art and architecture. Computer programs and digital communication modes invade reality – it is an already banal conclusion. We could expect that our ways of even acquiring knowledge will undertake major changes and digitality will dominate – the software will be the master. And you eider learn to write programs and create programs or you will remain to be programmed yourself; as the DIGITAL means not necessarily created by a machine but rather created under the conditions of a specific attitude towards the technologies. Organization of space is guided by the same culture trends. Everything is art and all arts intermingle, facilitated by the omnipresence of digitality and virtuality. For example – music, also a space organizer, is created and controlled by body movement, facilitated by computer synthesizers, and vise versa – architecture moving structures produce sounds by movement sensors. All known forms of representation blend – machines, systems, people, creating a real INTERMEDIA, an integrated artistic project in which there is no more any specific distinct art to be discerned. Digitally processed art tends to utilize all its resources and mixes the traditional genres into am overall total artistic reality. Reality and art merge into an integral amalgam of experiences –art becomes everything and nothing. Architecture is attracted by the trendy as always – since the Soundscraping in 1940, the three-dimensional implementation of musical compositions of Le Corbusier and Xenakis in 1958, the Coophimmelblau 2008 Pavilion 21 MINI Opera Space, basing architecture forms on the spatial transformation of sound sequences. The examples are unambiguous and ubiquitous.Art is converting into an intrinsic ritual, a natural feature of reality – very similar to the presumptive prehistoric understanding of the ritualistic totality – the Dionisian ecstatic experiencing of reality. But this time – as a constant highly technological browsing and experiencing of reality, in which the aesthetic episodes, in various forms, will

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be seamlessly implanted. And facilitated by virtuality, the powerful catalyst of the universalization of all human situations as subjected to an ecumenical whole. So maybe the Hegelian spiral is about close but at some unpredictable level. The huge hypermedia environment seems to be a result and the medium of this totalistic reality – and ambiance equally designed, performed and experienced. Technologically. The medium becomes not only the message, it is the omnipotent definition.

Graphs of ruled surfaces plotting the string glissandi of Metastaseis – the architecture of the Philips Pavilion originates in Xenakis’ copmposition.

View of the perspective of the first model of the Philips Pavilion.

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30 Boyko Kadinov I UASG ARCHITECTURE AS PUBLIC MEDIA I 2 H . L .

Founder and President of “VIZAR” Foundation, European Awards for Bulgarian Architecture. Faculty of Architecture, Department Public Buildings - head of department, Member of Chamber of Architects in France, Vice president of Cobaty 11, Geneva, ndependent expert of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture “Mies van der Rohe Award”. Member of the European Cultural Parliament. Subject: Architecture and Media. Transformations of the architecture in the public space. Interpretation and reconstruction of the “meanings”. Architecture as Art and its “exposure” in the fine gallery halls as author’s exhibitions in London, Paris and Geneva.

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31 Veselina Penevska I BAS, Sofia SOCIOLOGY OF ARCHITECTURE I 1 5 H . L .

This course is not about sociology. It is about people. These people that get in and out of the buildings we, as architects, design; that assess and transform, enjoy and hate them. What do people see when looking at those buildings, how do they use them, what do they like and dislike about them, how do they express their attitude towards the built environment around – social science could answer all these questions. Sociology could teach us how to become better architects – how to design buildings and cities that are pleasant to the eye, comfortable for the body and inspiring for the soul. Architects transform the social into spatial. To be able to do it they need to be socially sensitive. They need to understand how people and buildings interrelate, to be able to identify the needs and wants of the future users, to be skillful in using social and spatial instruments in order to influence human behavior in space. The primary focus of the course is on helping students become better professionals in architectural and urban design. Hence - the stress on the practical application of sociologically derived concepts about social-spatial interrelations. The curriculum consists of three modules. The first one examines the correlation between the constitution of society and the spatial structures it creates and inhabits. The second one discusses the approaches and instruments that could help architects design more socially attuned spatial structures. The third one aims at training the students to conduct their own research projects targeting social-spatial structures and issues. One of the course’s major goals is to enhance the understanding of socialspatial interrelations by helping students get an insight into the mechanisms of the interplay between the built environment and the individual or social group. Additionally, students will get acquainted with the theoretical aspects of the most acclaimed sociological and socio-psychological concepts about social-spatial systems. The curriculum also stimulates the development of a user-oriented design approach, by making students aware of the principles of inhabitant–sensitive architecture, the basics of participatory design, and the approaches for achieving social and community goals by spatial design. Participants will also acquire skills in devising and conducting their own research programmes targeting specific aspects of architecture or city.

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32 Yara Bubnova I Sofia CRITICAL DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY ARTS I 1 5 H . L .

• Socialist realism, its canon, public art, slow dissolution. • Abstract art and its developement after the World War II, the change of sceen: Abstract Expressionism, Tashism, Cobra Group, Post Painterly, abstraction in Italy and Spain, etc. • Reduction of the visual language, minimalism, op-art, post-minimalism. • The material relity as an object and a subject of art, pop-art, neorealism, arte povera, capitalist realism. • Illusions of reality – hyperrealism, photorealism. • Dematerialisation of the artefact, happening, performance, body art, actionism. • Conceptual art – the language of art as medium. • Between art and life, Fluxus • Land art, creative escapism, documentation, anti-market movement. • Video art and new media, technological romanticism and illusions. • What happened in 1970ies, the end of modernisms, the art pluralism. • East-Europen conceptualism, Moscow, Prague, Warsaw, Belgrade, etc. • The total metaphor, post modernism, neo-impressionism, Graffiti, etc. • Installation. • Contemporary art scene here and now.

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33 Hans Ibelings I Rotterdam, Toronto HISTOTY OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE IN EUROPE I 1 5 H . L . , 4 5 H . E X .

Hans Ibelings is the editor of The Architecture Observer, a multiform tool for architectural criticism. Master of history of art and archaeology at the University of Amsterdam in 1988. Critic of architecture since 1986. 1989-2000, collaborator in the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut of Rotterdam. 1992-1995, professor at the Academy of the Architecture of Amsterdam. 1994-2000, editor of the Annuaire Architectuur in Nederland. 2000-2001, Professor at the Polytechnic school of Eindhoven. 2003-2004, member of the scientific committee of the â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ciudades, esquinasâ&#x20AC;? exhibition in Barcelona (2004). Since 2004, Publisher/editor of the magazine A10 new European architecture, founded by Arjan Groot and Hans Ibelings, and president of the advice of the foundation of the Museum of Paviljoens in Almere. The course consisted of a series of lectures and a seminar dealing with European architecture in the 20th century. The aim of both the lectures and the seminar was to propose new perspectives on the historiography of European architecture which usually overemphasizes the Western part of the continent and tends to see the rest of Europe through the lens of developments in the West. By taking two neutral principles, the cardinal directions for the lectures and cross sections based on a single year for the seminar, the participants were invited to liberate themselves from preconceived ideas about the course of architectural history, ossified in a series of crucial moments and seminal events. After an introductory first lecture, the four presentations that followed focused on the North, the South, the West and the East respectively. In the seminar each student created a cross section of architectural production in Europe based on one particular year of their choice, between 1890 and 2010.

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34 Helle Juul I Denmark SPACE SYNTAX: THEORY AND PRACTICE I 1 5 H . L . , 4 5 H . E X .

Helle Juul has overall responsibility for national and international projects. She also teaches and researches and is a consultant for many of the largest educational institutions in the field of urban development and urban space. Campus consultancy projects constitute another important field of work, and Helle is a consultant for many of Scandinavia’s largest educational institutions. The application of research in fact has been one of the recurrent themes during Helle Juul’s career, which to a high degree has also defined Juul Frost Architects DNA. Helle Juul is responsible for ’Urban Space as a Development Strategy’, which developed a new approach to the function of public spaces as a catalyst for city development by focussing on transformation and significance as strategic instruments. The project became a development platform where all those with an interest were invited to inspiration meetings and development seminars in order to create both a robust and flexible instrument for ground based urban development. The role of the architect revolves around people, the social glue, requirement based design – the life lived. Simultaneously, there is a requirement that one should be in a constant state of readiness and prepared to set the agenda. She believes that architecture plays an essential global role and is an important instrument in the development of society and cities as well as the individual person. The breadth of knowledge from the local to the global society as a whole is precisely the fascination that drives the results that are moving the present mind set towards a future one. Helle Juul is engaged by the ways in which globalisation, coupled with the current urbanisation, is creating new conditions for our cities. The cosmopolitical change gives focus to a new form of public culture. Presently, multiculturalism, otherliness and ’the foreign’ are conditions that continuously make new demands on urban planning - there is a lack of meeting places for what we could call the value plural city. Places, spaces and activities which create awareness and provide insight and understanding of that otherliness. In order to meet that development, Helle Juul emphasises that urban space should be inclusive, provide social meeting places, be a platform for exchange for a city’s varied population. Whilst multicultural planning observes multiculturalism as a factum, intercultural planning accepts diversity as a norm, which requires an inclusive strategy. Public space can be, in other words, society’s social glue. New urban spaces require new hybrid strategies that correspond to changes in society. Inspired by Umberto Eco’s thoughts concerning the poetics of the open work, the urban citizen should take on the role of urban spatial coproducer. Ambiguity and the ability to honour multiple differing forms of behaviour become thus, according to Helle, one of the attractive cities’ most decisive qualities.

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35 Paul de Vroom I Netherlands SPACE SYNTAX: THEORY AND PRACTICE I 1 5 H . L . , 4 5 H . E X .

Paul de Vroom was trained as an architect at the Technical University of Delft, Netherlands. After having been closely involved in the first 3 years of OMA_Rotterdam, in 1985 he co-founded DKV Architecten. In 2013 he continued his career as Paul de Vroom Architects. Paul de Vroom is known for his analytical way of working based on typological models and research into changeability and the offering of options within designs and constructions. A serious of built projects show how these theories were successfully out into practice Since 1992 Paul de Vroom has been a regular guest professor at the leading schools of architecture in the Netherlands and abroad. He gave lectures and workshops in cities like Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Toronto, Madrid, Milan, Sofia, Moscow, Dushanbe and Jakarta, including the notorious “Terrace Lectures” for the TE’TSAB International Summer Workshop in Barcelona. He was jury member of various international workshops and competitions, member of the editorial staff of the Dutch magazine “Forum” and guest editor for the British magazine “Time-Based Architecture” (special editions on DKV Architecten and on Barcelona). Paul de Vroom works and lives in Rotterdam and Barcelona. Lecture ‘What’s in the Suitcase’ given on April 14th 2015 In this lecture Paul de Vroom states that ‘Architecture is the Art of Choosing’ and he describes the four design methods that are essential to him: 1. The Scientific Method, 2. The Volumetric Method, 3. The Mental method and 4. The Typology Method. Apart from explaining the methods from a historical as well as personal perspective he depicts how the methods play an important role in his academic work. The second part of the lecture focuses on the way the four methods are applied in planning and building. As Paul de Vroom experiences, it is actually always a combination of methods that determine real-life designing. To conclude the lecture Paul de Vroom argues that working with design methods means enhancing creativity and not at all restricting it.

Multifunctional residention complex, R u b l e v s k o y e , M o s c o w, 2 0 1 4

Conversion ‘De Nieuwe Hef’ Rotterdam, 2007 - 2010

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36 Kinda Al-Sayed I The Bartlet School of Architecture, UCL, London SPACE SYNTAX: THEORY AND PRACTICE I 1 5 H . L . , 4 5 H . E X .

A researcher at the Bartlet Space Syntax Laboratory, teaching fellow on the MSc/MRes Spatial Design: Architecture and Cities and the MSc/MRes Adaptive Architecture and Computation courses at the Bartlett, UCL. Architectural and urban scientist and designer. She has worked as a researcher on PROXIES, a project to understand the degree to which publicly available indices of street accessibility can be used as proxy indicators for the origin and destinations of the London riots. Screens in the Wild: Exploring the potential of networked urban screens for communities and culture. She has also worked on the Welcoming Workplace project at JSA Architecture and RCAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Helen Hamlyn Centre. She has a PhD and an MSc from UCL, She has studied architecture in the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, TUWien and Damascus University. She is an architect with a practice experience in the UK working at Elspeth Beard Architecture. Her main research interests are focused on -but not limited to- Complexity modeling of urban dynamics, knowledge-based architectural and urban design, design cognition, BIM and smart cities. She has recently been working on smart cities and BIM with the UK Government department of Business Innovation and Skills, contributing to the Digital Built Britain government strategy. She is also a member in the Smart Cities Interoperability committee at the British Standards Institution.

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37 Vladimir Philipov I Sofia ACADEMIC WRITING IN ENGLISH I 3 0 H . L . , 3 0 H . E X .

The objective of the course Academic Writing in English is both to inculcate in the MA students of architecture skills to generate scientific texts in the domain of the academic discipline they specialize in and also to be able to present and explain in the required spoken register of English their scientific results. The techniques drilled and the acquired stylistic and grammatical patterns will be practiced during the seminar classes in a simulated environment close to a real life context. The ultimate goal is to stimulate the students’ confidence in their language competence so that they will gain the self-confidence of young scholars in an English-speaking environment. The results that are to be achieved upon the successful completion of the course are the following: Writing and editing of texts in the domain of architecture. Creating a portfolio including texts reflecting the personal predilections of each student. • Inculcating language skills in English to present a text for discussion. Creating practical skills for logical, grammatical and lexical structuration of a presentation. • Creating skills for writing paragraphs, linking of paragraphs in a text, structuring the separate parts of a scientific article and its construction as a unified entity. • Creating skills to write abstracts, summaries and critical remarks on a specific scientific texts. • Overall improvement of the language competence in English.

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THE STUD ENTS

The Students

4139 arch. Daiana Todorova Course: Theory of Todorova Architecture arch. Daiana Mentor: Course: ///Georgi Stanishev Mentors: /// Connecting Boundaries/ Bounding Connections

Connecting Boundaries/ Bounding Connections

Corinthian channel, Greece

Metro Tube between Joliot Curie and G.M.Dimitrov stations, Sofia, Bulgaria

01 01

Very strong Phisical Boundary

Central Railway Station, Svoge, Bulgaria

Boundary acting as a connector

Overstepped Boundaries

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Path of least resistanceâ&#x20AC;?

Disobidience

Crime

01 01

Crossing the Border

Pointless

Ignoring the signs

Bounderies with changeing meaning

Sofia, 1908

Downtown Vitoshka, areal phopto

Curiosity

0101

Zhenski Pazar, Sofia, now

Zhenski Pazar, Sofia, few months ago

Boulevard Vitosha, Sofia, now

Mental, Semantic, Cultural

Pretty Woman

Habit

Boulevard Vitosha, Sofia, then

01 01

Caracas, Venezuela

Caracas Barrio meets the ordered city, Venezuela

Socio-cultural map, peoplemaps.org

THE STUDENTS

The Students

Socio-cultural map, peoplemaps.org

40 arch. Daniil Komitski

Course: Architecture & Philosophy Mentors: Yuhani Palasmaa

The Students

41 arch. Daniil Komitski

Course: Architecture & Philosophy Mentors: Yuhani Palasmaa

The Students

42 arch. Elina Hadzhieva

Course: Architecture & Philosophy Mentors: Yuhani Palasmaa

The Students

43 arch. Elina Hadzhieva

Course: Theory of Architecture II, Critical Discourse in Contemporary Visual Arts Mentors: Georgi Stanishev, Yara Bubnova

The Students

44 arch. Ivelina Mincheva

Course: Architecture & the Arts Mentors: Hans Ibelings, Anthony Roberts, Nadejda Djakova

The Students

45 arch. Ivelina Mincheva

Course: Architecture & the Arts Mentors: Hans Ibelings, Anthony Roberts, Nadejda Djakova

The Students

46 arch. Konstantina Hristova

Course: History / Philosophy / Ibelings Contemporary Phenomena in Architecture Hans - Anthony Roberts Konstantina Yuhani Palasmaa - Milena Metalkowa Hristova Mentors: Hans Ibelings, Anthony Roberts, Yuhani Palasmaa, Milena Metalkowa History - Philosophy - Contemporary Phenomena - in Architecture

The Students

konstantina_hristova@mail.bg

47 arch. Konstantina Hristova

Course: Contemporary Arts, Design Methods in Architecture Mentors: Yara Bubnova, Helle Juul

The Students

48 arch. Magdalina Rajeva Course: Architecture & Philosophy Mentors: Anthony Roberts

The Students

49 MODULE 1 arch. Magdalina Rajeva

ATC STUDENT

HISTORY OF MODERN Course: Architecture &COURSE: Philosophy ARCHITECTURE IN EUROPE Mentors: Anthony Roberts LECTURER: HANS IBELINGS

The Students

arch. Magdalina Rajeva m.rajeva@gmail.com

50 arch. Mila Zlatanova

Course: Contemporary Architectural Phenomena I Mentors: Milena Metalkova

The Students

51 arch. Mila Zlatanova

Course: Architecture & Philosophy; Architecture & the Arts Mentors: Anthony Roberts; Georges Heintz

