The Architecture Imagination

THE ARCHITECTURE IMAGINATION Learn fundamental principles of architecture — as an academic subject or a professional career — by studying some of history’s most important buildings

EDX

HARVARDX

ROTHA OUDOM

1. THE ARCHITECTURAL IMAGINATION INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY AND THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE

•K.Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architecture Theory •Erika Naginski, Professor of Architectural History •Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelslead Professor of the history of Architecture and Technology •Lisa Haber-Thomson, Design Critic in Architecture

BRIEF COURSE DESCRIPTION

-Architecture engages a culture’s deepest social values and expresses them in material, aesthetic form.

-Learn how to “read” architecture as a cultural expression as well as technical achievement.

-Analyses buildings from historical contexts, hands-on exercises in drawing and modeling.

-Bring you close to the work of architect or historian.

-Architecture is one of the most complexly negotiated and globally recognized cultural practices, both as an academic subject and a professional career.

-Its production involves all of the technical, aesthetic, political, and economic issues at play within given society.

-Examine some of history’s most important examples that show how architecture engages, mediates and expresses a culture’s complex aspirations.

1.THE ARCHITECTURAL IMAGINATION: AN INTRODUCTION

2. READING ARCHITECTURE: COLUMN AND WALL`

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3. HEGEL AND ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY

4. ALDO ROSSI AND TYPOLOGY

5. THE CRYSTAL PALACE: INFRASTRUCTURE AND DETAIL

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6. THE DIALECTICS OF GLASS AND STEEL

7. TECHNOLOGY TAMED: LE COURBUSIER’S MACHINES FOR LIVING

8. DRAWING UTOPIA: VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE OF THE 18TH CENTURY

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9. THE POMPIDOU CENTER IN THE CITY OF PARIS

10. PRESENTING THE UNREPRESENTABLE

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INTRODUCTION

Part I: Form and History -Introduces the idea of the architectural imagination as a faculty that mediates sensuous experience and conceptual understanding.

Part II: The Technology Effect -Addresses technology as a component of architecture’s realization and understanding Part III: Representation and Context -Confronts architecture’s complex relationship to its social and historical contexts and its audiences, achievements, and aspirations.

-Learn about what we call architecture’s power of representation, and see how architecture has a particular capacity to produce collective meaning and memory.

PART I: FORM AND HISTORY 1. THE ARCHITECTURAL IMAGINATION: AN INTRODUCTION

In Module 1 “The Architectural Imagination: An Introduction”you will explore the idea of the architectural imagination as a faculty that mediates sensuous experience and conceptual understanding.

1.1 AESTHETIC PERCEPTION

-Imagination: • Bridging the gap between perception and understanding.

• There is actually a space in the mind where the work of picturing takes place.

• The image isn’t there until the imagination produces it.

• Capacity for producing images, the mental capacity to picture things.

-Comparing two images

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1.2 WITTKOWER’S PALLADIAN DIAGRAM

-Study called “Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism”

Study of every villa that the Italian architect Andrea Palladio ever built.

-Common diagram of villa

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1. Appearance 2. Repetition 3. Relationship between that template

Understanding (perception of the building) Imagination

Universal

Physical things

Sensory Data (Sense data)

-Architecture produces knowledge

1.3 TYPOLOGY

-Concept of typology = The logic of types -Warehouse apartment Boutique Palazzo Hospital School -French architectural theorist Quatramere de Quincy “The word ‘type’ does not represent so much the image of something that must be copied or imitated perfectly as the idea of as element that must itself serve as a rule for the model”

1.4 PERSPECTIVE

-Inventor of perspective: Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi Architect in Florence

“Perspective as a system brings together self and the world” “It brings them all together and organizes them according to a single point of view”

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SUPPLEMENT: PERSPECTIVE

-One major ways that buildings are depicted is in perspective.

-A way of seeing the world -It’s part of the Western artistic tradition (14th 15th century)

-1 Point Perspective

-2 Point Perspective

-3 Point Perspective

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1.5 THE IDEAL CITY

-Book by Erwin Panofsky called “Perspective as symbolic Form” The Title come from the philosophy of symbolic form, which studies knowledge.

-Scientific knowledge:

• Facts of science

• Facts of nature -Symbolic form:

• Facts of culture -Panofsky was interested in the way perspective gives us

construct a world for a viewer - In the book: 1. Compare perspective to the cognitive achievement of the discovery of infinity or cognitive achievement of the discovery of geometry.

2. Compare perspective and the knowledge that we get from perspective to philosophy itself.

-”...not only did perspective elevate art to a ‘science’... the subjective visual impression was indeed so far rationalized that this very impression could itself become the foundation for a solidly grounded and yet, in an entirely modern sense, ‘infinite’ experiential world.”

Meaning: he’s comparing perspective to the discovery and understanding of infinity.

-Perspective is like a condition of possibility for knowing itself, or for experience itself.

-Finally “The result was a translation of psychophysiological space into mathematical space; in other words, an objectification of the subjective.”

-Simply put “Perspective, in an almost unique conceptual system, brings subject and object together, brings viewer and the world together.”` Perspective controls light

Light Left & High

“THE IDEAL CITY” URBINO PANEL

“unoccupied by architecture flat floor” “all the buildings had plinths” “it was closed”

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“THE IDEAL CITY OF BALTIMORE”

“THE BERLIN PANEL” “Totally open”

“None of the buildings have plinths”

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“4 Columns relate to four columns of the Baltimore panel”

Sketch by Rotha Oudom

“Modern advanced Renaissance building”

-These three images are almost like a kind of combination of perspective and typology -Typology and perspective together, as examples of the architectural imagination.

-There’s one more thing about a system like perspective, a system that constructs knowledge rather than just describing object that already exist.

We can’t reach infinity but somehow, we got the strange sense that there’s something looking back at us at the other end of that line of vision.

That thing looking back at us might be perspective’s other. It might be the city itself, the social city that’s looking back at us as individuals.

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SELF-ASSESSMENT: COMPARE TWO BUILDING

The Villa Savoye, in a suburb of Paris, by Swiss-French architect, Le Courbusier

The Robie House, in a suburb of Chicago, by the American Frank Lloyd Wright 12

• The Villa Savoye, in a suburb of Paris, by the Swiss-French architect, Le Courbusier.

• The Robie House, in a suburb of Chicago, by the American Frank Lloyd Wright.

• Features:

-Materials: Brick versus “something white”

-Relation to ground: perched on stilts or columns versus hustled into the earth.

-Massing: Box-like, or wrapped like a box, versus layered horizontal planes or bands that

are alternately open and closed.

-Light and thin versus heavy and massive. Alternatively, you might argue that both are

attempting to visually float.

-Window: You might contrast the windows of Savoye as being on the surface versus Robie’s

deep under overhanging eaves. Or you might find both cases similar in so far as both have

windows that are like horizontal robbons.

