CRUDE

Scenarios And Happenstance

Time Semester 1 2023, Wednesdays 6.00pm

Location 100.05.004. Classes in person

Organiser Vivek Subramanian

Skills Presentation tools and Excel (very basic)

Prerequisites None. An interest in the suburbs would benefit.

Duration 12 weeks

How you could undertake and communicate a feasibility WHAT IT

This elective is not intended to turn architecture students into developers or speculators (unless they want to be).

This is not a property development or finance elective, and is not run by someone who is well versed in finance.

This isn’t a professional practice elective either as it's being facilitated by someone who has never practised professionally.

This elective aims to show how you could convert an idea into a rough scenario to see if it’s worth exploring further. And then aims to show how to communicate it.

Is

Collectively we will choose a new neighbourhood town centre in one of Melbourne’s growth areas to undertake a feasibility analysis. This will be done through research, yield studies, modelling some very basic returns, general measurements, how to make assumptions and justify them, introducing related disciplines, and how to present and communicate a potential opportunity.

Over 12 weeks, the elective will be loosely arranged into 3 parts; concept, validation, and presentation.

What It Isnt

degrees of DIFFICULTY

Who has not put down a book in annoyance or tossed one in disgust, to then read it without putting it down. Reading is not nearly as straightforward as its made out to be, we skip words, repeat sentences, miss pages and search for words in a box full of them, We are compromised by reading, we are just as likely to be emboldened as insulted or diminished. we encounter difficulty; we experience doubt, and on occasion we give up. To look at books as repositories of knowledge says nothing of the experience of reading, after all it is not our knowledge of doubt but the feeling of doubt that causes books to shut and be returned to the shelf. And it is not what we know about anger but anger that causes a book to be thrown aside.

Is it ironic then that the feeling of doubt is a prerequisite to understanding the modern text ? .

“I am a thinking (conscious) thing, that is, a being who doubts, affirms, denies, knows a few objects, and is ignorant of many- (“cogito” dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum—res cogitans) Rene Descartes’ 1641

That the very sensation that causes the book to be returned to the shelf is all that we needed to realise its purpose. It followed from Descartes that modern philosophy is the phenomenology of reading, The” I “who doubts; the reader, who mouths the words, is the instrument of knowing that recognises truth.

From Descartes truth is not known but experienced; the experience of the reader reading. This project will carefully read a number of primary texts from Philosophy, Aesthetics and Architecture.

A reflection on each weeks reading will be the basis of a journal, This will be collated and submitted for assessment at the conclusion of the semester.

Text to be exerts from;

1 M Tafuri; Humanism Technical Knowledge and Rhetoric; The debate in renascence Venice.

2 Rousseau; The Social Contract (Foucault commentary)

3Gombrich from Perfernce for the primitive

4 J von Goethe – On German Architecture (commentary by J Pevsner, E H Gombrich and VonMuke and Purdy et el)

5 Alois Riegl; The Modern Cult of Monuments .

6 Wilhelm Worringer; Abstraction and Empathy.

7 Walter Benjamin; On translation. The storyteller.

8 Hegel Notes on aesthetics

9 Roland Bathe; Mythologies .

10 Foucault; What is an Author- (Giorgio Agambon The Author as Geasture)

11 Kuhn; The structure of Scientific Revolutions .Agambon What is a paradigm

12 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – What is Philosophy

13 Elizebeth Groz The thing

14 Agambon from The signiture of all things

Samuel Beckett – texts for nothing

Empathy (Einfuhlung): ... How the body in responding to certain stimuli in dream objectifies itself in spatial forms - and with this also the soul - into the form of the object. -

Robert Vischer

On the optical sense of Form a Contribution to

Aesthetics

Before we as individuals are even conscious of our existence we have been profoundly influenced for a considerable time (since before birth) by our relationship to other individuals who have complicated histories, and are members of a society which has an infinitely more complicated and longer history than they do (and are members of it at a particular time and place in that history); and by the time we are able to make conscious choices we are already making use of categories in a language which has reached a particular degree of development through the lives of countless generations of human beings before us. . . . We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong -

karl Popper

The plant contemplates water, earth, nitrogen, carbon, chlorides and sulphates, and it contracts them in order to acquire its own concept and fill itself with it (enjoyment). The concept is a habit acquired by contemplating the elements from which we come……p 106 Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari What is philosophy

Paul Valéry wrote in a very remote context. “Artistic observation”, he says in reflections on a woman artist whose work consisted in the silk embroidery of figures, “can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend upon no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their existence and value exclusively from a certain accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self.”

Aristotle briefly defended them in his fragmentary Poetics. In particular, Aristotle defended the arts from Plato’s charge that they are cognitively useless, trading in mere images of particulars rather than universal truths, by arguing that it is precisely the arts, or at least poetry, that deliver universal truths in a readily graspable form, unlike, for example, history, which deals merely with particular facts (Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9, 1451a37–1451b10).