The Students

52 arch. Petar Petrov

Course: History of Modern Architecture in Europe Mentors: Hans Ibelings

The Students

53 arch. Petar Petrov

Course: Architecture & Philosophy Mentors: Anthony Roberts

The Students

54 arch. Polina Kyosseva

Course: History of Modern Architecture in Europe Mentors: Hans Ibelings

The Students

55 arch. Polina Kyosseva

Course: Contemporary Architectural Phenomena I Mentors: Milena Metalkova

The Students

56 arch. Rossitza Bratkova Course: Architecture & the Arts Mentors: Georges Heintz

The Students

57 arch. Rossitza Bratkova Course: Theory of Architecture

STAIRS as rooftop

DAVID CHIPPERFIELD Neues Museum

DAVID CHIPPERFIELD BBC

AEDES STUDIO Business University

NEUTELINGS RIEDIK Sound &VIsion Institute

SOU FUJIMOTO Pavilion

JUNYA ISHIGAMI Family House

SOU FUJIMOTO Open Cafe

ZAHA HADID MAXXI CHRISTIAN KEREZ alternating stairs

endless STAIRS THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE RENDERING VISIBLE: STAIRS ROSSITZA BRATKOVA CHRISTIAN KEREZ Eschenbach school

CHRISTIAN KEREZ Swiss Re

STAIRS as structure

DAVID CHIPPERFIELD Yacht Club

STAIRS wrapped around

AEDES STUDIO Business University

NEUTELING RIEDIK Ontwerp De Kennisberg

STAIRS carved out

STAIRS as defining space

SOU FUJIMOTO Library

STAIRS as piaccas

ALVARO SIZA Tolo house ADALBERTO LIBERA Villa Malaparte

invereted STAIRS

Mentors: Georgi Stanishev

RAFAEL VINOLY Mahler 4 Tower

The Students

NEUTELING RIEDIK MAS

AEDES STUDIO TA vertical gymnasium

58 arch. Stefka Terzieva

Course: Architecture & Philosophy Mentors: Georgi Stanishev

The Students

59 arch. Stefka Terzieva

Course: Architecture & Philosophy Mentors: Georgi Stanishev

The Students

60 CONTACTS:

Daiana Todorova | 101, dipl. UACG, 2012 daiananikolovaeee@gmail.com, +359887409379

Daniil Komitski | 100, dipl. UACG, 2014 daninov@abv.bg, +359885596006

Elina Hadzhieva | 109, dipl. UACG, 2012 elinata@abv.bg, +359895553642

Ivelina Mincheva | 108, dipl. UACG, 2014 iv.mitncheva@yahoo.com, +35988348087

Konstantina Hristova | 107, dipl. UACG, 2012 konstantina_hristova@mail.bg, +359898285381

Magdalina Rajeva | 106, dipl. UACG, 1999 m.rajeva@gmail.com, +359887430647

The Students

Mila Zlatanova | 102, dipl. UACG, 2014 milla.starr@gmail.com, +359883387880

Petar Petrov | 103, dipl. UACG, 2014 petar.y.p.3@gmail.com, +359883499890

Polina Kioseva | 104, dipl. UACG, 2014 koni_lyn@abv.bg, +359877190752

Rossiza Bratkova | 110, dipl.UACG, 1999 bratkova@aedesstudio.com , +359889305250

Stefka Terzieva | 105, dipl. UACG, 2014 sterzieva@yahoo.com, +359889455800

The Students

G N I D A E R M O RO FULL COP Y YOU CAN OF THE BOOKS FIND HE R E.

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Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology I Manfredo Tafuri I 1969 translated for this anthology by StephenSartarell Contemporary architecture’s situation was never more radically theorized than by Manfredo Tafuri. Locating architecture’s intellectual project in the historical matrix of the bourgeois metropolis, Tafuri formulates the entire cycle of modernism (he refuses any periodization of a postmodernism) as a unitary development in which the avantgardes visions of utopia come to be recognized as an idealization of capitalism, a transÞguration of the latter’s rationality into the rationality of autonomous form, architecture’s “plan,” its ideology. Gathering up the threads that link the sociology of Georg Simmel and Max Weber, the critical theory of Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, the structuralism of Louis Althusser and Roland Barthes, and the negative thought of Massimo Cacciari, Tafuri identiÞes what for him is contemporary architecture’s only condition of possibility: to collapse into the very system that assures its demise or retreat into hypnotic solitude. Substitute “bourgeois art” for “the individual,” and the first lines of Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” disclose the same problematic as those of Tafuri’s essay reprinted here: how the subject, the individual or art, seeks to protect its internal integrity and, at the same time, accommodate itself to the shock of metropolitan experience. Simmel: “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”1 Tafuri: “To dispel anxiety by understanding and internalizing its causes: this would seem to be one of the principal ethical imperatives of bourgeois art. It matters little whether the conficts, contradictions, and torments that create anxiety are absorbed into a comprehensive mechanism capable of reconciling those differences, or whether catharsis is achieved through contemplative sublimation.” Following Simmel, Tafuri understands the metropolis as the general form assumed by the process of technical rationalization and objectiÞcation of social relations brought about by the monetary economy. This process dissolves individuality into a flow of weightless impressions, abstracts and levels down all particularity and quality, and restructures subjectivity as reason and calculation. The result, at the level of the individual, is the metropolitan subject, what Simmel called the blase type: the neurasthenic who survives the increase in nervous life by becoming totally intellectualized and indifferent. (“There is perhaps no psychic phenomenon which has been so unconditionally reserved to the metropolis as has the blase attitude, “ wrote Simmel.) The conficted nature of the blase ype fully rejects the metropolis ‘s structure of functional contradictions, contradictions that include a close confrontation with objects and people (shock) and an excessive distance from them (agoraphobia), stimulation as the cure for overstimulation, the ascendancy of the life of the intellect (Verstand or Vergeistigung) only through the life of the nerves (Nervenleben), the emergence of extreme individuality in the social totality and the

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66 simultaneous internalization of the social totality in the individual. All of which is to say that the blase type rejects the metropolis from the perspective of the subject’s negated autonomy. As Tafuri puts it, “The problem now became that of teaching not how one should Ôsuffer’ that shock, but how one should absorb it and internalize it as an inevitable condition of existence.” Like the blase personality, bourgeois art and architecture essentially and contradictorily register the very forces that assure their ineffectuality. Having Þrst been exploded by the shock and distress of the metropolis (expressionism), and then, with a sardonic detachment, taken an inventory of its surrounding remains (dadaism), bourgeois architectural thought must conclude that the subject itself is the only impediment to the smooth development of the fully rationalized technocratic plan that was to become the total system of capital. One had to pass from Edvard Munch’s cathartic Scream to Ludwig Hilberseimer’s metropolitan machine, the ultimate architectural sign of self-liquidation through the autonomy of formal construction, its homeostatic regulation of urban form understood as the ideological training ground for life in the desacralized, distracted, posthumanist world. Tafuri again: To remove the experience of shock from all automatism, to use that experience as the foundation for visual codes and codes of action borrowed from already established characteristics of the capitalist metropolis, rapidity of change and organization, simultaneity of communications, accelerated rhythms of use, eclecticism, to reduce the structure of artistic experience to the status of pure object (an obvious metaphor for the object-commodity), to involve the public, as a unified whole, in a declaredly interclass and therefore antibourgeois ideology: such are the tasks taken on, as a whole, by the avant-gardes of the twentieth century. The problem, then, was to plan the disappearance of the subject, to dissolve architecture into the structure of the metropolis, wherein it turns into pure object. Thus does architectural ideology resolve the contradiction between the internal, subjective resistance to metropolitan shock and the external, structural totality of the production system: this is its utopia. For Tafuri, that utopianism, whatever other aims and local concrete effects it may have, ends up ushering into being the universal, systematic planiÞcation of capitalism, all the while concealing this fundamental function behind the rhetoric of its manifestos and within the purity of its forms. The struggle of architecture to rationalize itself through autonomous formal operations alerts us not to architecture’s success, but to the historical moment of modernity as a limiting condition, one that shuts down certain social functions that architecture had previously performed. Tafuri’s theory takes ideology as its object (it is an ideology of ideologies), and, from his point of view, in modernity all aesthetic ideologies are equivalent if not interchangeable. As such they are equally useless for social production: this is architecture’s destiny. Such a thesis was received at the time of its first publication as the pronouncement of the death of architecture, to which Tafuri responded: What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away fromarchitecture. That is to say, what it has taken away in general fromideological. preÞguration. With this, one is led almost automatically

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to the discovery of what may well be the “drama” of architecture today: that is, to see architecture obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases, to sublime uselessness. To the deceptive attempts to give architecture an ideological dress, I shall always prefer the sincerity of those who have the courage to speak of that silent and outdated “purity”; even if this, too, still harbors an ideological inspiration, pathetic in its anachronism.

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68 The Society of the Spectacle I Guy Debord I 1967 translated by Donald NicholsonSmith *** 47 The falling rate of use value, which is a constant of the capitalist economy, gives rise to a new form of privation within the realm of augmented survival; this is not to say that this realm is emancipated from the old poverty: on the contrary, it requires the vast majority to take part as wage workers in the unending pursuit of its ends a requirement to which, as everyone knows, one must either submit or die. It is the reality of this situation the fact that, even in its most impoverished form (food, shelter), use value has no existence outside the illusory riches of augmented survival that is the real basis for the general acceptance of illusion in the consumption of modern commodities. The real consumer thus becomes a consumer of illusion. The commodity is this illusion, which is in fact real, and the spectacle is its most general form. 48 Use value was formerly implicit in exchange value. In terms of the spectacle’s topsyturvy logic, however, it has to be explicit for the very reason that its own effective existence has been eroded by the overdevelopment of the commodity economy, and that a counterfeit life calls for a pseudojustification. 49 The spectacle is another facet of money, which is the abstract general equivalent of all commodities. But whereas money in its familiar form has dominated society as the representation of universal equivalence, that is, of the exchangeability of diverse goods whose uses are not otherwise compatible, the spectacle in its full development is money’s modern aspect; in the spectacle the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece, as the general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can be and do. The spectacle is money for contemplation only, for here the totality of use has already been bartered for the totality of abstract representation. The spectacle is not just the servant of pseudouse it is already, in itself, the pseudouse of life. 50 With the achievement of a purely economic abundance, the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible, subjecting all reality to an appearance that is in effect that labor’s product. Capital is no longer the invisible center determining the mode of production. As it accumulates, capital spreads out to the periphery, where it assumes the form of tangible objects. Society in its length and breadth becomes capital’s faithful portrait.

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51 The economy’s triumph as an independent power inevitably also spells its doom, for it has unleashed forces that must eventually destroy the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs, now met in the most summary manner, by a ceaseless manufacture of pseudoneeds, all of which come down in the end to just one namely, the pseudoneed for the reign of an autonomous economy to continue. Such an economy irrevocably breaks all ties with authentic needs to the precise degree that it emerges from a social unconscious that was dependent on it without knowing it. “Whatever is conscious wears out. Whatever is unconscious remains unalterable. Once freed, however, surely this too must fall into ruins?” (Freud). 52 By the time society discovers that it is contingent on the economy, the economy has in point of fact become contingent on society. Having grown as a subterranean force until it could emerge sovereign, the economy proceeds to lose its power. Where economic id was, there ego shall be. The subject can only arise out of society that is, out of the struggle that society embodies. The possibility of a subject’s existing depends on the outcome of the class struggle which turns out to be the product and the producer of history’s economic foundation. 53 Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making. Unity and Division Within Appearances A lively new polemic about the concepts “one divides into two” and “two fuse into one” is unfolding on the philosophical front in this country. This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are against the materialist dialectic, a struggle between two conceptions of the world: the proletarian conception and the bourgeois conception. Those who maintain that “one divides into two” is the fundamental law of things are on the side of the materialist dialectic; those who maintain that the fundamental law of things is that “two fuse into one” are against the materialist dialectic. The two sides have drawn a clear line of demarcation between them, and their arguments are diametrically opposed. This polemic is a reflection, on the ideological level, of the acute and complex class struggle taking place in China and in the world. Red Flag, (Peking), 21 September 1964 ***

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70 IMAGE MUSIC TEXT I Roland Barthes I 1997 The press photograph is a message. Considered overall this message is formed by a source of emission, a channel of transmission and a point of reception. The source of emission is the staff of the newspaper, the group of technicians certain of whom take the photo, some of whom choose, compose and treat it, while others, finally, give it a title, a caption and a commentary. The point of reception is the public which reads the paper. As for the channel of transmission, this is the newspaper itself, or, more precisely, a complex of concurrent messages with the photograph as centre and surrounds constituted by the text, the title, the caption, the lay-out and, in a more abstract but no less ‘informative’ way, by the very name of the paper (this name represents a knowledge that can heavily orientate the reading of the message strictly speaking: a photograph can change its meaning as it passes from the very conservative L’Aurore to the communist L’Humanite). These observations are not without their importance for it can readily be seen that in the case of the press photograph the three traditional parts of the message do not call for the same method of investigation. The emission and the reception of the message both lie within the field of a sociology: it is a matter of studying human groups, of defining motives and attitudes, and of trying to link the behaviour of these groups to the social totality of which they are a part. For the message itself, however, the method is inevitably different: whatever the origin and the destination of the message, the photograph is not simply a product or a channel but also an object endowed with a structural autonomy. Without in any way intending to divorce this object from its use, it is necessary to provide for a specific method prior to sociological analysis and which can only be the immanent analysis of the unique structure that a photograph constitutes. Naturally, even from the perspective of a purely immanent analysis, the structure of the photograph is not an isolated structure; it is in communication with at least one other structure, namely the text - title, caption or article - accompanying every press photograph. The totality of the information is thus carried by two different structures (one of which is linguistic). These two structures are co-operative but, since their units are heterogeneous, necessarily remain separate from one another: here (in the text) the substance of the message is made up of words; there (in the photograph) of lines, surfaces, shades. Moreover, the two structures of the message each occupy their own defined spaces, these being contiguous but not ‘homogenized’, as they are for example in the rebus which fuses words and images in a single line of reading. Hence, although a press photograph is never without a written commentary, the analysis must first of all bear on each separate structure; it is only when the study of each structure has been exhausted that it will be possible to understand the manner in which they complement one another. Of the two structures, one is already familiar, that of language (but not, it is true, that of the ‘literature’ formed by the language-use of the newspaper; an enormous amount of work is still to be done in this connection), while almost nothing is known about the other, that of the photograph. What follows will be limited to the definition of the initial difficulties in providing a structural analysis of the photographic message.

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71 Visual Culture I Chris Jenks I 1997

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world within words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.1 Any attempt to establish a social theory of visuality seems beset by paradox. In Western society we have, over time, come to regard sight as providing our immediate access to the external world. But beyond this, and perhaps because of this belief, visual ability has become conflated with cognition, and in a series of very complex ways. On the one hand, vision is lionised among the senses and treated as wholly autonomous, free and even pure. Yet on the other hand, visual symbols are experienced as mundane and necessarily embedded, and their interpretation is regarded as utterly contingent. As Mitchell’s work on imagery informed us, the idea of vision and the idea as vision have a history.2 ‘Idea’ derives from the Greek verb meaning ‘to see’. This lexical etymology reminds us that the way that we think about the way that we think in Western culture is guided by a visual paradigm. Looking, seeing and knowing have become perilously intertwined. Thus the manner in which we have come to understand the concept of an ‘idea’ is deeply bound up with the issues of ‘appearance’, of picture, and of image. As the ‘early’ Wittgenstein stated: ‘A picture is a fact.’ And, ‘A logical picture of facts is a thought.’3 The content and form of things is, we might suggest, to be approached in terms of how they ‘look’. The manifest ‘phono-logo-centrism’ of this book about ‘visualising’ culture attests to this point—we begin from visual forms and talk and theorise and achieve understanding of those forms through mental constructs. Merleau-Ponty addressed this point in terms of the issue of perception: The perceived thing is not an ideal unity in the possession of an intellect…it is rather a totality open to a horizon of an infinite number of perspectival views which blend with one another according to a given style, which defines the object in question. Perception is thus paradoxical. The perceived thing is itself paradoxical; it exists only in so far as someone can perceive it.2 It has been forcefully argued by Jay that modernity’s project was most effectively achieved through the privileging of ‘sight’ and that modern culture has, in turn, elected the visual to the dual status of being both the primary medium for communication and also the sole ingress to our accumulated symbolic treasury.

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The modern world is very much a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;seenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; phenomenon. Sociology however, itself in many senses the emergent discourse of modernity, has been rather neglectful of addressing cultural ocular conventions and has subsequently become somewhat inarticulate in relation to the visual dimension of social relations. 1 J.Berger, Ways of Seeing. London: BBC 1972, p. 7. 2 W.Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1986.

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75 73 Architectural Maria Diamandieva DiamandievaI 2015 I 2015 ArchitecturalCommunication Communication II Maria Basing on this platform to see architecture as a type of communicative medium – means of transmission of signs and images, we can percept the urban environment as an instrument of public dissemination of information and finally – as a perfect mass medium. And also one of the "most powerful"at that according to Dejan Sudjic. (Sudjic, 2005) In his essay "Architecture as mass communication, mass appeal in Architecture" Umberto Eco systematized in several points that analogy and formulated a schematic, but convincing relationship of similarity between the two spheres of communicative activity. These similarities problematizing architecture as a means of mass communication, easily find reasons even when most superficially observed. In detail they look like this: 

“Architectural “discourse” generally aims at mass appeal; it starts with accepted premises, builds upon them well-known or readily acceptable ‘arguments’, and thereby elicits a certain type of consent” (Eco, 1997:195). It is in most respects something we are already familiar with and the differences involved only represent a welcome improvement or variation of some kind. We all have an idea how a beautiful building should look like, like a beautiful woman. And most people feel architects even without a special education.