-Roof: Sculptural feature on a flat roof at Savoye compared to massive chimney anchoring

pitched roofs at Robie.

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ORTHOGRAPHIC DRAWINGS

-All architectural drawings are abstractions.

-No single drawing can give a perfect picture or understanding of a building.

-We take information from the different drawings. In some ways, they’re abstract representations of a real object to gain a greater understanding of what actually is going on in a building.

-They’re called orthographic because they’re orthogonal or perpendicular to each other.

-They are the plan, the section, and the elevation.

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SELF-ASSESSMENT: DRAW A PLAN

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2. READING ARCHITECTURE: COLUMN AND WALL INTRODUCTION • Look in more detail at Rudolf Wittkower’s practice of a Kant-inspired interpretation of the project of architecture, and how Architectural Principles in the project of architecture, and how Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism revolutionized out understanding of geometry, modular pattern and the ways in which diagrams can be used to explain the work of the architect.

• Architecture is a mode of knowledge.

• Function or program

• Materials

• Techniques of construction Necessary considerations to understand architecture

• Context (physical/social)

• Formal Property

• Aesthetics

Free Architecture from its function, own interest, prejudices, expectation of architecture

Common-sense world

-In the late 18th century, Kant produced a foundational theory of aesthetics.

-Our experience and our judgment of beauty, our aesthetic judgment involves: Two cognitive powers

Understanding Imagination -Involves more feeling and affect, endowed with a universality that is not reducible to the laws of reason/laws of morality.

Two modes of knowledge -Considering of aesthetics is necessary as a third mode of knowledge.

-For scholars of architecture influenced by Kant, like Panofsky and Wittkower, whom we’ve seen, this particular productivity, involves investigations of geometry and proportion. It’s highly intellectual, self-reflexive and recursive and it’s very abstract.

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2.1 WITTKOWER’S THEORY OF ARCHITECTURE • Offered a new approach of the architecture of the

15th & 16th century in Italy.

• Revolutionized our understanding of geometry, modular pattern.

• Investigation into a set of problems surrounding perspective proportion, geometry ideal form and Architecture.

• Analyse architectural form as a autonomous project.

Impact on two distinct groups 1. Renaissance architectural 2. Modernist architect

• At the heart of this approach is the notion of the paradigm, The word “paradigm” comes from the Greek.

Pattern

Show side by side

• In the latter definition, get a sense of a comparative approach, that to put two things together.

Essentially the creation of a synthesis • So the word ultimately serves to underscore the creation of an outstanding example of something, of a model, a standard, an epitome, an ideal, a paragon.

• The assumption on Wittkower’s part is that Renaissance architects were after such paradigms, they sought and developed them, and ultimately, through that process, were after the core principles of architectural form.

• Wittkower’s very own approach became paradigmatic, it offered a standard means of approaching the historical past, of interpreting the past, and even of generating form itself.

• Wittkower’s is a broad attempt to characterize the theory of architecture as it emerged in the 15th and 16th century in a distinct set of places (Florence, Rome, Venice).

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• The book is broken up into four chapters:

1. Question of symbolism (how buildings mean)

2. Look at the problem of the appropriation of form

3. The question of typology and the development of building types.

(Churches?, Villas?, Institutional buildings?)

4. Question of proportion (The geometric ideal)

(The question of measure) • Two key players

1. Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472):

A theorist and an architect, a real Renaissance man, painter

2. Andrea Palladio (1508-1580):

Venetian architect from the 16th century • These two figures essentially represent the whole of the Italian Renaissance for Wittkower.

• What might we expect the historian to garner from a picture of the Renaissance architect or the buildings that he erected?

Renaissance: Historian would be after a history of patronage Eg:

-A history of the politics that gave rise to a particular commission (Great events that marked the 15th and 16th century, changes in military technology.)

-The question of politics or religion during this period.

-The indluence of the papacy.

All of these left out of Wittkower’s narrative

• To read Wittkower is to see a process of mental abstraction at work. In other words, it wasn’t after the discrete cultural meaning of a particular building in a particular context.

• He’s not after giving us some real and robust sense of the 16th century world view.

• Wittkower is looking for a kind of structure that organizes architectural form. Portico? Column?

The diagram of the Villa Cornaro • He’s interested only in the plan.

• He cuts away the rear monumental staircase.

• Minimizes and essentially elides the entrance porch, take away the column and anything that might signify a supportive function.

• Takes away the side wings, poche, scale.

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2.2 WITTKOWER AND ALBERTI • What does it mean for a Renaissance architect to look back to the classical past and deploy those forms in the context of religious architecture?

• He’s after explaining how to match up one formal system against another.

• Related to what we call a trabeated system or a post and Lintel system, which indicates classicism’s reliance on horizontal beams or lintels that are held up by columns or pillars

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Rudolf Wittkower In his religious buildings, Alberti consistently avoided the combination of arch and column. ... When he uses columns he did, in fact, give them a straight entablature, while when he introduced arches he made them rest on pillars Whereas the first motif is Greek, the second is Roman

• Alberti is going to reject the column entirely and turn toward a pure expression of the wall, a kind of architecture of the wall.

• He’s going to do this by examining four commissions:

1. The Tempio Malatestiano in Rimni

2. Santa Maria Novella in Florence

3,4 In Mantua: San Sebastiano and Sant’Andrea.

• These 4 commissions offer a neat chronology, to trace out the development of Alberti’s thinking on architecture.

• Buildings, in other words, become part of a single investigation of classical modalities in the context of religious structures.

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2.3 TEMPIO MALATESTIANO

Two blind arcades were originally meant to house a sarcophagus for Malatesta and his wife.

Deep arcade was based on a pillar and arch construction Entablature

Podium

• Small church in the city of Rimini Italy on the Adriatic Coast, a 13th century Gothic structure, so belonged to an entirely different stylistic and cultural moment.

• The structure named San Francisco (St. Francis), since the 19th century, it’s been known as the TEPIO MALATESTIANO. After the man you also see Sigismondo Malatesta an extraordinary character a Renaissance nobleman who become Lord Rimini at the age of 14 and became its sole ruler after abolishing the authority of his brothers.

• The church was essentially a reconstruction of the original structure, and it dates from about the time of Piero’s portait from about 1450.

• The patron’s aim was to turn the church of st. Francis into a mausoleum for himself and his wife.

• Pope Pius II ... full pagan gods and profane things... so full of pagan images that it seems like a temple for the worshippers of demons.

• What Wittkower’s see in the tempio is the first in a sequence of four churches in which Alberti is carrying out a systematic investigation of the fusion of classical system or classical principles in christian buildings.

• Problem one: The Tempio, or how to impose a classical aspect onto or over a pre-existing medieval structure.

• Solution: -Alberti’s answer is to introduce to the facade a variation on the Roman triumphal arch while reconsidering the entire envelope of the building as an antique temple almost putting a classical box around the whole structure.

-This is the first isolated church facade to do this in the Renaissance, this is why it’s such an important example.

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• Alberti’s own theoretical “In my opinion, the space taken up by the portico, and indeed the whole temple should be raised above the level of the city, this will give it a greater air of diginity” • This idea of elevating the church of placing it on a podium, of making it function as the sacred center of an urban context.

• Problem Two: How the entablature at the point at which it projects above each column confounds the attempt to coordinate the lower story with the upper story.

• Solution: This is where the work of the diagram comes in when Wittkower has demonstrated in his schematization of the facade is an attempt to resolve the contradiction of the lower story with the upper story.

•Leon Battista Alberti: “The Principle ornament in all architecture certainly lies in the column” Wittkower’s Diagram

• We are left with a contradiction while the central vertical thrust remains apparent.

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2.4 SANTA MARIA NOVELLA

Santa Maria Novella in Florence (Completed around 1360) • Offering an alternative solution to the problem of what it means to fuse an italian medieval structure and a classical idiom.

Decorative motif in the triangular pediment 25

Pointed Arches

Ornament of the capitals and the scrolls, which all have Florentine prototypes

• It is a church that maintains Tuscan formal traditions • Alberti’s goal was to “Harmonize” the medieval facade, to find what he called a “mutual accord” between the old structure and the new idea.

• Alberti’s design for the facade of Santa Maria Novella is deeply traditional (local, historiated, patriotically Florentine).

Diagrams

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Rwdolf Wittkower: • “The attic in Santa Maria Novella is at the same time effective as a horizontal barrier and neutralizes the vertical tendency of the projecting entablature above the columns, the motif which had led to such difficulties... in Rimini” • In other words, Santa Maria Novella solves the problem of the Tempio.

• ”The entrance to [The Tempio], is only the first step leading to the fully developed classical composition displayed in that of Santa Maria Novella.”

• ”Harmony, the essence of beauty, consists... in the relation of the parts to each other and to the whole, and, in fact, a single system of proportion permeates the facade, and the pace and size of every single part and detail is fixed and defined by it. Proportions recommended by Alberti are the simple relations of one to one, one to two, one to three, two to three, three to four etc., which...

Alberti found in classical buildings.

The diameter of the Pantheon, for instance, corresponds exactly to its height half its diameter corresponds to the height of the substructure as well as to that of the dome etc.”

“The whole facade is geometrically built up of a progressive duplication or, alternatively, a progressive halving of ratios. It is clear that Alberti’s theoretical precept that the same proportion be kept throughout the building has here been fulfilled. It is the strict application of an unbroken series of ratios that marks the unmedieval character of this... facade and make it the first great Renaissance example of eurythmia”

In greek, eurythmia designates graceful movement or the graceful movement of a well-proportioned object.

Hellenistic architectural theorist and engineer Vitruvius:

Architect consists actually, in six fundamental principles 1. Order 2. Arrangement or Disposition 3. Eurythmy (associated with the appearance of visual beauty) 4. Symmetry 5. Decor.

6. Distribution

In conclusion, The Tempio poses the problem of aesthetic apprehension, and Santa Maria Novella solves it.

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2.5 SAN SEBASTIANO & SANT’ANDREA

San Sebastiano

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Sant’andrea

• Churches whose designs are, in fact, ones that foreground and the fact that columns are now entirely absent.

Sebastiano • In fact, San Sabastiano is a central planned church. It’s a votive church which as never completed, and nowsaday is heavily restored. Sant’Andrea, by contrast, is far more complete.

• In both cases, unlike the Tempio in Rimini and Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Alberti was not faced with the problem of adapting his designs to a pre-existing structure .

• The idea of inventing the church whole cloth means that Wittkower can analyze the facades as theorical solutions to an architectural problem.

• If you look at them, the main proportions are essentially the same like Santa Maria Novella, the width corresponds to the height from the level of the entrance to the apex of the pediment.

• San Sebastiano underscores the presence of as much solid wall as possible. It affirms the wall as principle and the opposite, in Sant’Andrea where, besides the enormous and deeply recessed entrance the side bays have been broken up into three tiers of thresholds of door, of niches, of window.

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Broken entablature with arched window behind

Six equidistand pilasters

Broad monumental stair

• Wittkower is going to emphasize the temple facade raised on its podium again.

• Wittkower: “The Tempio and Santa Maria Novella are connected in so far as they show the compromise of wall and column, a compromise which was later abandoned. Here the compliance with the authority of classical motifs was replaced by their interpretation in terms of a consistent wall architecture.”

• To conclude, about Wittkower’s Alberti. For wittkower, the four churches offer a coherent sequence. From the very beginning, we are giving a problem, how to give a church, a religious edifice, a classical aspect. How to find the sources that are going to solve the problem of masking a two-story structure and, ultimately, coming in the end at an aesthetic affirmation of the whole.

• Wittkower’s approach, which is about using diagrams to distill some kind of fundamental understanding of architecture and its elements, is about schematizing buildings.

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3. HEGEL AND ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY INTRODUCTION • Wittkower’s interpretation of the work of Alberti and Argan’s account of the work of Brunelleschi give us two examples of Kant-inspired historians attributing to architecture the status of an ongoing formal project.

• To return to history is to return this internal world constructed by architecture, this world of aesthetic perfection, to the more robust world in which we all reside.

3.1 HEGEL’S HISTORY

• In our consideration of architectural imagination, there are two primary points.

• The imagination is productive. It sets us on part to knowledge.

• We owe the conceptualization and the model for a philosophy of art history to the German Idealist philosopher Hegel. is after a model where art deals with truth

About the world by giving those truths appearance

• What hegel is that all the cultures through time and all of the epochs of art can be assembled together in this giant global mechanism.

• Hegel is a very systematic philosopher, and he wants a total system, a mechanism that gathers up all the cultures and all the epochs of art into a single, coherent, unified system.

• Why should we think that architecture has to progress, that architecture has to change?

• How can it be that architecture, and art generally, is involved with thought?

• Hegel, who is concerned with the truth of art, wants the object to push back. He wants the subject to react to the object.

Categories Take more on a primary role The interpretation The way we are in the world • Therefore, the subject can know truths about the object, truth about the world because the subject make these truth appear.

3.2 HEGEL’S SPIRIT

• The central claims of Hegel’s philosophy art are constructed in his famously opaque terminology, primarily the idea of the spirit or the “Geist” or “Zeitgeist” mean “Spirit of the Time”.

• First way, is to see the Geist or the spirit as a kind of encompassing substance that determines reality.

• The traditional view of the Geist as being like a thing would almost understand the Geist as a person-like. It comes very close to the idea of a god, especially in Western literature.