“Architectural discourse is psychologically persuasive: with a gentle hand (even if one is not aware of this as a form of manipulation) one is promoted to follow the instructions, implicit in an architectural message; functions are not only signified but also prompted and induced, just as certain products and attitudes are prompted through “hidden persuaders”, sexual associations”(Eco, 1997:1996) in commercial advertising. The mechanism is identical, people are driven to behave in a certain way.



“Architectural discourse is experienced inattentively, in the same way in which we experience the discourse of movies and television, the comics or advertising – not that is, in the way in which one is meant to experience the works of art and other more demanding messages, which call for concentration, absorption, whole hearted interest in interpreting the message, interest in the intentions of the addresser” (Eco, 1997:196). This is not what happens perceiving the architectural product. Buildings are always around and people percept them as a background. This mindset is undergoing a transformation with the invasion of the iconic buildings of the last decades which provoke millions of visitors to travel to unknown destinations in order to see them.



“Architectural messages can never be interpreted in an aberrant way, and without the addressee being aware of thereby perverting them. Most of us 18 READING ROOM

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would have some sense of being engaged in a perversion of the object if we are to use the Venus of Milo for erotic purposes or religious vestments as dustcloths, but we use the cover of an elevated roadway for getting out of the rain or hang laundry to dry over a railing and we see no perversion in this” (Eco, 1997:196). Just practicality. 

“Thus architecture fluctuates between being rather coercive, implying that you will live in such and such a way with it, and rather indifferent” (Eco, 1997:196), letting you use it as you feel appropriate.



“Architecture belongs to the realm of everyday life just like pop music and most ready-to wear-clothing, instead of being set apart, distant like”serious“ music and high fashion” (Eco, 1997:196). Although the works of the contemporary stararchitects are exceptional, not easy to decipher at first glance. They are the “fashion kings” today.



“Architecture is a business. It is produced under economic conditions very similar to the ones governing much of mass culture, and in this too differs from other forms of culture. Painters may deal with galleries, and writers with publishers, but for the most part that has to do with their livelihood and need does not have anything to do with what they find themselves painting or writing; the painter can also pursue painting independently, perhaps while making a living in some other way, and the writer can produce works for which there is no market, perhaps with no thought of having them published, but the architect cannot be engaged in the practice of architecture without inserting himself into a given economy and technology and trying to embrace the logic he finds there, even when he would like to contest it” (Eco, 1997:196).

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ARCHITECTURAL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION There are a number of suitable communication theories that can shed light on the contemporary evolution of architecture basing on the essence of communication, moderating the complex ambiguous nature of the former with all its metaphorical implications. Now it seems reasonable to formulate what communication is although practically everybody is sure of his clear understanding of the notion – that it is something so familiar and obvious, which is the case with the attitude towards architecture too. We live among it and we are all have a definite opinion of what it might be. Although the communication studies form a comparatively new theoretical area, the practice of defining communication is so widespread that even about 1976 Dance and Larson, renowned communication theorists, reported over 126 definitions proposed by the relevant literature (Miller, 2002). Apart from this there is a substantial variety of communication models too. One suitable definition, suitable for the specific analytical analogy is: Communication is a deliberate social interaction carried out through the exchange of symbols and signs in varying social contexts. This is an interactive process - symbolic interaction creates an opportunity through the exchange of information to coordinate with each other and as a consequence to affect the environmental balance (Петев, 2012:15 ).

Fig.15. Communication

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The choice of a communication model for this concrete analysis is the scheme of the classical Shannon Weaver Model of information of 1949 (Fig.16). I have selected it from all possible choices – first, due to its popularity and second, due to its universal instrumentality serving optimally the purposes of the particular observation. It is equally simplified and thorough to the most adequate to my purposes degree. Shannon and Weaver were two American researchers – a mathematician and a communication engineer. The model follows a simple process line – starts with an initiator of a message of some kind, the message encoded and directed through a channel and then consequently decoded and received at its final destination – the recipient. This process is as a rule accompanied by possible noise sources blurring the clarity of the information transferred. The principle of this model is basically that all communication is by nature analogous to a phone call, structured by the same factor elements as source, channel, message, noise, etc. The model is a useful stylization of a protean process of converse, deprived of any deceitful complementary overlays.

Fig.16.The Shannon/Weaver mathematical model

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78 Essay I Juhani Pallasmaa I 1996

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Archetypal metaphor in rhetoric: The lightâ&#x20AC;?dark family I Michael Osborn I 1967

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96 Architecture and Authority in Japan I William H.Coaldrake I 1996

The soaring silhouette of Himeji Castle, the graceful roof-lines of the Nara Buddhist temples and the ebullient decorated forms of the Tokugawa mausolea at Nikko are all examples of consummate artistic inspiration harnessed to building technology in the service of authority (Figure 1.1). This book exam-ines Japanese architecture as the visible framework or container of authority and the processes by which authority is contained in and moulded by architectural form. For this purpose ‘authority’ may be defined as encompassing influence and power, dignity and legitimacy, status and hierarchy, religion and belief, and tradition and continuity, all of which play a role, but not all necessarily at the same time or in equal measure. How this varies will become clear as we study specific buildings and the circumstances of their creation. The terms which are used for ‘authority’ in Japanese offer an important key to understanding the relationship between architecture and authority. Ken’i, combining the characters for ‘authority’ and ‘dignity’, and kenryoku, using the characters for ‘authority’ and ‘power’, provide some insight into the meaning of the term. It is also illuminating to study the nomenclature of authority as used in its various historical contexts because these reveal a heavy reliance on architectural reference. From as early as the Nara period (710–794) the emperor or empress has been referred to as the mikado or ‘honourable gateway’, or by the title heika, meaning literally ‘below the palace steps’, the place from which petitions were customarily offered. From the Heian period (794–1185) it became customary for persons of high court rank and political influence to be described as kenmon or ‘gateway of power’ because of the impressive gateways which guarded the entrances to their palaces in Kyoto. In the medieval era the term was extended to refer to the leaders of the powerful new warrior clans.1 Kenmon and heika were adopted from Chinese usage, indicating a similar equation in ancient China between important people and impressive architecture, but mikado appears to have been of Japanese origin. In other words architectural metonymy was a standard way of referring to persons and institutions of authority and influence and this is itself indicative of a powerful association between what we see and what we believe. If seeing is believing, then by implication seeing an impressive building is more than halfway to believing what its creators would have us believe, whether it be the dignity of the law, the all-pervasiveness of government, the inescapability of death. At some time in our lives we have all experienced the profound impact of a

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stately building—the solid masonry mass of a medieval castle or a court-room with panels of darkened oak, or it may have been the soaring vaults of a Gothic cathedral which lifts the spirits as it stuns the senses. As John Ruskin trenchantly observed more than a century ago, ‘great architecture makes us believe what we would not otherwise have believed.2 The atmosphere created by certain buildings may be carefully calculated to elicit a particular reaction from the observer, or it may be the inevitable consequence of the process and materials employed in its construction. Whichever is the case, the interaction between buildings and the people whose lives and activities are contained in them has profound implications for how authority is perceived. The exterior of a symmetrical building may serve as a soothing simile for balance and harmony in a political system. The interior layout of a building can communicate highly specific information about status and responsibility. In Washington and Whitehall, government officials learn to identify authority by office size and location, and to measure influence by the number of windows and amount of sunshine enjoyed in midwinter. In Tokyo, the desk arrangement in the open-plan offices of government ministries and major corporations like Mitsubishi and Sumitomo serves as a mandala from which may be divined the status and responsibilities of their occupants, the lowliest clerk placed next to the entrance door, far removed from the divi-sion chief ensconced near the window and the newspaper rack. Japanese castle towns founded in the sixteenth century were laid out in zones according to these same principles of status, with the castle of the local lord or daimyo at the focus and the mansions of his highest ranking retainers ranged close by. Physical separation from the locus of power was equated with distance in status from the daimyo. Yoshida Kenko (1283–1350), the celebrated poet, court official, monk and philosopher, expressed a universally accepted truth when he wrote that ‘the appearance of a house is in some sort an index to the character of its occupant.’3 Similar sentiments were expounded by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) in the prologue to On the Art of Building in Ten Books, his seminal exposition of Renaissance architectural philosophy:

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Who would not boast of having built something? â&#x20AC;ŚWhen you erect a wall or portico of great elegance and adorn it with a door, columns, or roof, good citizens approve and express joy for their own sake, as well as yours, because they realise that you have used your wealth to increase greatly not only your own honour and glory, but also that of your friends, your descendants, and the whole city.4 Statements of such diverse origins make it obvious that in both Europe and Asia architecture has been a common vehicle for the expression of authority. It serves as an ideal medium for creating convincing metaphors. Institutions espousing democratic principles of government throughout history have chosen the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders of architecture because of their abiding association with the ideals of Classical Antiquity. Gothic arches have reinforced the authority of the Venetian city state and the intellectual authority of great centres of learning such as Oxford, as well as the spiritual meaning of Christianity. A jaded, secular world-view should not blind us to the sacramental significance of a great cathedral and its manifestation of divine presence for the medieval believer. As John James explains: In our day we call the church the House of God, for His presence occupies it. But the thirteenth century was less circumspect. They had the audacity to believe that they were constructing a slice of eternity itself, and the simplicity to trust that Godâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Essence would be made manifest in something they built from the materials found on earth.5 In the Japanese context the same might well have been written of the shrines at Ise, that sublime expression of communion between the gods and this world, or of the Yomeimon, the ethereal gateway to the Tokugawa mausoleum at Nikko. The relationship between architecture and authority, therefore, goes beyond signs and symbols. In manifesting authority, architecture can serve as a potent tool for political or social engineering or for profoundly affecting religious belief. We may readily acknowledge the power that a work of art of ineffable beauty has to move us, but what of the power of a work of architecture of sublime proportions to convince us? A beautiful building can move, inspire, and beguile its beholders with the visual language of architectural form in the same way as a charismatic orator can move, inspire and beguile an audience with words.

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1 The term mikado is used to refer to gateways and, by extension, to the emperor as early as the Man’yoshu, the collection of imperial court poetry compiled in the Nara period. The earliest known reference to kenmon meaning a powerful person rather than an impressive gateway occurs in an order issued from the Dajokan in 902 AD. See further, Kokushi daijiten henshu iinkai, Kokushi daijiten (14 vols), Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1984–1993, s.v., ‘kenmon seike’, ‘heika’; Nihon kokugo daijiten (20 vols), Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1972–1976, s.v. ‘ken’i’, ‘kenryoku’, ‘kenmon’, ‘mikado’, ‘heika’. 2 John Ruskin, Lectures on Art, London: George Allen, 1889, p. 67. 3 Yoshida Kenko (1283–1350), Essays in Idleness (Tsurezure-gusa), in Donald Keene (compiler and ed.) Anthology of Japanese Literature, Rutland, Vermont and Tokyo: Charles E.Tuttle, 1956, p. 233. 4 Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach and Robert Tavernor), Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1988, p. 5. 5 John James, Chartres. The Masons who Built a Legend, London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, p. 85.

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102 100 What is JAPANESE ARCHITECTURE? I Kazuo Nishi & Kazuo Hozumi I 1985

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction I Walter Benjamin I 1936 WALTER BENJAMIN “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) [... ] Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the must profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations—the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film have had on art in its traditional form. Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership. The traces of the first can be revealed only by chemical or physical analyses which it is impossible to perform on a reproduction; changes of ownership are subject to a tradition which must be traced from the situation of the original. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity. Chemical analyses of the patina of a bronze can help to establish this, as does file proof that a given manuscript of the Middle Ages stems from an archive of the fifteenth century. The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and, of course, not only technical— reproducibility. Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. The reason is twofold. First, process reproduction is more independent of the original than manual reproduction. […] Secondly, technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. […] The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, vet the quality of its presence is always depreciated. This holds not only for the art work but also, for instance, for a landscape which passes in review before the spectator in a movie. In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus— namely, its authenticity—is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced. These two processes lead to a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and

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Benjamin, “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

renewal of mankind. Both processes are intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements. Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage . […] * * * IV The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being imbedded in the fabric of tradition. [...] Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is neve r entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter.... An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all- important insight: for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a pho tographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics. * * * VII

The nineteenth-century dispute as to the artistic value of painting versus photography today seems devious and confused. This does not diminish its importance, however; if anything, it underlines it. The dispute was in fact the symptom of a historical transformation the universal impact of which was not realized by either of the rivals. When the age of mechanical reproduction separated art from its basis in cult, the semblance of its autonomy disappeared forever. The resulting change in the function of art transcended the perspective of the century; for a long time it even escaped that of the twentieth century, which experienced the development of the film. * * *

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XI The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. […] In the theater one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shot. Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment- free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. Even more revealing is the comparison of these circumstances, which differ so much from those of the theater, with the situation in painting. Here the question is: How does the cameraman compare with the painter? To answer this we take recourse to an analogy with a surgical operation. The surgeon represents the polar opposite of the magician. The magician heals a sick person by the laying on of hands; the surgeon cuts into the patient's body. The magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself, though he reduces it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient's body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among the organs. In short, in contrast to the magician—who is still hidden in the medical practitioner—the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him. Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art. XII Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest the\ control each other. Again, the comparison with painting is fruitful. A painting has always had an excellent chance to be viewed by one person or by a few. The simultaneous contemplation of paintings by a large public, such as developed in the

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nineteenth century, is an early symptom of the crisis of painting, a crisis which was by no means occasioned exclusively by photography but rather in a relatively independent manner by the appeal of art works to the masses. Painting simply is in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience, as it was possible for architecture at all times, for the epic poem in the past, and for the movie today. Although this circumstance in itself should not lead one to conclusions about the social role of painting, it does constitute a serious threat as soon as painting, under special conditions and, as it were, against its nature, is confronted directly by the masses. In the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the eighteenth century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneous]y, but by graduated and hierarchized mediation. The change that has come about is an expression of the particular conflict in which painting was implicated by the mechanical reproducibility of paintings. Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism. * * * XIV One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. The extravagances and crudities of art which thus appear, particularly in the so-called decadent epochs, actually arise from the nucleus of its richest historical energies. In recent years, such barbarisms were abundant in Dadaism. It is only now that its impulse becomes discernible: Dadaism attempted to create by pictorial—and literary—means the effects which the public today seeks in the film. Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. Dadaism did so to the extent that it sacrificed the market values which are so characteristic of the film in favor of higher ambitions though of course it was not conscious of such intentions as here described. The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of' their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion. The studied degradation of their material was not the least of their means to achieve this uselessness. Their poems are “word salad” containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language. The same is true of their paintings, on which they mounted buttons and tickets. What they intended and achieved was a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations, which they branded as reproductions with the very means of production. Before a painting of Arp's or a poem by August Stratum it is impossible to take time for contemplation and evaluation as one would before a canvas of Derain's or a poem by Rilke. In the decline of middle-class society, contemplation became a school for asocial behavior it was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost: to outrage the public. From an alluring appearance or persuasive structure of sound the work of art of the Dadaists became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to

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him, thus acquiring a tactile quality. It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. Let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation; before it the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame he cannot do so. No sooner has his eve grasped a scene than it is already changed. It cannot be arrested. Duhamel, who detests the film and knows nothing of its significance, though something of its structure, notes this circumstance as follows: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” The spectator's process of association in view- of these images is indeed interrupted by their constant, sudden change. This constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. By means of its technical structure, the film has taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the moral shock effect. XV The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. Yet some people have launched spirited attacks against precisely this superficial aspect. Among these, Duhamel has expressed himself in the most radical manner. What he objects to most is the kind of participation which the movie elicits from the masses. Duhamel calls the movie “a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries . . . , a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence . . . , which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a "star" in Los Angeles.” Clearly, this is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace. The question remains whether it provides a platform for the analysis of the film. A closer look is needed here. Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive. Buildings have been man's companions since primeval times. Many art forms ha ve developed and perished. Tragedy begins with the Greeks, is extinguished with them, and after centuries its `rules' only are revived. The epic poem, which had its origin in the youth of nations, expires in Europe at the end of the Renaissance. Panel painting is a creation of the Middle Ages, and nothing guarantees its uninterrupted existence. But the human need for shelter is lasting. Architecture has never been idle. Its history is more ancient than that of any other art, and its claim to being a living force has significance in every attempt to comprehend the relationship of the masses to art. Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception—or rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building.

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On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit. As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception. The latter, too, occurs much less through rapt attention than by noticing the object in incidental fashion. This mode of appropriation, developed with reference to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation. The distracted person, too, can form habits. More, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to whi ch new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film snakes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent- minded one. EPILOGUE The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today's technical resources while maintaining the property system. [. ..] [... ] The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society. The horrible features of imperialistic warfare are attributable to the discrepancy between the tremendous means of production and their inadequate utilization in the process of production—in other words, to unemployment and the lack of markets. Imperialistic war is a rebellion of technology which collects, in the form of “human material,” the claims to which society has denied its natural material. Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches, instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.