• A different way of understanding Hegel’s spirit is better for us, The idea is still that everything real is with hindsight determined by organizing principle of a whole, of a totality.

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• We might model the everything in the world is connected, theoretically, it would be possible to give that a structure, an organizing structure that never settled, more of a process.

• So and then that spirit that organizing structure learns about itself in stages. It learns about itself through art.

• Let think this way:

The spirit initially sort of doesn’t know itself. It can’t represent itself. So it, as it were, reaches down into the material world and creates through collective community human activity as its kind of vehicle.

It creates art forms, collective art forms. And it sees itself. It says, oh, this is what I am. But by the time it sees that, it actually has already grown, changed, developed and it wants to keep moving forward.

• This sends Hegel in two direction:

1. He defends a form of holism in which the forms of thought and an art as a form of thought depend on their identity in a network.

2. It is the spirit that is propelling art forward. But the spirit need the participation of individuals in social life to help. It make those art objects.

• Hegel constructs three epochs in which spirit learns about itself through art:

1. Symbolic [Architecture]: everything prior to Ancient Greece

2. Classical [Sculpture]: Centered in Greece in the fifth century Before Common Era

3. Romantic [Painting, Music]: Art after the Roman Empire, or art in the countries of the Romance languages.

-Late medieval -Renaissance -18 Century • Architecture is the primary art, inaugural art because architecture is the art that deals most closely with earth (stone, brick, wood).

• Hegel starts with the Tower of Babel. It’s the art of a community.

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• For Hegel, it is the very failure of the project that he finds interesting. Because it’s in the failure of project, it’s in the impossibility of the project, that then compels the community to continue.

• It gives Hegel the idea of community. It give him the idea of collective building. But it also give him the propeller that he needs to move art through time.

3.3 SYMBOLIC ARCHITECTURE • In the earliest architecture, which is the symbolic, spirit is still trying to free itself in away from nauture. So architecture has to deal with nature.

• Hegel talks about the pyramids, which are not natural, but they’re dealing with nature.

• The pyramids for Hegel is architecture representing the spirit trying to free itself from nature.

• Pyramids are a very abstract form. They don’t mimic nature. So architecture doesn’t enclose volumn.

• For Hegel the primary symbolic architecture, they’re often it’s an assemblage of very different and distinct objects.

3.4 ROMANTIC ARCHITECTURE

• At the other end of history, architecture will find its primary form in the interior.

• This is the romantic stage of architecture, and its paradigm is the Gothic Cathedral.

• Hegel conceptualized the Gothic Cathedral as an enormous interior landscape.

• The stone of the cathedral very unlike the stone of the pyramids, is a stone that denies its own stone-ness. It’s been carved away, ornamented, decorated and refined until the stone seems to be just vectors of energy surging upward.

• It’s important that it’s dematerialized because here the spirit, in the romantic spirit, is leaving the sensuous realm, is leaving nature and becoming more conceptual, more self-conscious and less material.

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The interior of Gothic Cathedral

The stone of the cathedral

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3.5 CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE

Symbolic

-

Classical

-

Romantic

Greek Temple: Hamonius between form and function (house of god)

• The symbolic for Hegel really is pre-functional.

• There’s no real reason for the pyramids, there’s no function in terms of the spirit.

• Where in the Gothic cathedral, it is post-functional. It’s more this dematerialized representation of a conceptual realm.

• Classical period: Its function is to show forth the spirit in the object Romantic period: Spirit has almost left the object Symbolic period: Spirit is outside the object • The greeks used the human form, they idealized the human form, so that the spirit shows forth in the human form.

• So if you think the way a classical building does that, it takes its parts, which are very distinct, different parts (the column, the entablature, the joint) which brings all the differences together.

3.6 THE END OF ART

• The idea of spirit appearing, sort of, shining forth in object of art is important.

• Art is showing more real in a way it shows forth spirit and Hegel uses the term “der Schein” which means appearance “Shining”.

• So art shines forth transforms the material world into a representation of spirit through the work of the imagination.

• Hegel believe that in the Romantic when art has moved, is moving out of the material realm into the conceptual, actually, as a prologue to the end of art.

• Paradigm: Symbolic Architecture

Classical Sculpture

Romantic Painting and Music • Finally, a spirit achieves self-identity. And it moves toward philosophy and theology.

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4. ALDO ROSSI AND TYPOLOGY INTRODUCTION

• What we want to keep from Hegel is:

First, that the importance of architecture is not just its aesthetics but its deep historicity.

Second, He placed the work of architecture at the center of existence as a work of what he

called the “spirit” which for us means of the community, of the collective, • Now, making much more modest claims, we want look at the work of a modern architect who shares Hegel’s understanding of architecture.

• For Aldo Rossi, architecture in our own time must struggle with this lack of meaning.

• The architecture is finding its origin again and again, that it has to constantly be re-enacted, that it has to constantly beginning again.

4.1 “THAT IS ARCHITECTURE”

• Architect Adolf Loos writes, “If we find a mound six feet long and three feet wide in the forests, formed into a pyramid, shaped by a shovel, we become serious and something says, “someone lies buried here, that is architecture.”

• We have an encounter that involves the architectural imagination, constructing a genre or a type, which is the pyramid - this particular kind of construction, and we have craft or technique involved.

• The consequence of the encounter is, first of all, an architectural effect. We become serious. The mound, the shape of the mound, the appearance of the mount has affected us. All these have an architectural affect, then we conceptualize only then, do we theorize someone lies buried here, and the summation of that encounter is the conclusion: “That is Architecture”

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4.2 THE CUNEO MONUMENT

• Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) •First project by Rossi: Unbuilt monument to the Italian partisans.

It’s a cube 12 meters, open to the sky.

very steep steps ascending up into small room

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• It’s situated at the edge of the city in a very precise relationship to a plazza.

• When you see the elevation, the first thing you notice is a blank surface, which is held by very thin corner of concrete, so thin that the surface appear to be floating and the step ascend behind the surface.

• If you move into the room, there’s an almost oppressive weight of this giant 12 meter cube hovering over you.

•There’s no roof, it opens up to the sky.

• It’s a very intense experience of ascent, encloser, and then view.

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4.3 THE ARCHITECTURAL TYPE

• Rossi spent his entire career thinking about the relationships between individual elements of architecture and architecture as a discipline. The very beginning of architecture and the end of architecture. And the relationship between architectural practice and the kind of everyday level and architecture as a theoretical intellectual project.

• In conclusion, he called the architectural type was the beginning and the end of architecture.

• One of the example he gives is the Roman coliseum at Lucca, which first of all, in medieval times was used as quarry. The stones from the Roman coliseum were taken to construct medieval churches. And then later become a market and then housing.

• This is an example of what Rossi calls a “propelling permanence”. The form remains, but it carries us through changes in history, function, and even changes in the way that the colliseum is inhabited.

• In his work, the idea of architectural type and its relationship to city can best be seen in his most famous project, which is a cemetery, the cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena which he won the competition in 1971.

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• It’s about 325 by 175 meters surrounded by two story wall which later changed to three stories.

• You can enter at either south gate or the north gate.

• Along this north/south axis, Rossi’s places 3 distinct architectural types.

• Triangular shape in plan • Consists of vertical rectangular slabs that increase in height as they decrease in width

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• Large cube • Open to the sky • Repetitive square windows • No frames to the windows

• Large truncated stone • The top part is a chapel • The bottom part is a place for the ashes.

4.4 ANTERIORITY AND THE ANALOGOUS CITY

• Persistence of types call “Typogical of type” but there’s another dimension we might call the “anteriority of type”.

• The type pre-exist the architectural act.

• The example of the anteriority of type by what he means “the analogous city”. Take a look at a painting by Canaletto of Venice.

Corner of the Chiericati Palace of Andrea Palladio

Project made for the Rialto Bridge of Venice

Palladio’s Basilica (large classical wrapper around on existing medieval building) Bring classicism into modern urban form

• The type, though it’s pre-theoretical and pre-conceptual nevertheless give the form of social experience and collective understanding.

• The type sort of schematizes aesthetic experience, sensual encounters, in such a way it can be scanned by the collective human understanding.

• For Rossi, the city is also an invisible, abstract, virtual reality.

Ontological

History unfolding through time Field of potential-actualization of architecture 41

4.5 ARCHITECTURE AFTER ARCHITECTURE

• Rossi calls the autonomy of architecture, architecture on its own, appears as an aesthetic and technical solution to a problem that’s neither aesthetic nor technological, but is historical.

• “The monument, having overcome its relation to history becomes geography.

• So architecture, for Rossi, emerges in history, but it shows forth something that’s beyond history, something more universal.

• For Rossi, art is beyond the nature, is more authentic than nature itself.

• Architecture remaining after it should have ended, what’s important about Rossi’s project, is not that architecture is coming to an end, but that architecture has installed the kernel of history in its very core.

• Architecture doesn’t come to an end because architecture exist in time. Architecture is what remains of man.

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PART II: THE TECHNOLOGY EFFECT

• This part addresses technology as a component of architecture’s realization and understanding.

• Discover ways that innovative technology can enable and promote new aesthetic experience, or disrupt traditions. The interactions of architecture and modern technologies changed not only what could be built but also what kinds of constructions could even be though of as architecture.

5. THE CRYSTAL PALACE: INFRASTRUCTURE AND DETAIL INTRODUCTION

• In first set of modules we discussed some of the primary example of architect imagination and typology perspective.

• In the next three modules, we focus on how architecture has a fundamental relation to materiality, advance technology of materials for construction (iron, steel, glass and reinforced concrete)

5.1 EXHIBITION, IRON, AND THE NEW CONSTRUCTION • Few buildings have marked as important a moment in the history of architecture as the Crystal Palace.

• Not only was the building concept of a new way to build, using iron, it was also a major turning point in terms of its use since it hosted the first world fair and introduce a whole new spatial experience.

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• It introduced the public to a new realm of merchandise, to this capitalist world full of wonders.

• This is about changes brought by the first Industrial Revolution to architecture.

• The progress of iron construction had been known for thousands of year, but its use at a massive scale in construction really started at the end of the 18th century.

• The Crystal Palace was built to host the first great exhibition that opened in 1851.

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5.2 THE PROJECT

• In 1849, indeed, Great Britain was, at the time, the most advanced country technologically, but also in economic terms.

• How could it be that England had not organized an exhibition of this type?

• It’s in the middle of the society that this idea to organize something at a much larger scale than what had been done before gradually emerged.

• Prince Albert actually secured the temporary loan of part of Hyde Park as the place where the exhibition could take place.

• A committee was formed and asked for proposals to architects all over Europe.

• Two proposals were especially noticed:

The first one by French architect, Hector Horeau, a kind of gigantic shed very much like a railway station

The Second one from Richard Turner, an engineer who had recently realized the Kew Garden greenhouse

• The commitee had a number of architects and engineers and since no proposals had been deemed satisfactory, the architects and engineers of the committee decided to design their own proposal following these general choices: Single building, a grid on a 24-feed module.

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• The result was actually a pretty horrendous proposal made of brick with giant dome, which proved not only ugly in the eyes of the public but also highly problematic.

• This is where Joseph Paxton comes into play as the savior, who is going to really redeem the situation and transform what a path towards failure into one of the greatest achievements of the early 1850s.

5.3 JOSEPH PAXTON

• Joseph Paxton (1803-1865) is a kind of British hero that he had no traditional training.

• He was neither an engineer nor an architect.

• He interested in botany, who had realized construction of all kinds, and who launched press enterprise.

• He had become the chief gardener of the Duke of Devonshire and responsible for the management of the main estate of the Duke in Chatsworth.

• It’s a place where Paxton realized, two experimental greenhouse, which would play a role in the initial design of the Crystal Palace.

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• The Great Stove, a giant greenhouse started in 1838 and completed in 1840.

• Another key realization of Paxton at Chatsworth was the 1850 lily house that built to host the giant lily plant called the Victoria regia.

• There, Paxton actually used a completely innovative roof principles, using much longer sash bars supported by iron trusses, that would be a very principle for the Crystal Palace roof techniques.

• The genius of Paxton lies not only in the general conception of his building but also in the very close attention paid to details.

• It’s quite interesting that glass, which is, with iron, one of the most emblematic materials of the Industrial Era. • So how did Paxton enter the story of the Great Exhibition?

• He imagined that actually a greenhouse like solution would actually function much better at that scale, and especially would be lighter and less expensive.

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• He begin to sketch the principle of the Crystal Palace:

• The fist version of Paxton’s project:

• The Crystal Palace also marks the emerge of a totally new idea in architecture, which is the idea of flexibility.

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5.4 BUILDING

• A church with a central nave, which is 72 feet large, and rises at the height of 64 feet.

• Four times longer than the greatest church in the United Kingdom and with a much thinner structure.

• The first time that a building gave this impression of being infinite.

• Because of its scale, the building confronted its designers unexpected problems: How to evacuate water, the rain that fell on the roof. The solution adopted, which Paxton had tested in his lily house, using hollow columns, in which the water would actually be evacuated related to the sewer of the city.

• Another interesting aspect to note is actually the double level of reading of a structure like this one, for example, the node in order to additionally stabilize the structure, you have these giant ties that intersect.

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• Even in London, sometimes, you can get sun and the building can get pretty hot. This is actually one of the louvres of Paxton.

• Putting in place the barrel vault elements of the transept was not such a simple process.