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Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-Garde I K. Michael Hays I 2010

DESIRE

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ujpot!cz!bsdijufdut!pg!uif!dsjujdbm!ejtubodf!pg!uifjs!qsbdujdf!gspn! efhsbefe!mjgf!cfdpnf!sfevoebou!boe!usjwjbmj{fe!jo!bewbodf/!Uijt! usbotnvubujpo!pg!uif!dpme-!bmm.!fodpnqbttjoh!cmvfqsjou!pg!b!npef! pg!qspevdujpo!joup!uif!qvsf!gpsnbmj{bujpo!pg!bftuifujd!ufdiojrvf! jt!bsdijufduvsfÖt!eftujoz-!jut!Óqmbo/Ô!Boe!ibwjoh!jefoujßfe!uibu-! Ubgvsj!bttfsut!uif!joupmfsbcmf!cvu!joftdbqbcmf!dpoejujpot!pg!qpttj. cjmjuz!gps!dpoufnqpsbsz!bsdijufduvsf;!up!dpmmbqtf!joup!uif!wfsz! tztufn!uibu!dpoefnot!bsdijufduvsf!up!qvsf!!nfbot.!foe!jotusvnfo. ubmjuz-!ps!up!sfusfbu!joup!izqopujd!tpmjuvef-!sfdphoj{joh!uibu!uifsf! jt!op!mpohfs!b!offe!gps!bsdijufduvsf!bu!bmm/!Uivt!ÓÕuif!ejtfodiboufe! !bwbou.!hbsef-Ö!dpnqmfufmz!bctpscfe!jo!fyqmpsjoh!gspn!uif!dpngpsu! pg!jut!dibsnjoh!cpvepjst!uif!qspgvoejujft!pg!uif!qijmptpqiz!pg!uif! vofyqfdufe-!xsjuft!epxo-!pwfs!boe!pwfs!bhbjo-!jut!pxo!sfbdujpot! voefs!uif!joàvfodf!pg!esvht!qsvefoumz!benjojtufsfe/Ô6 Uif!Ópwfs.!boe.!pwfs.!bhbjoÔ!joejdunfou!pg!uif!qptuxbs!!bwbou.!! hbsefÒuif!fnquz-!ovncjoh!sfqfujujpo!pg!gpsnt!mfgu!pwfs!gspn! uif!!qsftvnfe.!bvuifoujd!ijtupsjdbm!!bwbou.!hbsefÒcfdbnf!tpnf. uijoh!pg!b!mfgujtu!dsjujdbm!uspqf!bgufs!Qfufs!C shfsÖt!Uifpsz!pg!uif! Bwbou.!Hbsef!)Hfsnbo-!2:85<!Fohmjti-!2:95*/!C shfsÖt!efsphbupsz! ufsn!ofp.!bwbou.!hbsef!uifsfgpsf!tvhhftut!jutfmg!bt!bo!bqqspqsjbuf! bqqfmmbujpo!gps!uif!xpsl!J!bn!joufsftufe!jo!ifsf/!Dfsubjomz!uif! sfqfujujpo!pg!uif!gpsnbm!fmfnfout!boe!pqfsbujpot!pg!Mf!Dpscvtjfs-! ef!Tujkm-!boe!dpotusvdujwjtn!jt!uif!nptu!jnnfejbufmz!bqqbsfou! dibsbdufsjtujd! pg! uif! fyqfsjnfout! pg! Fjtfonbo-! Ifkevl-! boe! Utdivnj-!jg!opu!Spttj-!xipn!pof!njhiu!ofwfsuifmftt!uijol!pg!bt!b! ofp.!Fomjhiufonfou.!bwbou.!hbsejtuf/!C shfsÖt!dbufhpsj{bujpo!tffnt! joftdbqbcmf;!ÓUif!ofp.!bwbou.!hbsef!jotujuvujpobmj{ft!uif!!bwbou.! !hbsef!bt!bsu!boe!uivt!ofhbuft!hfovjofmz!!bwbou.!hbsejtuf!joufoujpot/! Uijt! jt! usvf! joefqfoefoumz! pg! uif! dpotdjpvtoftt! bsujtut! ibwf! pg! uifjs!bdujwjuz-!b!dpotdjpvtoftt!uibu!nbz!qfsgfdumz!xfmm!cf!!bwbou.!! hbsejtuf/!/!/!/! Ofp.!bwbou.!hbsejtuf! bsu! jt! bvupopnpvt! bsu! jo! uif! gvmm!tfotf!pg!uif!ufsn-!xijdi!nfbot!uibu!ju!ofhbuft!uif!!bwbou.!hbsejtuf! joufoujpo!pg!sfuvsojoh!bsu!up!uif!qsbyjt!pg!mjgf/Ô7!

READING ROOM

118 116

Uif!ofp.!oftt!pg!uijt!xpsl!jt!nbef!bmm!uif!npsf!dpnqfmmjoh!jo! uif!tqfdjßd!nfejvn!pg!bsdijufduvsf!cz!uif!gbdu!uibu!opu!pomz!Ubgvsj! cvu!bmtp!uif!npsf!dpotfswbujwf!Dpmjo!Spxf!dbnf!up!bmm!cvu!uif!tbnf! dpodmvtjpo!fbsmjfs!boe!joefqfoefoumz!pg!C shfs/!Bddpsejoh!up! Spxf-!jg!uif!ijtupsjdbm!!bwbou.!hbsef!tibsfe!dpnnpo!jefpmphjdbm! spput!xjui!Nbsyjtn-!ju!bmtp!tibsfe!b!Nbsyjtu!qijmptpqijdbm!bncjujpo! up!joufsgvtf!gpsn!boe!xpseÒwbsjpvtmz!bsujdvmbufe!bt!fyqsfttjpo! boe!dpoufou-!tztufn!boe!dpodfqu-!qsbdujdf!boe!uifpsz-!cvjmejoh! boe!qpmjujdt-!ps!)jo!C shfsÖt!ufsnt*!bsu!boe!mjgf/!Uibu!uif!gvtjpo! vmujnbufmz!gbjmfe!nbz!cf!buusjcvufe!up!b!tijgu!jo!uif!ufsnt!jo!xijdi! uif!fyqfsjfodf!pg!npefsojuz!jutfmg!ibe!up!cf!dpodfjwfe!jo!qptuxbs! bsdijufduvsfÒb!tijgu!gspn!npefsojuz!gvmmz!efwfmpqfe!bt!uif!fttfo. ujbm!eftjsfe!hpbm!pg!bsdijufduvsf!up!npefsojuz!bt!bsdijufduvsfÖt! mjnjujoh!dpoejujpo/!Jo!ijt!jouspevdujpo!up!Gjwf!Bsdijufdut-!Spxf! bttfsut!xibu!tffnt!up!cf!uif!pomz!qpttjcmf!dipjdf!gps!uif!bewbodfe! bsdijufduvsf!pg!uif!ujnf;!beifsf!up!uif!gpsnt-!uif!Óqiztjrvf.!àftiÔ! pg!uif!!bwbou.!hbsef-!boe!sfmfhbuf!uif!Ónpsbmf.!xpseÔ!up!jodboubujpo/! Gps!jg!uif!mbuufs!ibt!cffo!sfevdfe!up!Ób!dpotufmmbujpo!pg!ftdbqjtu! nzuit-Ô!uif!qiztjrvf!tujmm!Óqpttftt\ft^!bo!fmprvfodf!boe!b!àfyjcjmjuz! xijdi!dpoujovft!opx!up!cf!bt!pwfsxifmnjoh!bt!ju!xbt!uifo/Ô!Uif! nfbtvsf!pg!bsdijufduvsf!mjft!op!mpohfs!jo!uif!fgßdbdz!xjui!xijdi! ju!qsfßhvsft!b!ofx!boe!cfuufs!xpsme!cvu!sbuifs!jo!jut!bdijfwfnfou! xjuijo!uif!dpoujohfou!dpoejujpot!pg!uif!npefso-!pg!nffujoh!uif! efnboet! pg! uif! àfti-! bt! ju! xfsf-! pg! fmfwbujoh! gpsn! bt! jut! pxo!! mbohvbhf!xjuipvu!sfgfsfodf!up!fyufsobm!tfoujnfout-!sbujpobmft-!ps! joeffe!tpdjbm!wjtjpot;!ÓUif!hsfbu!nfsju!pg!xibu!gpmmpxt!mjft!jo!uif! gbdu!uibu!jut!bvuipst!bsf!opu!fopsnpvtmz!tfmg.!efmvefe!bt!up!uif! jnnfejbuf!qpttjcjmjuz!pg!boz!wjpmfou!ps!tveefo!bsdijufduvsbm!ps! tpdjbm!nvubujpo/Ô!Uif!qmbtujd!boe!tqbujbm!jowfoujpot!pg!dvcjtn! boe!dpotusvdujwjtn-!pg!Hjvtfqqf!Ufssbhoj-!Bepmg!Mppt-!Njft!wbo! efs!Spif-!boe!Mf!Dpscvtjfs-!sfnbjo!uif!tuboebse!tqfdjßd!up!uif! jefpmphjdbmmz!joejggfsfou!nfejvn!pg!bsdijufduvsf!jutfmg/!Uif!bsdij. ufdut!pg!uif!qptuxbs!!bwbou.!hbsef!bsf!Ócfmmjhfsfoumz!tfdpoe!iboe-Ô!

EFTJSF! 5

READING ROOM

119 117

Tdbnp{{jt!up!npefsojtnÖt!Qbmmbejp-!b!tfsjft!pg!tjnvmbdsb/!Zfu!ju! jt!pomz!uispvhi!uif!bddfqubodf!pg!uibu!tuboebse!boe!uif!sfqfuj. ujpo!pg!kvtu!uiptf!tjnvmbdsb!uibu!bsdijufdutÖ!btqjsbujpot!dbo!cf! joufmmjhjcmf/8! Uijt!jt!uif!tupsz-!uifo-!po!xijdi!Ubgvsj!boe!Spxf!bhsff;!Jo!b! ßstu!npnfou-!uif!sfwpmvujpobsz!!bwbou.!hbseft!pg!uif!fbsmz!uxfoujfui! dfouvsz!tvshjdbmmz!qspcf!uif!npefso!djuz!jutfmgÒuif!tpdjpqtzdip. mphjdbm! nfuspqpmjt! pg! Hfpsh! Tjnnfm-! Hfpsh! Mvl dt-! boe! Xbmufs! CfokbnjoÒjo! psefs! up! jefoujgz! uif! qbuufsot! pg! jut! fttfoujbm! dibsbdufsjtujdt-!xijdi!dbo!uifo!cf!dpowfsufe!joup!bsujtujd!gpsn<! jo!UbgvsjÖt!xpset;! Up!vtf!uibu!fyqfsjfodf!bt!uif!gpvoebujpo!gps!wjtvbm!dpeft! boe! dpeft! pg! bdujpo! cpsspxfe! gspn! bmsfbez! ftubcmjtife! dibsbdufsjtujdt!pg!uif!dbqjubmjtu!nfuspqpmjtÒsbqjejuz!pg! dibohf!boe!pshboj{bujpo-!tjnvmubofjuz!pg!dpnnvojdb. ujpot-!bddfmfsbufe!sizuint!pg!vtf-!fdmfdujdjtnÒup!sfevdf! uif!tusvduvsf!pg!bsujtujd!fyqfsjfodf!up!uif!tubuvt!pg!qvsf! pckfdu!)bo!pcwjpvt!nfubqips!gps!uif!!pckfdu.!dpnnpejuz*-! up!jowpmwf!uif!qvcmjd-!bt!b!vojßfe!xipmf-!jo!b!efdmbsfemz! joufsdmbtt!boe!uifsfgpsf!boujcpvshfpjt!jefpmphz;!tvdi!bsf! uif!ubtlt!ublfo!po-!bt!b!xipmf-!cz!uif!!bwbou.!hbseft!pg!uif! uxfoujfui!dfouvsz/9! Jo!b!tfdpoe!npnfou-!b!ejnfotjpo!pg!bdijfwfe!bvupopnz!pg!gpsn! bmmpxt! bsdijufduvsf! up! tuboe! bhbjotu! uif! wfsz! tpdjbm! psefs! xjui! xijdi!ju!jt!dpnqmjdju-!zfu!uif!tbnf!dpnqmjdjuz!sbdlt!bsdijufduvsf! joup!bo!bhpojtujd!qptjujpoÒdpncbujwf-!tusjwjoh!up!qspevdf!fggfdut! uibu!bsf!pg!uif!tztufn!zfu!bhbjotu!ju/!Cvu!uif!mbohvbhf!pg!gpsnt!uivt! ejtdpwfsfeÒtjnqmf!hfpnfusjdbm!wpmvnft-!tfsjbmj{fe!qpjout!boe! mjoft-!ejbhpobm!wfdupst-!qmboft!jo!wfsujdbm!mbzfst!boe!ipsj{poubm! tubdlt-!gsbnft!boe!hsjetÒublft!po!bo!bctpmvuf!bvupopnz!xjui! uif!sftvmu!uibu-!jo!b!ßobm!npnfou-!uif!bsdijufduvsbm!ofp.!bwbou.!

READING ROOM

120 118

hbsef!dbo!qffm!uif!mbohvbhf!pgg!gspn!uif!sfbm-!sfqfbujoh!uif!tbnf! bmsfbez!sfjßfe!gpsnt!cvu!usbotgpsnjoh!uifn!joup!b!tfmg.!fodmptfe-! upubmmz!tusvduvsfe!tztufn!pg!tjhot/!Uif!sfqfujujpo!pg!uif!ofp.!bwbou. !hbsef!jt!uibu!Ópg!tpnfpof!xip!jt!bxbsf!uibu!if!jt!dpnnjuujoh!b! eftqfsbuf!bdujpo!xiptf!pomz!kvtujßdbujpo!mjft!jo!jutfmg/!Uif!xpset! pg!uifjs!wpdbcvmbsz-!hbuifsfe!gspn!uif!mvobs!xbtufmboe!sfnbjo. joh!bgufs!uif!tveefo!dpoàbhsbujpo!pg!uifjs!hsboe!jmmvtjpot-!mjf! qsfdbsjpvtmz!po!uibu!tmboujoh!tvsgbdf!uibu!tfqbsbuft!uif!xpsme!pg! sfbmjuz!gspn!uif!tpmjqtjtn!uibu!dpnqmfufmz!fodmptft!uif!epnbjo!pg! mbohvbhf/Ô:!Jo!uijt!wjfx-!jo!uif!bsdijufduvsf!pg!uif!bhf!pg!ejtdpvstf! xf!xjuoftt!uif!Ógsffjoh!pg!bsdijufduvsbm!ejtdpvstf!gspn!bmm!dpoubdu! xjui!uif!sfbm/Ô21 Uif!mbdl!pg!b!tpdjbm!offe!gps!bsdijufduvsf<!bsdijufduvsfÖt!upubm! mptt!pg!uif!sfbm;!uifsf!jt!qmfouz!pg!fwjefodf!jo!uif!xpslt!boe!xsju. joht!pg!uif!bsdijufdut!jo!rvftujpo!up!tvqqpsu!UbgvsjÖt!dpodmvtjpo/! Cvu!b!csjfg!fydvstvt!xjmm!tvhhftu!b!npsf!ejbmfdujdbm!qptjujpo!uibo! fjuifs!Ubgvsj!ps!Spxf!bmmpxt/!Spttj!boe!Fjtfonbo-!gps!fybnqmf-! bsf!fyqmjdjumz!boe!ftqfdjbmmz!tfotjujwf!up!uif!fggfdut!pg!sfjßdbujpo-! cvu!uifjs!xpsl!jt!opu!kvtu!b!wjdujn!pg!jut!fggfdut<!uifz!dsjujdbmmz! jotdsjcf!uiftf!fggfdut/!Jo!SpttjÖt!uzqpmphjdbm!uijoljoh-!uif!sfmfou. mftt!gsbhnfoubujpo-!bupnj{bujpo-!boe!efqmfujpo!pg!uif!bsdijufduvsbm! fmfnfout!tffn!up!gpmmpx!qsfdjtfmz!uif!qspdftt!uibu!Mvl dt!dbmmfe! sfjßdbujpo!)Wfsejohmjdivoh*/!Boe!zfu!uzqpmphz!)wfsz!mjlf!uif!sfbmjtn! sfdpnnfoefe!cz!Mvl dt*-!jowpmwft!uif!qpxfs!up!uijol!hfofsbmmz-! up!ublf!vq!uif!gsbhnfout!boe!pshboj{f!uifn!joup!hspvqt!boe!up! sfdphoj{f!qspdfttft-!ufoefodjft-!boe!rvbmjujft!xifsf!sfjßdbujpo! zjfmet!pomz!mjgfmftt!rvboujujft/!Xibu!jt!npsf-!gps!Mvl dt!uif!gpsn! pg!fyqfsjfodf!uibu!nptu!dpodsfufmz!sfqsftfout!uif!gpsdf!pg!sfjß. dbujpo! jt! dsjtjtÒuibu! qpjou! xifsf-! bt! jo! UbgvsjÖt! bobmztjt-! uif! nofnpojd!gvodujpo!pg!bsdijufduvsf!jt!kvtu!bcpvu!up!gbjm-!xifsf!uif! nfnpsz!cbolt!ibwf!cfdpnf!tp!dpnqbsunfoubmj{fe!boe!bsje!uibu! uifz!xjmm!ipme!opuijoh!puifs!uibo!uif!nptu!!cmfbdife.!pvu!nbufsjbm/! Bu!uijt!tubhf-!uif!dphojujwf!wpdbujpo!pg!bsdijufduvsf!jt!up!sfàfdu!ps!