• You have these little carriages on rails the enabled to go a bit faster when putting in place the large sheets of glass produced by the Chance Brothers Factory.

• One can say that the Crystal Palace marks the beginning of the spilt between the taste of public at large and what professionals, like architects, care about.

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5.5 THE EXHIBITION

• In February 1851, the construction of the building was almost complete.

• What kind of painting, in order to animate the entire building.

• The 19th century was obsessed with color.

• One is to paint everything in white. To the contrary one could try using red, which is a color that has a tendency to make things look more closer and more present.

• The Crystal Palace had presented some analogies with church, or more generally, religious architecture.

• If painting the Crystal Palace was actually a complex problem, organizing the exhibition was another. How to bring order to millions of artifacts.

• The exhibition organize in four parts:

1. Raw materials

2. The machinery

3. Manufacturers

4. Art • This very logical order created at least two problems:

1. The four sections were not of equivalent size.

2. Such a division blurred national distinction, which was clearly something some nations

did not want

• Between the 1st May, 1851 and the 11th of October of the same year day on which the exhibition was declared officially closed, some six million people visited the Crystal Palace.

• This is not yet the period of department store, but we can understand also the continuity between the water of 19th Century department stores and a place like the Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition.

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5.6 THE AFTERMATH

• At the beginning of October 1851, the exhibition was declared officially closed, and the problem then arose of what to do with the Crystal Palace.

• He decided to rebuild another Crystal Palace - larger, more beautiful, and turn it into a private venue for the entertainment of the crowds, this was done in Sydenham, in the suburb of London.

• It was a very large construction, better buit. the buidling survived until the 1930s.

• This was a theme park, you had garden, fountains, and all kinds of displays linked to ideas of exotic travel.

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• Paris became the capital of world exhibition during the second half of the 19th century, with exhibitions in 1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900.

• What’s the meaning of all that?

• The idea of technology, progress, human industry, all these things we’ve seen. The need for symbols.

• Part of the paradox of history of architecture is that it feeds upon the concrete objective relation between a building and its period, between a building and the social and political forces of the time.

• It’s inseparably about materiality and imagination.

• From that perspective, the Crystal Palace is definitely a very important moment, for this building actually was, for a very short period, at least for its 1851 avatar, material reality.

• It remained for a much longer time, probably until today, an important landmark in our architecture imagination.

6. THE DIALECTICS OF GLASS AND STEEL INTRODUCTION

• The Crystal Palace produces, perhaps, almost unintentional architecture effects out of this new technology.

• Next, we’ll pursue examples of the refinement of the aesthetic intention and the expression of the representation power of the new architecture of metal and glass.

6.1 FROM STONE TO STEEL

•The development of technologies that allow the production of large sheets of glass and the materials with tensile strength, like steel, had the power to enormously change the buildings are made.

•How would that change architecture as the art of building?

6.2 BEHRENS’S THEORY

• From the middle of 19th century, there was a strong movement to apply artistic design production to sties in large industrial complexes.

• Architecture begin around the end of 19th century and intensifying in the 20th century began to be used for commercial purposes.

•Scholars largely agree that it was the turbine factory for the Allgemeine Elekticitats-Gesellschaft or General Electric Company, in Germany is the seminal example of architecture entering in to this commercial representation, and at the same time wanting to use these new materials of steel and glass.

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• The architect Peter Behrens in 1907 was appointed artistic director responsible for creating an entire image system, or branding package, for this international company.

• It was Behren’s charge to bring that building type- that kind of industrial, functional building type into the status of architecture as an art.

• This new architecture would play, which would be on the one hand representing the commercial power of these great corporations, and also to even participate in creating national identity.

Greek times Temple

Medieval times

Renaissance

Christian church

Aristocracy

• With this kind of Hegelian understanding of this teleological development of architecture in relation to social ethos, or a kind of cultural ethos, he looked at his own time.

• The way he did was to reduce the building down to four elements:

1. Fire (Ceramics) - Society

2. Base (Masonry) - Attachment to the earth

3. Tectonics (Carpentry) - elements joint together

4. Enclosure (Weaving) - Pattern / Texture

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6.3 THE AEG FACTORY

• Behrens starts with what is really a kind of social but also technological device that is at the heart of the architectural program.

• He starts with the base, run around the entire building.

• On this giant masonary base, Behrens than constructs a tectonic system made of steel.

• Transalting Semper’s theory into an architecture of steel, glass, and concrete, Behrens is able to bring the building of the industrial factory into realm of architecture, capital “A”, and even to compare the factory building with the monumental tradition that begins with the greek temple.

6.4 THE FAGUS FACTORY

• Behrens’s AEG turbine factory was a seminal building. It was enormously influential.

• The young Walter Gropius worked for Peter Behrens exactly at the time that the design of the AEG factory was underway. Gropius absorbed many of Behrens’s ideas.

• Architecture was not just building, but was building raised to the level of art.

• This is Gropius’s building for the Fagus Factory, which was a small factory which manufactured shoe lasts.

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• He starts very much like Behrens, putting his attention on the glass wall and on the mansonry construction that supports the glass wall.

• The corners, as in the turbine factory, are still a kind of primary anchor for the building. The glass bay is bent exactly in half, so that the glass seems to wrap around the corner.

• The visual effect is that of what we call a curtain wall. In the case of the Fagus Factory, it’s not a proper curtain wall in that sense. The individual panes of glass are still attached to the structure just behind them. But the visual appearance, is that they’re hanging free of the structure.

• He manages to design a variation that we might think of as even more modern than the AEG factory, moving architecture even further to an industrial glass and steel aesthetic.

6.5 THE SEAGRAM BUILDING

• Glass become, for modern architects, the essential material of the future.

• Glass was endowed not only with material visual qualities, but also with spiritual qualities.

• The German architect Mies van der Rohe would design buildings in America that would become the epitome of glass and steel skyscrapers.

• Mies also worked in the office of Peter Behrens.

• New York in 1954 in his project for the Seagram building where these experiments were first realized in a commercial office tower.

• The Seagram Building was the administrative headquarters of the Canadian distillery Seagram’s, it was located on Park Avenue in downtown New York.

• He first sets the building back from the street line, creating a fairly deep plaza in front of the building.

• The essential thing to be expressed by a high-rise building in steel and glass, for Mies, is the idea of structure.

• How do you make the essence of the building, which is structure, how do you make that visible?

• Mie’s solution is to add an additional steel I-Section 56

• It actually has no structural function whatsoever it is an ornament.

• This I-section in front of the glass is playing the role that in architectural terms, we call a mullion.

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7. TECHNOLOGY TAMED: LE CORBUSIER’S MACHINES FOR LIVING

• The architects Peter Behrens and Mies van der Rohe, in different ways, maintain deep connections to the ongoing classical tradition in their new architecture of steel and glass.