EFTJSF! 7

READING ROOM

121 119

up!dbvtf!sfàfdujpo!po!uif!qspdfttft!cfijoe!tvdi!dsjtjt;!dsjtjt!jt! npevmbufe!joup!dsjujrvf/ Xf!dbo!cfhjo!up!sftupsf!uif!tpdjbm!boe!ijtupsjdbm!nfbojoh!pg! uzqf!nbljohÒboe!joeffe!pg!uif!mbshfs!qspkfdu!voefs!dpotjefs. bujpo!uibu!uzqpmphz!ifmqt!jobvhvsbufÒcz!qptjujoh!ju!bt!bo!bctusbd. ujpo!gspn!b!tqfdjßd!ijtupsjdbm!npnfou-!b!dsjtjt-!fwfo!b!npnfou! pg!usbvnb/!Gps!uif!wfsz!dpoejujpot!po!xijdi!uif!uzqpmphz!qspkfdu! efqfoetÒobnfmz-!uif!dpoujovjoh!usbejujpo!pg!uif!Fvspqfbo!djuz! bt!epdvnfoufe!jo!SpttjÖt!MÖbsdijufuuvsb!efmmb!djuu !)2:77*Òibe-! cz! uif! ujnf! pg! uijt! uifpsj{bujpo-! bmsfbez! ejtbqqfbsfe! bt! b! dpo. ufnqpsbofpvt! pckfdu! pg! fyqfsjfodf-! hjwjoh! xbz! up! uif! djuz! pg! jogpsnbujpo-!bewfsujtfnfou-!boe!dpotvnqujpo/!Cz!2:82!Efojtf! Tdpuu! Cspxo! )kvtu! up! hjwf! pof! fybnqmf*! ibe! qspqptfe! uibu! uif! dpnnvojdbujpo!bdsptt!tqbdf!pg!uif!tpdjbm!wbmvft!pg!hspvqt!ibe! tvqfstfefe!uif!npsf!dpowfoujpobm!tpsut!pg!offe!gps!bsdijufduvsf/! ÓMbt!Wfhbt-!Mpt!Bohfmft-!Mfwjuupxo-!uif!txjohjoh!tjohmft!po!uif! Xftuifjnfs!Tusjq-!hpmg!sftpsut-!cpbujoh!dpnnvojujft-!Dp.!pq!Djuz-!! uif!sftjefoujbm!cbdlhspvoet!up!tpbq!pqfsbt-!UW!dpnnfsdjbmt!boe! nbtt!nbh!bet-!cjmmcpbset-!boe!Spvuf!77!bsf!tpvsdft!gps!b!dibohjoh! bsdijufduvsbm!tfotjcjmjuz-Ô!xsjuft!Tdpuu!Cspxo/!ÓJo!gbdu-!tqbdf!jt! opu!uif!nptu!jnqpsubou!dpotujuvfou!pg!tvcvscbo!gpsn/!Dpnnv. ojdbujpo!bdsptt!tqbdf!jt!npsf!jnqpsubou-!boe!ju!sfrvjsft!b!tzncpmjd! boe!b!ujnf!fmfnfou!jo!jut!eftdsjqujwf!tztufnt/Ô22! Xf!offe!opu!sfifbstf!uif!xbzt!jo!xijdi!nbtt!nfejb!dibohfe! uif!wfsz!obuvsf!pg!uif!fyqfsjfodf!pg!qvcmjd!tqbdf!evsjoh!uijt!ujnf-! fydfqu!up!sfdbmm!uibu!bewfsujtjoh!nfejb!kpjofe!xjui!uif!fyufotjwf! efwfmpqnfou!pg!cvjmejoht!po!uif!pvutljsut!pg!uif!djuz!boe!uif!ofx! ejtusjcvujpo!pg!tfswjdft!up!tvcvscbo!dpnnfsdjbm!{poft-!nbljoh! ju! npsf! ejgßdvmu! up! dpouspm! uif! rvbmjuz! pg! vscbo! tqbdf! uispvhi! usbejujpobm!ufdupojd!boe!uzqpmphjdbm!nfbot/!Nfttbhf!sfdfqujpo! dibmmfohfe!uif!ubdujmf!fyqfsjfodf!pg!pckfdut-!boe!wpjdf-!bt!ju!xfsf-! cfdbnf!ufobou!mjfv!pg!uif!gvmm!cpez<!jogpsnbujpo!opx!tusvduvsfe! tqbdf!boe!qsfqbsfe!ju!gps!fyqfsjfodf/!Tdpuu!Cspxo-!Spcfsu!Wfouvsj-!

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Sofia’s Transitional Urbanscapes I Alexander Kiossev I 2009

The Screen of the City: Sofia’s Transitional Urbanscapes, 1989 - 2007 Alexander Kiossev In: Moraru, Christian 2009. Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination, Barnes and Nobles pp. 71 -101

This text summarizes the results of a collective, artistic and research project called “The Visual Seminar.”i Dedicated to the urban sights of Sofia in the transitional period, the Seminar was initiated because certain groups of Bulgarian intellectuals had the feeling that between 1989 and 2000 Sofia had become “unbearable” for the eye and citizen were obligated to fight the “visual pollution” brought about by the overflow of advertisements and recently built commercial buildings. Today, about 8 years later, the results of this “visual activism” seem rather humble and ambivalent—the project determined only minor changes in Sofia’s new, capitalistic appearance, and even the premises of the initial activism were seriously questioned. Yet, the author believes that analytic insights of the Seminar are worthwhile as they offer a strong starting point for discussions of general issues about contemporary cities in transition and about their visual culture. This text is a personal interpretation of the project results; its main idea is informed by visual sociology and urban anthropologyii and is based on the assumption that social processes and social conflicts in the city do not occur invisibly but have a clear visual coefficient. The problem is that we need to know where to direct our gaze and how to decipher what we see, how to analyse and synthesize urban visual data. My method views the city space as a “screen” upon which social processes have different projections. The latter are certainly not limited to the direct production of images,

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92 advertisements, or even to the visualization typical of “the society of the spectacle,” although Sofia, not unlike other East European cities undergoing the transition to market economy, has experienced an incredible boom in this respect. The assumption is that every urban practice— habitation, street behavior, shopping, neighbourhood contacts, transport, construction works, signs, advertisements, architecture, and everything else that makes up the multifaceted life of a city—has its own visual potential. The resulting panorama is a conglomerate of heterogeneous images and urbanscapes, which the “screen” of the city tends to represent as a homogeneous visual field for consumption.iii I will try to analyse the screen-like homogeneity of this heterogeneity, that is, Sofia’s image-production in the basic sense of the word, the cityscreen itselfiv and the various forms of visual consumption as embodied in the numerous aspects of everyday behaviours, subcultures, political initiatives, inhabiting places and styles, mass urban processes, and institutional conflicts, for all of them make a contribution to Sofia’s intricate visual mosaic. Let us start with a discussion of two different regimes of urban visuality, both of which will be used here as ideal types. The first is the panoptic modern city-machine striving towards rationality, functionality, and transparent, total governmentality. This type transforms the constructive principlev into a real structure of the city while using it as its emblem reproduced across an entire spectrum of different urban images from the straight streets and visible infrastructure to the simple geometric and functional architecture, the calculated traffic, and further to the images of progress and the symbols of centralized, political and cultural power concentrated in the city center. In this regime, the politics of invisibility is logically directed at that which eludes central, modernized power; the urban authorities begin to imprison, intern and drive out of the city everything that cannot be made rational, functional, and normal (the only remaining challenge being those few urban “heterotopias” that reflect, provoke, and even revert this spatial and visual ordervi).

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93 The other regime, that of the postmodern megapolis,vii stems from the loss of this modern sort of visibility. No longer the city demiurge and all-pervasive, scrutinizing “ray,” the abstract, panopticalviii Eye of power that observes, builds, and governs urban space according to rational principles breaks up into countless eyes, into an extremely diverse and often “irrational” mass of individuals and perspectives: passers-by, private individuals, flaneurs, dealers, entrepreneurs, advertisers, tramps, children, ethnic minorities, etcix. These scattered subjects are both producers and victims of the city’s visual aggression. They are swamped by heterogeneous, fragmentised images; they are overburdened with visual information and tempted by advertisements, scandalised by erotic and shocking images. In short, they live in a “vortex of representations.”x Thus, the city loses its rational wholenessxi and its “over-view” type of visibility, blurs its own boundaries, becomes porous, an “overexposed” cityxii open to the global informational and visual flowsxiii. In this second regime, the politics of invisibility acquires paradoxical features. Urban space continues to produce traditional, “shady” heterotopias, “shameful” niches, and ghettoes within itself, but it no longer hides them directly, in other words, it does not make them invisible by traditional modern techniques such as internment, imprisonment, segregation, or standardization. Paradoxically, it produces invisibility through excessive visibility. “Deviant” individuals, groups, and places are pushed in the background, “overshadowed,” and substituted by their own picturesque simulations constantly produced by the image industryxiv: they are hidden, made imperceptible behind urban phantasms and media clichés about them—sensational news, scandalous rumors—in brief, by a whole image production following the genres of action movies and horror stories.xv This politics of “sensational invisibility” also applies to the city’s rational infrastructure: the latter is no longer interesting as a perfectly functioning, constructive principle, presenting itself publicly. In a way similar to the image simulation of deviancy, the

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94 infrastructure is concealed behind the urban phobias and comes to the fore only in its catastrophic aspect as a threat to the life of the city. Instead of the images of the working urban structure, the late-capitalist image factory prefers to display the spectacle of earthquakes, terrorist attacks, epidemic diseases, and alien invasions, along with the entire spectrum of destruction or malfunctioning of the urban infrastructure,xvi which is another way of saying that the once rational visual regime has now become irrational by displaying fears, claustrophobia, and forbidden passions. The sale and consumption of ‘trans-rational’xvii images has substituted rational panopticism; the staged visibility of subconscious emotions and pleasure has replaced the ceremonious emblems of demiurgic reason.

1. Sofia as a Visual Problem

I have limited the discussion to these two abstract models in order to ask: where between them does the visual production of present-day Sofia take place? I will use the ideal types as coordinate systems through which I will look at the post-totalitarian city and search for differences rather than “deviations” from the standard paradigms. The above ideal types are only cognitive tools instead of the “norms” the Bulgarian capital must necessarily follow. That is to say, the models will be used only as instruments for an analysis of the specificity of Sofia’s urbanscape. Bulgaria’s capital underwent a difficult yet rapid transformation between 1989 and 2007. It started as a semi-modern, semi-totalitarian city, went through a short phase (19891991/1992) as a carnivalesque stage of the “velvet revolution” and landed in a sort of semiglobal, semi-“Balkanized” condition. The materials collected and the analyses carried out by the Seminar demonstrate how contemporary Sofia remains a peculiar hybrid of a modern, totalitarian, and postmodern city offering the eye a historically dynamic, “forbidden” mix of

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95 different visual regimes. I will describe here what these regimes of visibility/invisibility were, and still are, and how they are connected to the social, political, and economic realities of the city. Media theorists, to begin with, classify images and visual conflicts into several zones: excessive visibility, normal visibility, low visibility, invisibility, and deliberate concealment.xviii The visual regimes of the modern city and of the postmodern megapolis discussed above can relate differently to these zones, thus producing a complex set of visibleinvisible effects; the politically active city agents, in turn, can use these regimes consciously, and in fact they sometimes do develop policies in relation to them. We will see, Sofia shows that the zones are shaped by interrelationships of mutual tension and intertwinement and that the various visual regimes too interface and are even capable of “shadowing” each other. Consequently, because they intersect in unexpected ways—for example, at the core of excessive visibility lie blind spots and some phenomena become visible only in comparisons, contrasts, and visual tensions—it is difficult to make hard-and-fast distinctions among such regimes.

2. Conspicuous Sofia: The Zone of the Screaming Images

These are series of images by which diverse urban subjects as well as the city in its problematic entirety want to represent themselves, things the potential observer must not miss. They insist on being the focal point of the field of vision, at the center of the city of its stage; in their conspicuousness, such images make the normal, inconspicuous urban sights difficult to see or even invisible for, in order to be seen, those sights now require a redirection of attention, a special focus, and a change in viewers’ perceptive Gestalt. Yet, these aggressive sets of images transform themselves simultaneously with every historical transformation of the city. In Sofia’s case, their dynamics follow the rapid phases of the 1989-

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96 2007 transition, moving as they do from a visual regime dominated by the central perspective of totalitarian power to the visions celebrating political liberalism to the regime of limitless market visuality. In fact, Sofia’s urban structure, architecture, and sights were not typically totalitarian even during communism, when the city remained a peculiar historical hybrid. It certainly was not transformed by communism to the extent that Moscow was, for instance; it did not need to be rebuilt after the Second World War, like Warsaw; it was not as horribly cut up by its leaders’ megalomaniac visions as Ceauşescu’s Bucharest; and it did not have such emblematic “proletarian” streets as Karl Marx Allee in East Berlin. As in the years before communism, the city has always had something Balkanian, familiar, premodern, and, in this sense, anti-totalitarian, about it. Far from the purity of the modern “panopticism” and Benjamin’s “visibility of the constructive principle,” Sofia has always been a city hard to govern centrally. In the period between the 1878 Liberation and the Second World War, the capital of the newly liberated Bulgaria grew rather chaotically, without a clear urban development plan,xix keeping its Ottoman neighbourhoods as basic urban units, with occasional campaigns of uncoordinated construction.xx Between 1878 and the Second World War, Sofia proved its modernity less through a centralised, functionally urbanistic rationality than through symbolic de-Orientalization, i.e., through emblematic buildings and other forms of its will to catch up with the civilizational achievements of urbanism.xxi Modern infrastructure was built in a similar way. Historians have shown that, “progressive” as this infrastructure was viewed, it took a long time to build and remained financially problematic. Water, power, and transport facilities were unevenly distributed, insufficiently functional, illmaintained due to lack of specialists, and, in fact, poorly utilized by the different groups of Sofia residents, some of which were reluctant to change their pre-modern habits.xxii While preserving historical strata dating back to Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman times, Sofia’s

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97 relatively narrow streets—for a long time, only those in the central part of the city were paved—eventually filled with buildings in various styles, some designed by foreign architects and others by Bulgarians educated abroad (it was not until 1942 that the first Bulgarian architecture school was created), who favored, in their work, approaches such as National Romanticism, Sofia Sezession, pre-war Modernism, or “mature,” post-war Modernism. But the “representative” buildings and districts were next door to the spontaneously built, styleless, poor, and chaotic neighbourhoods of Yuchbounar and Konyovitsa, and refugee neighbourhoods with village-like (rather than town-like) houses complete with yards and gardens (such as those between the Lagera and Pavlovo quarters). Socialism would later build the Stalinist center of the city, the heavy industrial periphery, and the prefab satellite towns Mladost and Lyulin, integrating large rural populations with their premodern mentality into the urban environment. In the first couple of years after 1989, Sofia, as many other cities in Eastern Europe, was an arena of protest demonstrations and rallies. The latter’s slogans called for democracy and a multiparty system while speaking to the kind of protesting public behavior Vaclav Havel called “living in truth” (during the first years of the postcommunist transition, Sofia had even its small “city of truth,” erected by protestors living in tents in the front of the Presidency building).xxiii Apart from and irrespective of their specific political goals, the protesters involuntarily produced a sight whose aesthetics and dynamics were designed to shake the totalitarian aura of the city. The velvet revolution of 1989 was oblivious to the complexity of Sofia, a city, as noted earlier, with many historical faces: by way of parodic reversal, the revolution made visible only that layer of the city that had a distinctly communist symbolic meaning. Everything that was associated with communist power and was emanating a feeling of impersonal collectivism, historical pomp, and optimism was to be subjected to public travesties and parodies. The official architecture of power was objectified in the

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98 Stalinist Baroque whose central symmetry and heavy columns dominated the city center (the Largo), in the political aesthetics of the Party House (the Communist Party headquarters)xxiv that stood face-to-face with the monument to Lenin (who, in his turn, had his gaze firmly fixed on the future), in the mummy-like aura of the Mausoleum assembling the symbolic order of communism,xxv in the countless statues of communist leader Georgi Dimitrov, his acolytes, and Second World War partisans, in the memorial plates, decorations, changeable and unchangeable slogans on billboards,xxvi in the names of streets and boulevards, and so forth. The spontaneous, colourful crowds of different people who not only protested but also rejoiced, sang, and celebrated their own boldness, who behaved (walked, jumped, danced, shouted) any way they wanted, staging their own freedom and “lack of restraint” with goodhumored, playful irony were in contrast, even in conflict, with the entire system of spatialized symbols of power in communist Sofia. People moved, assembled, and dispersed precisely in such areas emblematic of the communist regime but without conforming to these sites’ power perspective. The protesters’ behavior placed within ironic quotation marks, as it were, the city squares and tribunes from which the Party eye used to gaze onto the political processions and Party members saluted the “united” proletarian masses. The various hues of the oppositional blue (the colour of the newly formed opposition Union of Democratic Forces) and human diversity of every sort and kind drowned the fading red of leftover flags and five-pointed stars. At will, the demonstrators would block traffic, march with lit candles through places that used to be venues of tank and missile parades, surround and symbolically desecrate official public buildings. The new public actions were conducted “in the back” (or, in Bakhtinian terms, against the dolnica, the lower body) of the government bastions—the demonstrations had already moved the new, spiritual center of the city behind the Party House and the National Assembly, facing the silhouette of Sofia’s Orthodox cathedral.xxvii

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99 Thus, the celebrating city made visible its new political life or, more precisely, a contradictory moment in this life: the carnival of the velvet revolution. The source, producer, and consumer of images was a paradoxical and theatrical subject: the People-made-up-offree-individuals, (collective and dispersed into single individuals at the same time), who staged and feted itself in its newly won sovereignty. Resorting to the visual, verbal, and spatial codes of the city, the People acted out the Drama of the Two Modernities: the victory of the liberal, non-violent, and individualistic Modernity over the collective and totalitarian one.xxviii This political urban spectacle still contained a panoptic moment: the visual production of rallies and demonstrations presupposed a unified urban “stage” and a unified Eye of power that may be attacked, humiliated, and scandalized. That is why this visual regime was hybrid and transient; through scandal and carnival, it made visible for a short while precisely the totalitarian features of otherwise non-totalitarian Sofia. This public, political, and playful visuality was slowly marginalized and then obliterated completely by another wave of aggressive, conspicuous urban images: the commercial ones. Pictures of lively, civic spontaneity were thus replaced by those of spontaneous consumption, so much so that commodities supplanted the political actors of democracy. Sofia seemed to be turning successfully into a megapolis: fighting for communal places and the public gaze were not protesting and dancing popular masses but a chaotic multitude of private, aggressive advertisements, billboards, logos, signs, banners, avalanches of posters, flyers, specially disguised facades, expensive shop windows, erotic pictures behind which were all sorts of social subjects: firms, holding companies, patriotic circles, small enterprises, Buddhist associations, politicians, global corporations, youth organizations, family cooperatives, individuals, and so on. This was no longer a city where a central power could “engineer” and discipline social space from its panoptic center but where divergent lives and disparate economic initiatives intersected confusingly in a Babel of private

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100 perspectives and interests. The “mirror” of “the people,” the latter’s central, visually governing perspective had broken to pieces; the time of individuals had come. Sofia’s variegated stage no longer showed a consistent plot and dramatic unity, but dispersion, conflicting multiplicity and diversity, enacting as it did centrifugal entrepreneurship and commercial aggression.xxix But, as usual, behind this chaos stood difficult-to-see structures.xxx Some of them were unspecific, global, and megapolitan, while others were characteristically Sofian, telling of what was typical to this city—in the postmodern megapolis, global commercial imagery exerts unobstructed power, occupying the conspicuous center of urban visuality; unlike this imagery are several monumental sites and foci developed in Sofia over the last seventeen years.

3. Globalization and Neighborhoods

Global was the consumer utopia that served as a framework for the chaotic abundance of commercial images. The sea of advertisements that swamped Sofia was a celebration of a new global lifestyle of oversupply and of happy and unobstructed, universally accessible consumption represented both as a dream and as a norm. The real power of this “dreamed-of norm” in Sofia is borne out by the disappearance of this norm’s Other: the glossy, advertising visual layer stages only the heroes and narratives of consumption; absent from it are not only images of misery and poverty but also of labour and production, of industry and technologies, which were so typical to the socialist imagery of socialism just a decade ago. In addition, the new imagery—albeit for seductive rather than disciplining reasons—prefers panoptic places. Commercial pictures came to dominate all possible sites of visibility: the centre of the city, the intersections, the spaces along highways, the blind walls visible from a distance, the rooftops, in sum, all places from which the environment could be controlled and manipulated.

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The Making of Urban Japan I Andre Sorensen I 2002

Introduction

During the course of the twentieth century Japan transformed itself from a largely rural country with approximately 15 per cent of its population living in cities, to one of the most urbanised large countries in the world with close to 80 per cent urban population. Superlatives are routinely employed in descriptions of Japanese economic growth and urban development. Of the large developed countries, urbanisation was fastest, and its resulting urban areas biggest. The Tokyo area alone holds over a quarter of the national population, and is now one of the largest urban regions in the world with a population approaching 40 million. Perhaps the most extraordinary manifestation of Japanese urbanisation is the enormous urban industrial belt along the Pacific coastline of the main island of Honshu. Stretching from Tokyo in the east to northern Kyushu in the west, the Tokaido megalopolis, as it is sometimes referred to, houses the overwhelming majority of the Japanese population and productive capacity. Here live some twothirds of the population, on only 23 per cent of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s land. Here also, where some 85 per cent of the GDP is produced, are concentrated the bulk of the countryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fixed assets, the main research and development labs, international communications facilities and global financial centres. The worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best and most heavily travelled rail system knits the megalopolis together, allowing fast, safe travel between almost any two points within the area. Even with this efficient rail system, since the late 1960s increasing motorisation has led to increasing road congestion, and the building of vast networks of elevated expressways that snake through the metropolitan areas. Whatever their other demerits, some of which are discussed in Chapter 6, these expressways provide by far the best vantage point from which to experience the Japanese megalopolis. Who can forget arriving in central Tokyo for the first time on the Narita International Airport bus, and after a seemingly interminable drive through the suburbs, winding between gleaming skyscrapers of innumerable strange shapes and sizes on the upper deck of four or five levels of elevated roadway, gazing at busy office workers on the tenth or twelfth floors? Here the sheer scale of megalopolitan urbanisation hits one, not for the last time. Japanese cities display a fascinating mix of similarities with and differences from cities in other developed countries with similar levels of wealth and urbanisation. At first sight they seem surprisingly similar to Western cities, particularly those of the United States. Larger buildings are almost universally new constructions in steel-frame reinforced concrete and plate glass; there is everywhere the surge of late-model cars and trucks, a proliferation of gas stations, chain convenience stores, shopping malls, category-killer

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Introduction

warehouse stores, fast-food restaurants with globally familiar names and logos, and colourful plastic signage and advertising; and the commercial strips along major suburban roads seem like they could be in suburbs almost anywhere. This sort of urban landscape is often somewhat of a surprise and disappointment for first-time travellers from the West, who come so far hoping to find something a little less familiar, a little more exotic. This reaction is perhaps understandable, and has a long history. Seidensticker (1991: 60), for example, notes that even in the nineteenth century there were complaints about the Americanisation of Tokyo. The processes of Westernisation continued and even accelerated through the twentieth century. Little of the historic Japan which features so prominently in coffee-table photo books on the country is immediately evident in modern Japanese cities. A striking feature of Japanese cities is thus their very visible Westernisation, and particularly the American influence on built form. The observer of Japanese cities, however, gradually becomes aware that behind their surface similarity, in many respects they really are very different from those in other developed countries, and that any superficial similarities serve merely to disguise profound structural differences. Perhaps the most significant of these are two related aspects characteristic of Japanese urbanisation: the intense intermixture of differing land uses, and the extensive areas of unplanned, haphazard urban development. Mixed land use is so prevalent in Japanese cities that it may be hard to believe the government

Figure 0.1 The â&#x20AC;&#x153;busy placeâ&#x20AC;? (sakariba) of Ueno is one Japanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most enduring central city entertainment and shopping districts, and was already famous in the Tokugawa period for its theatres and nightlife. Photo A. Sorensen 2001.

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Introduction 3 implemented urban land use zoning in all major cities in 1919, before such zoning became popular in the US in the 1920s. As explained in Chapters 3 and 6, Japanese zoning systems have consistently been rather inclusive, with most zones allowing a wide range of different uses. Many credit the permissive nature of this zoning with the continuing vitality of Japanese cities, as a great deal of spontaneous urban change is allowed to occur, and a broad intermixture of land uses is the norm. Developments of all sizes routinely include retail, office and residential components, and urban intensification in central city areas has encouraged the creation of crowded, noisy and often flamboyant urban centres. This urban energy is visibly amplified by the lack of controls over outdoor signs, so that the exteriors of buildings are often plastered with all manner of cheerful flashing neon, and the dense overhead wirescape adds to the confusion, as thickets of cables seem to shoot in all directions and at many different levels. The crowds of well-dressed shoppers and businessmen rushing to and from the main stations, the stacks of tiny restaurants in skinny buildings 10 stories high, the enormous congregations of shops and offices all linked together by immaculate subway systems underground and gleaming elevated expressways overhead, all affirm the urban vitality of modern Japan. High population densities and the intensive mixture of differing land uses in central city neighbourhoods, combined with stable, tight-knit urban communities to form vital, lively city areas that exemplify Jane Jacobsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (1961) conception of healthy city life.

Figure 0.2 Suburban highway retail strips such as this one outside Sanda just north of Kobe are now one of the dominant urban forms in Japan. Photo A. Sorensen 2001.

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Clearly Jacobsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; â&#x20AC;&#x153;eyes on the streetâ&#x20AC;? approach to urban safety applies just as forcefully in urban Japan today as it did in Greenwich Village in Manhattan 40 years ago. Even in the largest Japanese metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and Osaka, a few steps away from the busy main streets are found quiet residential neighbourhoods with a variety of small shops flanking narrow streets. The human scale of these districts, their efficient use of space, the ubiquitous potted plants on the curb in front of the houses, and the effective restraints on car traffic on the extremely narrow roads all contribute to some of the most positive aspects of Japanese urbanisation: the very widespread existence of healthy and charming urban neighbourhoods, even in the largest cities. As this book shows, the formal urban planning system has played only a minor role in the creation and maintenance of these inner city urban areas. They have instead been shaped by the legacy of the pre-modern street layouts, and by unplanned urbanisation in the modern period, and are a product of enduring social structures and housing preferences. It is thus not sufficient in the Japanese case to equate planned areas with good urban areas, and unplanned areas with urban problems. In fact, some of the best urban environments are those which have seen a minimum of planning intervention, and some of the worst are those which have been comprehensively planned. This is not, however, meant to suggest that unplanned urbanisation in Japan is without its own problems. Over half the area of Japanese metropolises has developed as unplanned, haphazard sprawl. The extent of unplanned development is most striking on the urban fringe, where the weakness of land development controls and the mixture of land uses that contribute so positively to the urban vitality of central city areas contribute more problematically to this decidedly less attractive aspect of Japanese urbanisation. Here loopholes in the system have continued to allow unplanned, unserviced development. Clusters of tiny houses mix with large and small factories, big-box retail warehouses with large parking lots, high-rise apartment blocks, auto wreckers, noisy scrap metal recyclers and industrial waste incinerators, all interspersed with remnants of rice paddy, fields of cabbages and tree nurseries that continue actively to be cultivated. Haphazard development on the urban fringe has also meant that local governments in the suburbs have fallen further and further behind in infrastructure provision, and crucial public infrastructure such as roads, sewer systems, parks, and other community facilities remain unbuilt. Vast areas in the suburbs are being built in sporadic fashion and new road systems planned in the 1960s remain fragmentary, with most suburban traffic funnelled into narrow roads which are congested at all hours. Worse, allowing such scattered development along rural lanes means that land prices quickly rise to fully urban levels, making it increasingly difficult to buy land for roads and parks, while private building of lanes and alleyways creates confusing road systems without sidewalks or overall design and many dead ends. Rural areas become gradually built over, and any chance of using natural features such as streams or forested hillsides to create an attractive urban environment is lost. With even sidewalks, sewers or small parks and playlots virtually unattainable, larger-scale urban amenities such as interconnected green networks, bicycle paths, and even decent road networks are out of reach in most cases (Sorensen 2001b). As Ishida (1991a) has argued, Japanese urban areas have long shown this dual structure of planned and unplanned areas. The planned areas are found primarily in the

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main commercial centres near main transportation infrastructure, in large-scale industrial developments, large-scale public housing developments and suburban “new towns”. Unplanned areas are virtually everywhere else, and include most of the sprawling mixed residential-commercial-industrial districts on the urban fringe. As unplanned growth on the fringe gradually is incorporated into the urban fabric, the characteristic pattern of Japanese cities – bits of planned development surrounded by large areas of incremental, unplanned development – is repeated. This provides quite a contrast with the other developed countries, where a major priority of planning since the end of the nineteenth century has been to create effective systems to control and plan for new development on the urban fringe. In such countries it is left to local governments to regulate new development on the urban fringe in order to ensure adequate public space is gained for roads and parks, that developers pay for their own infrastructure costs so that those costs are not shouldered by local taxpayers, and to prevent undue speculation and land price inflation. Such efforts, it goes without saying, have not always been successful, but at least represent the accepted wisdom, and in many cases this approach has arguably prevented the worst problems. One consequence is that despite its wealth, Japan has seen real difficulty in translating economic success into a high quality of life for its people, as we are reminded by the frequent complaints about “rich Japan, poor Japanese”. Two important reasons are the high cost of land and housing, and the poor urban environments that shape daily life in urban Japan. Urban planning decisions have had far-reaching impacts on the quality of life of the urban residents, who now constitute more than three quarters of the population. The quality and affordability of housing, accessibility to work, schools, and services, and the quality of local environments, have all been greatly affected by past and present planning decisions. Although during the last 30 years an enormous body of literature on Japanese economic development, business practices, politics, history, literature, and anthropology has accumulated, there is as yet little on Japanese urbanisation, and less on Japanese urban planning. And while as this book will show, Japanese city planning, by commission and by omission, has had profound impacts on Japanese society, and in particular on quality of life in Japanese cities, there has been little research on the development of city planning in Japan and its impact on Japanese urbanisation. This lack of research is unfortunate, although in a sense it is perhaps not so surprising, as Japan is famous for its economic growth, not its city planning. Yet Japan presents an interesting and important case of rapid urbanisation that should be better understood. During the last quarter century it has been the second largest economy in the world, and one of the most urbanised and densely populated of the large developed countries. At the same time, however, it has quite different traditions of land ownership, historical urban development and governance than the other developed countries. Further, while as in other fields Japanese planners have constantly borrowed from Western ideas and techniques, in implementation these have been transformed, and combined with others of local invention have helped to create a planning system that is different both in conception and in execution than in any of the other developed countries. In a variety of ways the outcomes of urbanisation and urban planning have been very different, and not infrequently, it is precisely these differences that are most interesting. This distinctiveness makes Japan an important case

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6 Introduction study of urbanisation and its management, as it gives us a useful perspective on some of the assumptions and values implicit in planning approaches in the West which have shared cultural, historical and economic legacies, as well as linked city planning and urban histories. Understanding Japanese urbanisation and planning provides insights into some of the major urban and regional planning issues faced by the other developed countries, because here very different approaches to familiar urban problems have been attempted, and very different outcomes experienced. The Japanese case is also interesting because it is revealing of some of the planning dilemmas particular to an East Asian country experiencing rapid economic and urban growth. While it is not necessary to suggest that any particular aspect of the Japanese experience will be seen in the other rapidly developing countries in Asia, it seems clear that the Japanese experience will hold many lessons, both positive and negative, about urbanisation and urban planning issues in the Asian context. The fact that Japan has been the first to undergo the transformation from rapid urban industrial growth to a post-industrial information and consumer society suggests that at the very least the case should be carefully examined by policy-makers in the Asian countries where the vast majority of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s urbanisation is expected to occur during the first half of the twenty-first century. It is hoped, therefore, that this volume will contribute to bringing the Japanese experience of urbanisation and urban planning into the international discussion of urban studies, urban planning and planning history which has hitherto focused primarily on the European and North American experience, with a largely separate literature devoted to the issues of urbanisation in the developing world. Although no systematic comparison of the Japanese case with other countries is attempted, such comparison is implicit in the work. As a Canadian who studied urban planning thought in London, my understanding of Japanese urbanism can only be that of an outsider who bases his analysis of Japanese urbanisation on a prior study of North American and European urban and planning issues. The position of outsider brings both advantages and disadvantages in the study of cities. The main disadvantage, of course, is that cities are inherently such complex phenomena, influenced by such a great diversity of factors, that it is always possible that the foreign researchersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; questions may be irrelevant, their information lacking, or their interpretation wrong. The main advantage is that the experience of foreignness and newness in studying a style of urbanisation different from oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own prompts a different set of questions, and possibly a different set of explanations than those of native researchers for whom their own cities are simply the norm. It can only be hoped that the present work leans more toward the latter than the former. It is also worth noting that the Japanese experience of modern urban industrial growth and urban planning has itself always been comparative. Ever since the modernising drive to catch up and surpass the West was launched following the Meiji restoration in 1868, Japanese urban planners, government officials, and indeed the Japanese people themselves have conceived of their own experience in relation to Western models, and have implicitly and explicitly modelled their policies on Western examples, especially those of the leading industrial nations of Britain, Germany, France and the US. As in other areas of public and private enterprise Japanese city planning efforts that drew heavily on foreign models produced often dramatically different