• They use classicism to tame technology in order to give representation to the new corporations that arose from technical and economic advances.

• We next look at a powerful example of how ne techniques of concrete construction supported the pictorial and spatial elaboration of hat another modern architect, Le corbusier, called his “machines for living”.

7.1 THE DOM-INO

• Le Corbusier was beginning here to conjure a new architecture.

• He wanted to reconcile these challenges with the great architecture of the past (Classical architecture of Greece and Rome.

• The new architecture, Le Corbusier said, would be “a machine for living.”

• Years earlier, in 1914, he had conceived that he called the Dom-in house.

• The Dom-ino is really more of a diagram than a building.

• You can see it’s really a superstructure. It’s all plan and all section.

• It’s really a prototype of potential of the new technology and reinforced concrete, glass, and steel.

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7.2 VILLA LA ROCHE-JEANNERET

• Looking at a few of the villas of Le Corbusier will allow us to further articulate the interaction of new technology with the historical continuity of the discipline of architecture.

• The first of these we’ll look at is the Villa La Roche-Jeanneret.

• He built two houses for two families - kind of twins that would be bridged by a common gallery.

• Every view of the geometry and the compositional features of the house must be taken in as a result of movement through the spaces and movement through walls, through surfaces and come around figures and walls.

• The dialectic of frontality and rotation combine to produce a kind of spatial and formal knowledge, combine to produce architectural information in the architectural imaginary.

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7.3 VILLA GARCHES

• The villa stein-de-Monzie, usually called simply by its location, Garches is a very different kind of translation of the Dom-ino system into a suburban house.

• We can see the column grid, slabs, its relationship to the earth, the seperation of the structure column from the interior walls that allows a free arrangement of the plan.

• Windows go across the entire width of the facade, hat Le Corbusier would call ribbon windows or elongated windows.

• It was an industrial space, a new kind of space, which along with automobiles and airplanes, were the object-type that Corbusier thought represented mondern industry and modern spirit

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7.4 THE FIVE POINTS OF A NEW ARCHITECTURE

• It was intended to familiarize a lay public, an international public, with the ideas underlying this new architecture.

• They are:

1. The pilotis: Column support the horizon slab and raise the building above the ground

2. The roof garden: Replaces the pitched roof and the attic with an open air room.

3. The free plan: The paralyzed plan is a plan of rooms: each one discrete from the other,

created by walls that are themselves load bearing. New possibilities of

space, form, that can be explored sculpturally, architecturally, as well as

programmatically.

4. The ribbon window: a window that produces a panorama.

5. The free facade: a kind of thinner wrapper that encloses the building and emphasizes the volumetic qualities.

7.5 VILLA SAVOYE

• The pilotis, the long window, the roof garden, the glass facade.

maison La Roche

maison a Garches

villa Savoye 62

8 DRAWING UTOPIA: VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE OF THE 18TH CENTURY INTRODUCTION

• The control of movement and view in the work of Le Corbusier produces an almost cinematic representation.

• We’ll deal more directly with architecture’s relationship to its various social and historical contexts.

• In the upcoming, we’ll look at the visionary architects of the 18th century and their use of architecture as a way of speaking to communicate meaning.

8.1 LEDOUX’S UTOPIAN CITY OF CHAUX

• Focus on a period in the late 18th century, and on a group of architects called the visionary architects.

• One of visionary architects by the name of Claude Nicolas Le doux (1736-1803)

• Perspectival view of the the ideal City of Chaux

• The topography unveils and reveals mountains in the background.

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• We only have 2 roads to get in and out of town

8.2 REPRESENTING UTOPIA: MORE AND VITRUVIUS

• Sir Thomas More’s “Utopia” (novel in 1516) • Crucial about this book: Divided into two paths:

First: a conversion (critique of contemporary society)

Second: encounter of traveller who describes the island of Utopia that he’s visited • The word of Utopia has two meaning: “no place” or “happy place” • Go back to the classical world, in fact, and look at the architectural treatise of Vitruvius (Roman architect and engineer from the first century BC)

The diagram shows us an ideal form enclosed

by a protective wall like a kind of military fort.

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The very first ideal city conceived in the Renaissance called Sforzinda, the town of Sforzinda.

• We can see Vitruvian principles being extended and imagined in the Italian Renaissance with the military fortress of the ancients still the dominant metaphor for urban planning.

8.3 FILARETE’S SFORZINDA

• Invented by an architectural theorist - he was also a sculptor- by the name of Filarete.

• It’s an eight-pointed star (recuperating the Vitruvian) objection to the eight provailing winds and the idea of the hygienic city (Streets and Canals) • The circle in the drawing are defensive towers.

• Society: Spiritual, political, economic and judicial.

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8.4 BOULLÉE’S ARCHITECTURE PARLANTE

• What’s important is that this relation of ideal city and inventing institutions or public institutions anew with which to reorgainze the social order really emerged fully articulated only for the first time in the 18th century.

• Boullée​(1728-1799), another one of these visionary architect whose “City of the Dead”.

• He was elected to France’s official architectural institution: the Royal Academy of Architecture.

Unbuildable Projects

City of the Dead • You sense the ghost of the ideal city in this so-called “City of the Dead” rendered as eternal as nature itself.

• How our bodies, how our senses react to the spaces around us, to the architectural spaces around us?

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A funerary monument characterizing the genre of a buried architecture • First, It means that the image is tied to sublime because the subject or purpose of the building we see is, in fact, an architecture of death, Gateway to a cemetery.

• Second, it characterizes what Boullée called a genre or type. This is an important word in the 18th century: type or typology.

• Third, that genre or type actually has a name. Boullée calls it “buried architecture” • The primary purpose of architecture was to imagine possibilities, for Boullée.

“Architecture is the only art by which we can put Nature to work, and this unique advantage makes manifest its sublime aspect. The means by which nature can be put to work, which belong to architecture, come from the power to effects of light belongs to architecture. For in all the monuments that are capable of stirring the soul and making us experience the horrors of darkness, or, conversely, that create transportive sensations through brilliant effects, the architect, who must know these means and master them, can dare to say I create light” • First, that architecture is linked to nature.

• Second, that the sublime character of architecture is based on that link to nature.

• Third, Boullée’s assumption that, somehow, the formal character of a building affects our senses. We feel horror at darkness We feel jubilation at light.

• Finally, the equation between architect and God: “I create light”

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8.5 THE PRODUCTION OF THE SUBLIME: CENOTAPH TO NEWTON

• Boullée ingeniously put nature to work.

• Boullée is imagining, forcing us to navigate downwards and then proceed down a long dark, and seemingly endless or infinite corridor.

• Daylight here theatrically illuminates and creates the inside effect of a night sky, brightly lit up by the stars.

• Boullée actually made these drawings for students.