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outcomes, and in studying Japanese urban planning it is often useful to understand both the original version, and the intentions of the borrowers. Where appropriate, therefore, comparisons are made between Western planning policies and their Japanese versions. In historical studies there is always a tendency to want to line up all the facts into an orderly progression leading towards the present. This is possibly especially the case in city planning, which began the twentieth century with such a strong normative mission: to right the wrongs of the squalid industrial metropolis and to progressively develop a practice that could not only prevent the further decline of urban civilisation, but could also build healthy, beautiful, and equitable cities with good housing for all. Even until the mid-1960s a dominant goal of the planning profession was the gradual improvement of techniques and methods to achieve rational development control and the rational city. Few would argue today that such a future is either possible or even desirable. While the basic goals of healthy, productive and equitable cities may remain, the idea that there might be gradual and steady progress in the development of techniques and methods to achieve them no longer seems tenable. Current practice is characterised by diversity, pluralism and pragmatism, and above all the recognition that planning is inevitably a highly political activity that can never be perfected in the manner of a technical procedure, but must always be negotiated, and will always be contested by a diverse range of interests. There is thus little point in producing a tidy account of an orderly progress towards the present. Instead it seems useful to pose questions about why urban planning and urban areas have developed in one way here, and differently elsewhere. Why did Japanese cities develop in the ways they did? Why, given the fact that Japan is one of the richest countries in the world, is the quality of life and of the environment in urban areas still so poor? Why is housing still so small and so expensive? Why were more than 35 per cent of all households still not serviced with sewer connections at the turn of the century? Why is so much haphazard unserviced development still allowed when the main goal of the planning system for the last 30 years has been its control? In a country which has had democratically elected local governments since the end of the nineteenth century, why have local electorates not pressed for better local government services? Why has there been so little support or pressure for better urban planning and more effective urban management at the local government level? Why has Japanese urban policy developed the way it has, and where have the key decisions affecting urban change been made? A variety of explanations have been put forward to explain Japanese urban problems in the post-war period. The most common is that destruction in the Second World War, rapid economic growth and migration to the metropolitan areas created severe housing shortages and difficult city planning problems. There can be no doubt that the war was a major factor inhibiting the development of city planning in Japan. After the war the task of reconstruction was huge, and the shortage of housing amounted to millions of units. Later, rapid economic growth and urbanisation put enormous stress on available resources, making it difficult for governments to provide adequate urban infrastructure. This explanation alone is not adequate to explain the subsequent development of Japanese cities, however. As Calder (1988: 390â&#x20AC;&#x201C;3) has pointed out, West Germany was in a similar state at the end of the war with almost all its major cities in ruins, the economy in tatters, and a huge influx of refugees from the east. West Germany (before reunification) also had similar overall population densities to those of Japan, and a

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major urban industrial agglomeration in the north west. Yet at the same time as experiencing rapid economic growth, albeit not as rapid as Japan, German cities were rebuilt carefully and to a generally high standard. Other factors than post-war destruction and rapid economic growth must be found if we are to fully explain Japanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s severe urban problems in the post-war period. In the course of researching and writing this book it emerged that one of the most distinctive factors influencing the development of urban planning in Japan has been the virtual absence of civil society in the formation of city planning policy and practice, or in creating images of the good city and good urban life. Civil society can be defined as the set of institutions, organisations and behaviours situated between the state, the business world and the family. This includes voluntary and non-profit organisations, philanthropic institutions, professional organisations, social and political movements, and the public sphere (see Hall 1995; Keane 1998; Salamon and Anheier 1997). Although the concept of civil society has recently come into vogue amongst social theorists, the phenomenon is not a new one. The enormously influential international city planning movement that developed at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth century is one of the prime examples of civil society actors and institutions creating a radically new policy agenda. Public health and hygiene activists, professional associations of architects, surveyors and engineers, non-profit housing advocates, settlement workers, anti-slum campaigners, friendly societies, labour and cooperative movements and a range of others provided a vocal constituency which backed many of the campaigns for greater government intervention and regulation of what had hitherto been relatively unregulated processes of urban development (see Gorsky 1998; Rodgers 1998; Sutcliffe 1981). Yet in Japan civil society remained, for a number of reasons outlined in this book, extremely weak, to the extent that it has recently been suggested that Japan only saw the birth or rebirth of its civil society during the 1990s (Iokibe 1999; Kawashima 2001; Vosse 1999; Yamamoto 1999b). While other factors, including the urban legacy of Tokugawa Japan, the particularly successful traditional urban patterns, and the persistent prioritisation by policy-makers on the drive to catch up with and overtake the industrial powers of the West over the quality of life of the Japanese people have also played an important role, it is fair to say that one of the most distinctive features of Japanese urbanisation and urban planning in comparison with the other developed countries has been the extremely weak role of civil society in the evolution of city planning policy. This situation seems to be changing quite rapidly in recent years, and it is significant that local citizen-initiated environmental improvement efforts have been credited with playing a central role in the recent rebirth of Japanese civil society (Amenomori 1997; Iokibe 1999; Yoshida 1999). In the last 5 to 10 years urban environmental issues have begun to play a much greater role in Japanese society, and a range of grassroots movements to work towards better urban planning and local environmental improvement processes has emerged, as shown in Chapters 8 and 9. As Japan moves towards a declining population and an ageing society, the issues of urban amenity and quality of life appear to be taking on a degree of importance that they were not awarded earlier. Major changes are also taking place in Japanese urban areas and the planning system is being reformed and redesigned to accommodate new needs and desires. More than ever, city planning is at the centre of a number of crucial social and political changes,

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and understanding the city planning system, its development and its impacts on urban growth and urban life is essential to an understanding of Japanese society and its present and future challenges. In attempting to answer the questions posed above, this book traces the patterns of Japanese urban growth from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century, describing the development of urban planning during that period, and attempting to explain why the planning system developed the way it did and how it has influenced patterns of urban growth. This historical approach was found to be essential because although many of the formal elements of Japanese planning system are similar to and even copied from Western models, they frequently tend to function rather differently in practice. Even to describe the present planning system accurately the historical context of its development is useful. To understand why it developed the way it did, understanding the history is essential. The approach of the book is essentially chronological, beginning with an outline of the urban legacies of the early modern period. During the Tokugawa period, which lasted from 1600 to 1868 when the Tokugawa regime was overthrown, the urban population grew and a sophisticated national urban system and economy developed. A number of very large cities developed, including Edo (later Tokyo), which was in the eighteenth century probably the largest city in the world with over a million inhabitants, and also Osaka and Kyoto at almost half a million, and several medium sized cities of around 100,000. With rapid modernisation in the second half of the nineteenth century, the first city planning efforts were dominated by the issue of how to modernise the very large urban areas inherited from the previous era. Chapter 1 reviews the forces leading to the development of Japan’s sophisticated feudal urban system, the typical urban forms of castle towns, and the main urban legacies of the feudal period. Three chapters on the pre-Second World War period follow. Chapter 2 describes the major changes of the Meiji period from 1868 to 1912, during which a modern centralised national government, modern industries, railways, and institutions were established. In a surprising range of different policy areas, including city planning, the choices made during the Meiji period have had enduring effects on later Japanese development. Some of these are outlined here. The period between the end of Meiji and the end of the Second World War is covered in two overlapping chapters. Chapter 3 looks at the rapid urban industrial growth of the first decades of the twentieth century, and at the increasing urban and social problems that led to the passage of Japan’s first modern planning legislation in 1919. Chapter 4 describes the new planning system in detail, and traces its implementation in the period up to the end of the war. The post-war occupation and reconstruction years and the period of rapid economic and urban growth of the 1950s and 1960s are the subject of Chapter 5. Here the focus is on the concentration of population in the metropolitan belt between Tokyo and Osaka, and the consequent creation of the great urban industrial sprawl sometimes referred to as the Tokaido megalopolis. This vast linear conurbation is the central fact of post-war Japanese urbanisation, and virtually all subsequent planning efforts have been motivated by attempts to manage the urban challenges posed by the megalopolis. Chapter 6 traces the environmental crisis which was a consequence of rapid and unrestrained economic growth and unregulated urban expansion, the development of significant opposition to the government’s “growth at any cost” policies, and the

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development and passage of a new City Planning Law in 1968 and revision of the Building Standard Law in 1970. From here the discussion breaks naturally into decades. Chapter 7 discusses the implementation of the new city planning system during the 1970s. Chapter 8 relates the period of conservative resurgence and deregulation from 1980 through to the crash of the bubble economy in early 1990, and Chapter 9 examines the recent development of a renewed energy for improved city planning during the 1990s with the creation of the Master Plan system in 1992, the development of machizukuri practices, and the emergence of historical preservation as a major part of Japanese city planning. Chapter 10 attempts a summary of the major characteristics of Japanese urbanisation and planning, discussing what lessons may be learned from Japanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s distinctive patterns of urbanisation and planning practices, and speculating on some major future issues facing Japanese cities.

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If anything is described by an architectural plan, it is the nature of human relationships, since the elements whose trace it records—walls, doors, windows and stairs—are employed first to divide and then selectively to re-unite inhabited space. —Robin Evans The big problem is then how to preserve the sense of floating in a space with no exterior. —Toyo Ito Le Corbusier famously wrote that creation in architecture is a “patient search.”1 Among architects working today, only Toyo Ito approaches Le Corbusier’s restless creativity. On at least three occasions over his long career, he has designed buildings that simply rewrite the rules of the game—definitive statements of

architectural principles that become new points of reference for other architects. Although he is a thoughtful writer, his contributions are not discursive. His buildings do not exemplify concepts enunciated elsewhere: it is the power of the built artifacts themselves that provokes our reassessment. They establish a state of play between before and after. It is simply impossible, for example, to think about domestic space in the same way after his 1976 White U house, arguably the most radical house of the twentieth century. His Sendai Mediatheque (designed in 1995 and completed in 2000) culminated a decade-long preoccupation with the effects of emergent digital technologies on architecture, which he has called “the body of electronic modernism.”2 Finally, his 2007 Tama Art University Library simultaneously sums up a decade of structural experimentation as it

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demolishes many of our conventional notions about the space of the library. Although the delicacy and restraint of his buildings feels innately Japanese, one of the astonishing things about Itoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work is the way in which he constantly refers back to Western classical traditions, taking them apart from the inside out. The filigree of arches at the Tama Art Library, for example, would seem to recall the proto-historicist work of the 1960s, when late-modern architects such as Philip Johnson and Edward Durrell Stone sought to soften the polemical force of

the new through classical reference. The result at the time was paper-thin and decorative, a kind of classical appliquĂŠ over a lightweight modern framework. But the arches at the Tama Art Library are not a quotation of classical form: they are devices for activating space. They vary in size, and their profiles are not classically half-round but elliptical. They have nothing to do with the postmodernist use of the arch as an applied sign. Instead they register an interpenetrating spatial form, which owes something to the classical idea of the library but can no longer be represented as a solidly enclosed space. The gently convex perimeter of Itoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s library, for example, suggests space beyond the limits of the building. Destabilized by the sloping floor, the visitor registers the library as an elastic void tracing out the vectors of the program, mirroring the dynamic, interlinked quality of information today. The moving spectator perceives

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the number of elements. In Ito’s proposal, the hollow columns perform multiple functions, allowing him to reduce the number of elements. Paradoxically, this enables him to recuperate the elemental dialogue of the horizontal space of occupation with its vertical support, this time with the idea of “support” enlarged to include more than mere structure. At Sendai, Ito brilliantly demonstrated the capacity of simple rules to produce complex architectural and social effects. Architecture, as much as it is a tectonic support, is also the creation of a localized artificial atmosphere that connects

in turn to larger information networks. It is in these more ephemeral aspects of building that architecture can reshape social interaction today. The Mediatheque suggests that, in an increasingly dematerialized social milieu, the physical space of encounter that architecture provides still has meaning. It is the architecture itself

that deserves rethinking under these new conditions. Unlike Reyner Banham, who in the mid-1960s imagined the house reduced to a plastic bubble inflated by airconditioning output, Ito does not turn away from architecture or dissolve its physicality but instead revises and enlarges its capacity as a social technology under modern conditions of information drift. 4 If the Sendai Mediatheque is, in both its architectural form and its social ambition, outward-looking, the White U is its opposite: an intimate, inward-looking space. Not only is the architecture organized around an inner court with a nearly blank street wall, the program itself is deeply private. It is impossible not to invoke the history of the house, designed and built for Ito’s sister and her two young children, whose husband and father had recently succumbed to cancer. Enveloped over time by vines, it was finally demolished in 1997. Only an architecture that is honest and subtle in its architectural effects could adequately address such an extreme personal narrative. Here, Ito’s architectural precision does not disappoint. He describes how subtle architectural shifts can revise the way a form is perceived: “As I displaced the entrance from the symmetry axis toward the edge, the interior of the building lost that hard aspect of the room conferred by linearity and the U became a white ring.”5 The courtyard, due in part

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the interpenetrating profiles in parallax, more Richard Serra than Robert Venturi. 3 Finally, the dimension and material quality of the arches erases their traditional representational function. Constructed from steel plates encased in concrete, they are impossibly thin: they could never operate in compression, as a classical arch does. Your eye tells you that they are almost too thin to stand by themselves. In fact, the arched form is almost accidental, the result of carving out the void space rather than a reference to the arch’s supporting function. With this array of devices, Ito does not so much attack or confront the classical tradition as accept and redirect its persistent impulse toward stability and the representation of function. This pattern, of an extended career marked by the periodic appearance of paradigm-shifting projects, suggests

that just when you think Ito has exhausted a certain line of inquiry, he is capable of surprising everyone (including himself). The rest of the discipline spends ten years catching up. This is the measure of Ito’s creative intelligence. Despite his fascination with digital media and new social formations, Ito, who has been building for more than forty years, knows that architecture is a slow medium with a very specific social agency. It is structurally tied to institutions that are themselves conservative and slow to change. Nevertheless, for Ito it remains both possible and necessary to renew architecture through this long cycle of critique, reassessment, and invention. Of the three buildings discussed here, it is the Sendai Mediatheque that has, perhaps deservedly, received the most attention. Here Ito definitively reconfigured the slab and column organization of Le Corbusier’s Dom-ino-type form. For the first time, the Mediatheque takes into account not just structure but all of architecture’s other imperatives: movement, fire safety, vertical transport, and mechanical and environmental engineering. Up to this point, the conventional approach had been to address each new need with a new system, thus multiplying

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space toward the empty courtyard and its floor of black soil. The plan organization turns its back on the street. The asp-like half-round, which would normally terminate an axis of movement, becomes the front instead. This means that the symmetry of the space is broken by the entrance, and at the back of the site, the “U” is only partially closed, giving a certain sense of incompleteness and contingency. The incidents of occupation are minor interruptions to the

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space’s continuity: a tangent fold opens a generous window in the blank courtyard wall and situates the dining table; a modest vestibule accommodates passage from the street; and a staggered corner and half-circle arc navigate the transitions between the spaces. As Alain Robbe-Grillet once observed about Franz Kafka’s writings, “The hallucinatory effect derives from their extraordinary clarity and not from mystery or mist. Nothing is more fantastic, ultimately, than precision.”6 In the White U, this translates to a minimal number of parts perfectly calibrated between balance and imminent discord or collapse.

a l l e n:

to its blank walls, is more than a void defined by the perimeter: it is a palpable, thick space. It anchors the composition. This is reinforced by the inward slope of the roof, which seems to focus all of the

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In one of his earliest essays, Robin Evans points out that it is only in the nineteenth century that the corridor was fully integrated into domestic space planning. In the palaces and villas of the Renaissance and beyond, space was organized as a â&#x20AC;&#x153;matrix of connected rooms,â&#x20AC;? always making it necessary, when moving through the house, to traverse one room to reach another.7 The division of private and public space (or served and servant space, as Louis Kahn would later describe it) coincided with the emergence of the middle class. The

simultaneous flattening and stratification of social hierarchy was reflected in the partitioning of domestic space into private and public realms. The White U, on the other hand, is nothing but corridor, a restless space of movement and transition. This suggests a space of transience, of impermanence, and at the same time a projection of the private realm of the corridor into the public realm of the house. It is a house without any conventional collective spaces, such as a living room or sitting room. An early plan drawing strategically excludes the

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spaces of inhabitation—only the corridor remains. Ito describes the house as a “uniform tubular space.” “All openings were closed,” he writes, “and the natural light beams falling sparsely from above strengthened the impression of an underground labyrinth. At the same time the white summoned more white, and the curved surfaces enhanced their own curvature.”8 It is worth remembering that before Westerners brought the black frock coat to Japan in the nineteenth century, white was the color of mourning. Despite this, and even despite the metaphor of the house as an underground space, the white surfaces suggest not heavy emotion but lightness and delicacy, even optimism. European modernism embraced transparency and opened the space of the house out to the landscape. For the architects of the early twentieth century, this exteriority had a polemical force. The

plush interior had developed in the nineteenth century as a comforting retreat from the hard reality of the modern metropolis. Interiority implied a withdrawal into individual subjectivity, politically suspect and artistically bankrupt. By contrast, the modernist interior—flooded with light—minimized the distinction between interior and exterior. Its subject was thrust out into the world to confront the hard realities of modernity head-on. But Adolf Loos, who so often turned convention on its head, pursued an alternative approach. He wrote that the exterior of the house must be mute, and the house should only reveal itself from within. 9 For Loos this translated to the complex interlocked spaces of the raumplan and the strategic use of rich materials like marble and exotic woods, whose figured surfaces provided an intrinsic ornament to the space. Loos imagined a new, fundamentally modern interiority, in which media and emergent information technologies blurred the boundary between interior subjectivity and public collectivity.10 The spaces of the White U are highly restrained, and there is none of Loos’s sectional interlock: their fullness is invested in surface effects rather than the result of carefully calibrated effects of light and space. Ito, now operating fully within the logic of the Information Age, radicalizes Loos’s split between interior and exterior, dissolving both into a kind of white noise: a signal without a message. Ito has described the elements of the house as “light” and “soil,” a confrontation

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between light and dark, nature and culture. He writes that he was searching for a “whole, stable form,” a kind of “independent utopia” that could reconstitute the idea of a family in the face of great loss.11 But he also understood that this utopia—precisely in order to fulfill its role in rebuilding the family—could not be false or conciliatory. Ito’s sister

wrote, for example, that “windows like cracks in the ceiling would please me.”12 Everything about the house, from its blank exterior and palpable emptiness, to the sensation of being underground, to the ghostly images of the children in photographs of the time, reinforces this intensely personal narrative. In his essay “Architecture” of 1910, Loos wrote, “The work of art aims at shattering man’s comfortable complacency. A house must serve one’s comfort.”13 He argues that art and architecture have fundamentally different tasks. The artist has an obligation to challenge received ideas and imagine alternative futures, whereas the architect must be attentive to the needs of the present and the collective memory of the past. For Loos, “Only a small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.”14 In the case of the White U, the singular narrative of the house demanded a more intense and personal response, one that sanctions Ito’s foray into the territory of art. This does not contradict Loos so much as suggest that in this house the functions

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preserve the object artificially, apart from the life of its inhabitants, would be an empty gesture. In the White U, the plan is still the primary organizing device. In most of Ito’s work since that time, it is secondary. At Sendai, section is decisive, and at Tama, a fully developed three-dimensional spatial matrix is in play. This certainly owes something to Ito’s extended collaboration with the engineer Mutsuro Sasaki, who also made decisive contributions to the design of the Sendai Mediatheque. In conversation with Ito, Sasaki has proposed that contemporary developments in structure can be traced back to two figures: Mies van der Rohe and Antonio Gaudí. The infinite horizontal of Mies implies a minimal structure, while Gaudí’s figured form anticipates what Sasaki calls “flux” structure.15 In that same conversation, Ito describes the Mediatheque as a series of cave-like holes drilled through a compact volume. For Ito, this dialectic between the regularity of the structure and the worm-like voids speaks to the

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of memory associated with the tomb and the monument are never far away. With the White U, Ito has fused the introverted idea of the house as private refuge with the collective function of memory and public mourning. This is what elevates the house from a private matter to a public testament. At the same time, considering the fugitive character of memory, it is only fitting that the story of the house ends with its demolition. To

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dispersed quality of information in the Digital Age. This concern persists at Tama, where the program is more conventional but marked (as is the program of any contemporary library) by the erosion of solidity that digital information implies. Seen this way, Tama might be understood as a series of horizontal cavelike spaces drilled through a compact volume, with its attenuated walls taking the place of the thin slabs at Sendai. An anecdote from the design process confirms this account. Ito had recently completed the Crematorium in Kakamigahara with Sasaki and was tending toward a similar solution, with a smoothly curving structure. In the early design studies for the library, Ito’s office approximated these continuous surfaces with cardboard templates. Looking at the model, Ito realized that there was no

need to literally complete the surfaces. At Kakamigahara smooth structure yields smooth space; the effect is stunning, but the technical investment is disproportionate. The symmetry of support and affect does not produce a significant transformation. At Tama, what happens is more complex: a segmented structure yields a smooth space. Referring to the persistence of the image on the retina, which creates continuous movement out of still images in cinema, Gilles Deleuze writes, “cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movementimage.”16 At Tama, the spatial experience of the moving spectator smooths out the intervals between the striated architectural elements to a similar effect: not of literal movement but the taut energy of a body in motion—a movement-image. The discovery here is that flux structure does not need to be literally smooth; instead, the design of the interval itself, and the relationship of the parts, imparts smoothness to the segmented structure. Ito further developed these ideas in the project for the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/PFA), designed in 2008. Berkeley represents an intensification and internalization of the structural and spatial ideas explored

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sarily entails protection and enclosure. Beyond the simple need for vertical walls to accommodate the display of art, the museum needs to house the works and establish an autonomous identity for the institution. These requirements are incompatible with the idea of pure flux. The museum program alternates between stasis (the slow contemplation of works) and movement (the flow of spectators through the collection). The dialogue that had previously animated Ito’s works—between the delicacy of the Miesian volume and the figural space of information—takes on a very specific meaning at Berkeley. The contemporary rethinking of interiority, the “sense of floating in a space with no exterior” that

Ito first explored in the White U, returns here in another form. The Swiss architect Valerio Ogliati contends that architects are either adders or dividers. The Mediatheque is clearly an additive project, a system of horizontal floors held up by hollow, woven columns. The walls at Tama divide space, although the spectator’s movement stitches it back together. Berkeley is perfectly calibrated between the two. Ito’s proposal is a compact, three-story cubic volume that fills the given site. It imparts a sense of urban density to its loose, campus-based context. The registration of the thin slab edges suggests a simple stacking operation (as at Sendai), but here, for programmatic reasons, the perimeter is closed. The elevation is a snapshot of the sectional organization. At Sendai, Ito lightly enclosed a fragment of continuous space—punctuated by hollow columns—into which all of the necessary services were packed. At Berkeley, the space appears dense, and thicker. The convex profiles suggest pressure from within. It is as if the lacy columns of Sendai have solidified and swelled to the edges of the site, spilling the services out to create a tightly packed cellular matrix. The effect is one of arrested motion and potential energy, perfectly mirroring the programmatic mix and urban aspirations of the project. In plan, the site is divided into a simple four-by-four matrix, which yields

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at Tama. If today’s library suggests a fluid information space that extends past the boundary of a single building, the program of the art museum neces-

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rectangular programmatic modules. Any grid can be seen simultaneously as accumulation and division, and Ito plays up this ambiguity, moving from closed cells at the lower level (with pedestrian passages in between) to a dense weave of galleries up above. There is no distinction

between served and servant spaces, and there are no corridors. The more primitive â&#x20AC;&#x153;matrix of connected roomsâ&#x20AC;? described by Evans reappears, but Ito does not default to the conventional enfilade strategy so often employed in museum design. Instead, the walls sway and bulge and loop back on themselves. This undulation creates interstitial spaces for passage and a spatial rhythm as the viewer moves between concave and convex spaces. Renderings show both the enclosed galleries and the passages utilized as exhibition space. This serves to confound the sense of

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public and private, unpacking the “white cube” model of the conventional gallery. The plan language oscillates along multiple readings: the grid as a fragment of continuous space; an infinite line looping back on itself to enclose space; and a collection of living cells captured at the instant of division. The sense of arrested movement in the BAM/PFA is not limited to the plan. The cell walls billow and sway in section as well, and there are openings in the elevation that appear as cuts, the result of the swelling form being sliced by the perimeter of the site. Invisible currents of movement become visible at the moment they come in contact with the envelope of the building. As much as it follows

on the lightness of Tama, the Berkeley project is part of another line of inquiry in Ito’s work—that of elastic, threedimensional cellular projects such as the Taichung Metropolitan Opera House (under construction and expected to be complete in 2013) and the Ghent Forum for Music, Dance and Visual Culture (2005). Like the museum, these are introverted programs, where the audience’s attention is collectively focused on the performance. The museum program is more dispersed: it needs to create at once a series of inwardly directed spaces of contemplation and a series of outwardly directed spaces of public engagement. Ito alternates between the two with exquisite subtlety. He does so not by adjusting the essential language of the proposal but by teasing out a latent flexibility in the apparently static, grid-like organization. And, as is so often the case with Ito, these deviations from the norm are never overt. They trust in nuance and suggestion. This sense of immanent change projects a new idea of the institution,

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suspended between inside and outside, whole and fragment, finality and revision. The delicacy of the tectonic language reinforces this sense of institutional provisionality. Where one would conventionally expect weight and solidity, Ito answers with lightness, which for him is the everpresent shadow of the flux of information today. The architecture is pushed right up to the edge of dematerialization, with the full knowledge that it can never actually be dematerialized. Instead, the heavy is made light. But the lightness of this architecture is not a lightness that works against the hardness of technical laws: it works tactically to achieve effects of lightness by architectural (as opposed to purely technical) means. It is a lightness of tectonic precision, a lightness of software as opposed to one of hardware.17 In the work of some architects, like Rem Koolhaas at OMA, the force of the project as an idea outweighs the need for its construction: OMA’s project for the Jussieu Library, for example, has had an enormous impact on the field despite its never having been built.18 By contrast, Ito’s work only reveals its richness and complexity through construction—not because the architect revels in materiality, but for just the opposite reason. It is only in built form that the subtlety of his dematerialized relationships—the play of light and space activated by the inhabitant—and the sophistication of his tectonic solutions become fully evident. His work is not so much about making the nature of materials visible as it is about material

transformation: a qualitative change of state that can only occur through the fully realized process of construction. Ito’s long building history and intimate knowledge of construction mean that he is not bound by the normative dictates of materials use—that concrete should be heavy and sculptural, for example. In his hands, inert matter is transformed into something resembling living matter, and allows his architecture to be light “like a bird, and not like a feather,” to borrow Paul Valéry’s formulation.19 The resemblance of the Berkeley project to a house of cards is highly suggestive. A house of cards is elemental and repeatable—the product of simple operations of balance and stacking, carried out with a given set of standardized parts—at the same time as it is fragile and provisional. To make a house of cards stable, you could add additional elements like glue and tape or manipulate the elements themselves by tearing, bending, or folding them. Ito has done the latter, exercising the minimum necessary morphological transformation in order to impart stability to this fragile assemblage. Far from the conventional image of the art museum as “culture bunker,” Ito’s museum appears at once as an arrangement of forms caught at an instant of momentary equilibrium and as something inevitable: a recognizable icon assembled from conventional elements.

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Ito’s work emerged during the 1970s in the midst of architecture’s linguistic turn. Yet a simple return to language has never been part of the architect’s agenda. For Ito it is the impossibility of language— of architecture ever approaching the discursive transparency of written or verbal language—that animates his work. A comparison with the work of two of his peers proves instructive. Arata Isosaki (born in 1931, ten years earlier than Ito) embraced interdisciplinarity, linguistic reference, and, in some projects, overt historical quotation, almost from the beginning of his career. Even when it is not explicitly referential, his work is a collage of ready-made signs. The work of Tadao Ando (Ito’s exact contemporary) is, by contrast, resolutely anti-scenographic, emptying architecture of all possible

reference other than light, material, and space. Starting from scratch, he restrains architecture’s representational capacity through a heroic act of invention. Ito falls somewhere in between Ando and Isosaki: he is skeptical of both, yet draws productively from each. Although his buildings are richly suggestive and syntactically complex, he never fully engages the linguistic. Legible semantic reference is always kept at a distance: for Ito, that would be too easy, too conciliatory. On the other hand, he is not tempted by the portentous “silence” of Ando, which monumentalizes the impossibility of communication. Ando wants to shut down the referential in order to get at a deeper level of meaning—a non-discursive, phenomenological fullness. Ito is critical of this, recognizing its power (as in the White U) but understanding that a deep level of personal meaning cannot have a wider significance in the public realm. For Ito, such fullness of presence is a given property of architectural experience more than a material with which the architect might work. If Isosaki works with “language without affect” (what he communicates risks topicality and trivialization), Ando works with “affect without language.” He risks simply not communicating. Ito’s work is delicately poised between affect and language: syntactically dense, it is full of meaning and suggestion without ever devolving into literal quotation. Ito’s White U, for example, oscillates between the collective memory of

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Language without affect is a dead language: and affect without language is uncommunicable. —André Green

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architecture’s formal types—a symmetrical courtyard and an apsidal space—and a frank confrontation with the fragility of life in the Post-Nuclear Age. It is this dual engagement that transforms the house into a collective statement beyond the narrative of personal loss. At the Tama Art Library, it is impossible not to read the arches as a sign, a reference to a recognizable form in the repertory of classical architecture. They are that, but they are many other things, too: a subtle strategy for partitioning space while enabling visual transparency, an unexpected material transformation, and a knowing echo of the library’s collective space. Surely Ito’s primary intention was not to make reference to Western classical architecture, but by accepting this reference and its associated meanings—while pursuing innovative structural and spatial solutions and reworking the library’s program—Ito produces work that is richer and more nuanced precisely for its capacity to hold these multiple readings in a delicate equilibrium. It is this suspension—between memory and forgetting, between possibility and impossibility, between language and silence—that makes Ito’s work significant today. His skeptical intelligence and restless creativity tell him that the old solutions will no longer work. Yet architecture for him is by no means an exhausted practice. He holds fast to an optimistic idea: that through a patient and slow search, there may be moments, widely

spaced and hard-won, when something new emerges. But Ito is not naive. His search is not for a heroic, revolutionary breakthrough but for a fissure, a toehold that will help to move the discipline not so much forward as sideways, or back on itself, revisiting known territory from a new perspective. And that is all architecture can ever do in the present.

Notes

First Epigraph. Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages” (1978), reprinted in his Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1996), 56. Second Epigraph. Toyo Ito, cited by Mutsuro Sasaki, in “A Dialogue with Toyo Ito,” Morphogenesis of Flux Structure, trans. Thomas Daniell (London: AA Publications, 2007), 62. 1. Le Corbusier, Creation Is a Patient Search, trans. James Palmes (New York: Praeger, 1960). 2. “The ‘body of electronic modernism’ calls for a still more non-localized space than the one created by mechanistic modernism.” Toyo Ito: Blurring Architecture, 1971–2005, ed. Ulrich Schneider and Marc Feustel (Milan: Charta, 1999), 55. 3. See Yve-Alain Bois, “A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara,” October 29 (Summer 1984): 32–62, for a description of the perceptual effects of Richard Serra’s sculpture on the spectator in motion. 4. Reyner Banham, “A Home Is Not a House,” Art in America 2 (April 1965): 109–18;

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124 158 BOOK REFERENCES: Georgi Stanishev: • Neil Leach (Editor): Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory • Sanford Kwinter: Architectures-Time-Toward-Modernist-Culture • Charles Jencks: Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture • Charles Jencks: The Architecture of the Jumping Universe: A Polemic - How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture and Culture • Jane Jacobs: Death and Life of Great American Cities • Branko Mitrovic Philosophy for architects • Rem Koolhaas: Project Japan: Metabolism Talks... • Kevin Lynch: The Image of the City (Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies Series) • Zhongjie Lin: Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan • Robert Venturi: Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture • Nigel Taylor: Urban planning since 1945 • Juhani Pallasmaa - The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (2012) • Juhani Pallasmaa: Encounters 1 - Architectural Essays • Juhani Pallasmaa: Encounters 2 - Architectural Essays • Juhani Pallasmaa: The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema • Hans Ibelings: European Architecture 1890-2010

Alexander Kyosev: • Barnard, M. (2001) Approaches to Understanding Visual Cultures, New York: Palgrave • Bohm, G and Mitchel, J.T. (2009) Pictorial vs. Iconic Turn. In: Culture, Theory, Critique, • Bridge, G, Watson, S. (2002) City Reader, Oxford: Basil Blackwell • Drucker, J. Visual Studies in Afterimage. Volume: 31. Issue: 1. Publication Year: 2003 • Ewen, St. (1988) Image and Identity (chapter 2) in All Consuming Images. The Politics of Style in contemporary Culture. USA, Basic Books. Inc • Jay. M. (1988) Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In: Foster. H. (1988) Visons and Visuality, Bay Press • Gelley, Al. (1993). City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism. In: Poster, Mark (1993) Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture, N.Y. Columbia University Press • Gillian, R. (2001) Visual Methodologies. An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. London: SAGE Publications • Heywood I., Sandywell B. (1999) Interpreting Visual Culture Explorations in the

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125 159 Hermeneutics of the Visual. London and New York: Routledge • Hunt, D. (2005) Los Angeles as visual world: media, seeing, and the city In: Visual Worlds, Hall. J. etc. eds. London and New Yoork: Routledge • Kiossev, Al. (2009) The Screen of the City: Sofia’s Transitional Urbanscapes, 1989-2007. In: Moraru, Christian 2009. Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imaginatio

Milena Metalkova: 2000

• Architecture Theory since 1968-edited by K. Michael Hays, The MIT Press,

• Maria Diamandieva: Architecture As Communicatin • Hans Ibelings, Aaron Betsky, Dmitri O. Shvidkovsky ,Oleg Yavein, Mikhail Piotrovsky: The Hermitage XXI - The New Art Museum in the General Staff Building • Rudy Ricciotti: L’architecture est un sport de combat • Kinda Al Sayed: Space Syntax Methodology Textbook (paper/publication)

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â&#x20AC;&#x153; Architecture creates horizons and frames of reference for the perception & understanding. â&#x20AC;&#x153; - Yuhani Pallasmaa

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