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9. THE POMPIDOU CENTER IN THE CITY OF PARIS

• The late 20th century economy sponsored not only an industry that produced machines like Behrens’s turbine factory or Henry Ford’s assembly line, but also what philosophers called culture industry.

9.1 INTRODUCTION

• A cultural and art center in the Marais district on Place Beaubourg in Paris, designed by the team of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.

• What we want to do now is to think about the Pompidou Center in the city of Paris at a particular moment in time as a kind of representation, as a kind of registration and it’s actually helping us produces an understanding of a very particular moment in history.

9.2 PLATEAU BEAUBOURG AND THE EVENTS OF MAY ‘68

• The events of May ‘68 were a paradigm of what the situationist were calling for, a new way of practicing the city, a new spatial practice.

• If the events were not a huge political success, they had, nevertheless, enormous social and cultural impact.

9.3 THE PROJECT

• During this time, Georges Pompidou was the Prime Minister of Present Charles de Gaulle and actually become his successor as present after the events of May. • International competition was launched received almost 700 entries from all over the world. And the team of Renzo Piano and Richard Rodgers won.

MUSEUM LIBRARY

• The public library occupies the first three levels, The museum and the library overlap on the third floor, and the museum continues up to the fourth and the fifth floor and from the very top floor you get this amazing view of the city of Paris.

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• The building itself comprised the series of floors, uncluttered by columns, supported by enormous trusses.

• In front of that, supported by these brackets, is a thin network of horizontals, verticals, and diagonals that operates mainly in tension together with these little brackets and struts to give stability.

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9.4 BAUDRILLARD’S PERIODIZATION

• Periodization is really just the idea of diving or partitioning the past into chunks or into separate moments, that each have their own sort of different identity.

Medieval - Renaissance - Baroque - Modernism - Postmodern • We’re going to use the periodization of a French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) • Baudrillard characterizes his periods as what he calls “three orders of the simulacra”

First order: call “imitation” or “counterfeit” of the simulacrum occurs in time really from

the Renaissance up until the industrial Revolution

Second order: the simulacrum is what he calls “production”. The beginning is around the

industrial Revolution when industrialized manufacturing becomes possible • The different in the first order and the second order can also be seen in the difference between an automation and a robot

Third order: What he calls “simulation” what happens in simulation is that the variability to

distinguish between the representation and the real goes away.

9.5 BEAUBOURG AS SIMULATION

• The Centre Pompidou in the city of Paris is Baudrillard’s example of the architecture in the third order of the simulacra.

• He sees the building like a kind of nuclear power plant.

• It looks like an oil refinery, its interior is like a warehouse.

• The Baudrillard actually compares the Centre Pompidou to the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower is a monument, but it’s a monument to nothing. It just marks a place.

• The Centre Pompidou does something very similar it marks a place.

9.6 CONCLUSION

• Baudrillard expect art to be different from everyday life. He expects, like Breuer, that art have a sincerity and a profundity.

• It’s a place where different sites in the city, different spaces in the city can be brought together, can be connected, can be examined, contested but also represented.

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10. PRESENTING THE UNREPRESENTABLE

• To fully represent what is truely human is architecture’s most important function.

• Ultimately, maybe that’s what the pyramids did. Maybe that’s what the Gothic Cathedral did.

Maybe that’s what the temple did.

10.1 INTRODUCTION

• There is no marked entry there are many places you can enter the project. There’s also no clear exit.

• In May 2005, the Memorial to the Murdered Jew of Europe opened in Berlin Mitte, which is the centermost borough of the city of Berlin.

• The project was designed by the American architect Peter Eisenman.

• It comprises almost 3,000 stelae, which are these concrete pillars or block on a site that’s almost the size of three football fields.

• It tooks almost 17 years to complete because of debate surrounding the project.

• The memorial is dedicated to the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide in World War II. • The project is an architectural memorial.

• It is the abstraction of the architecture as a response tot he need for critical memory, or abstraction as a way of producing critical memory.

• 2,711 blocks that seem to come somehow out of the earth and create this sober, gray, awesome field.

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10.2 SITE AND PROJECT

• The site is right in the center of Berlin • And the reason is basically that between 1963 and 1989 the site was occupied by the Berlin Wall, which separated Eastern Berlin from Western Berlin.

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• Each block is about three feet wide and almost eight feet long.

• 2,711, doesn’t sigify anything. It’s not a date, number of victims. It’s purely random.

• This is not the cemetery. It’s a rather inert field of blocks.

10.3 THE BITBURG CONTROVERSY

• In 1985, relationships between Germany and the United States were beginning to warm up a little bit after a very long period of sort antagonism.

• The Bitburg Controversy helped produce a kind of public understanding of the conditions that required a memorial to the murdered Jews.

• On the other hand, there was a recognition for the need for a critical memory - a kind of collective responsibility of constantly working through the past as part of one’s everyday life.

10.4 MODES OF ABSTRACTION

• Eisenman’s project was the most abstract of 19 submissions.

• Why did the architect choose abstraction over some more realistic depiction of the abject suffering of the victims?

• To represent the victim suffering, realistically, give us an image that fixes- that stabilize - the victim’s condition, rather than actually inviting us and requiring us an active living memory.

• Abstract architecture tend to focus more on form and structure rather than contents and subject matter.

• The most important in this project is repetition. Repetition also gives a kind of randomness and then limitlessness to the project.

• The first operation of abstraction is repetition. The second aspect of abstraction involves us with a different dimension of the project.

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10.5 FORM OF THE SIGN

• Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) who gave lecture in linguistics right around the turn of the 20th Century.

• Saussure is one of the most important influences on architectural theory because of his theory of the sign.

• Two components: Concept Signified Signifier

Sound-Image • Third moment in the theory of sign in the work of the American Linguist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914).

• Pierce thought that there we’re three distinct modes to the sign.

• The first mode, which he called the symbolic. Let’s say the bald eagle is a symbol for American spirit. The bald eagle got nothing to do directly, casually, functionally with American spirit. It just means that American and others, as a kind of collective consensus agree that bald eagle is going to stand for, is going to represent American spirit. So symbol requires audience.

• The Second sign is called the index. The index is different from the symbol in a couple of ways.

• Say, a bullet hold is an index of the fact that a bullet has been shot. So the bullet hole is an index.

• Smoke is an index of fire, whether or not there’s someone there to see and interpret the smoke.

• The final sign is icon. An icon simply looks like the thing that is represents. So a statue of a soldier holding a rifle in a helmet, in a uniform, looks like a soldier holding a rifle in that uniform.

10.6 CONCLUSION

• The Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin uses abstraction to produce a critical memory.

• It’s a memory that comes from the slabs themselves from the way they’re organized, from the way that the organization of the project itself reflects the enormity of the scale, the systematicity, the randomness of the Holocaust itself.

• This is the critical memory that Eisenman is attempting to produce.

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