Name: Tan Wui Xiang Lecturer: Mr. Prince Reader/Text Title: The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903)
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC 61303) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (August 2017) ID No.: 0321128 Tutorial Time: 10am-11am Synopsis No: 1 Author: Georg Simmel
In the text, Georg Simmel discuss about what happens to people when they live in cities, and how it links to the “resistance of the individual to being leveled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism.” Simmel argues that people in cities must be able to adapt so often to changing circumstances that their feelings are never engaged the way they are for people in more conservative settings. In my opinion, city people react with their heads and not their hearts. All relations are personal, and thus emotionally mediated. Whereas city people must deal with ever-shifting contexts, and therefore they must adapt to protect themselves.
In cities, they are privitize and selfish because the relations are streamlined and instrumentalized. I agree to this as money becomes the measuring standard among people and a nuanced understanding of motives and status can only come against a less fluid social backdrop. Also, I agree that today as “mediatization.” Information becomes fungible like money as it is driven to become mobile and circulate among exchange partners with no social ties. This is how I see it as antagonistic to real qualitative individuality, prompting a pseudo-differentiation based on quantities of things and possessions. Besides, Simmel claims that the complexity of city life and the multiplicity of competing interests brings about a rise in time-consciousness and the death of spontaneity. Nowadays, advance technology gadgets can immediate get whatever information for example internet surfing. Thus, it set against the traditional, organic way of life with its deep emotionality. All in all, the people in rural areas are more friendly and know each other better is because they are less competence, less in density, more safe to communicate and they are all relatives in relationship. While in the cities, the people tends to be careful and not to communicate with strangers because of high human traffic and busy individual schedule. Word Count: 317 Assessed by:
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Name: Tan Wui Xiang Lecturer: Mr. Prince Reader/Text Title: Schulz-Intentions in Architecture
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC 61303) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (August 2017) ID No.: 0321128 Tutorial Time: 10am-11am Synopsis No: 2 Author: Christian Norberg-Schulz
​In the text, Norberg-Schulz talk about the aesthetic dimension of architecture where new aesthetic design should favor the style of the past and corresponding to the functional differences. In my opinion, modern architecture keep varying to suits the contextual responses but forgetting the previous worked-out method based on a clear analysis of functional, sociological and cultural problems.
Norberg-Schulz stated that the aim of architecture is to create particular forms to be correlated with the function, where a building may have particular form in a particular period. I agree with this as different era have different architecture style and the function of a building is corresponding to it and how it influence the people inside the building. Unlike historicism, which information illustrate the relation between problems and solution. To me, architecture has to adapt to the form of life as a whole, the new concretization is not about imitating the past or break completely with the tradition. Moreover, modern architecture are dependent upon the existence of symbol-systems and conserve the structural principles of tradition. Modernism to me is the true tradition of the present due to the understanding of the historical continuity is not to borrow the motives and ideals from the past but always to conquer the human values in new ways.
All in all, modernism for me is new technologies and ideas that people tends to forgot how the nature form of a building can work different function and lead people to react with it in a natural way. It is not about the use of a space with function, but how people use the space by its form. The use of space by form is what we can learn from the history, not the imitation of form, but the intention of a building form to serve its function.
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BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC 61303) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (August 2017) ID No.: 0321128 Tutorial Time: 10am-11am Synopsis No: 3 Author: Juhani Pallasmaa
Name: Tan Wui Xiang Lecturer: Mr. Prince Reader/Text Title: Space, Place, Memory and Imagination: The Temporal Dimension of Existential Space In our globalized world, newness is not just a stylish and aesthetic esteem, it is a vital need of the way of life of utilization. Therefore, an indivisible element of our dreamlike realist culture. In my opinion, human constructions also have the task of preserving the past. Also, we do not just exist in a spatial and material reality but inhabit cultural, mental, and temporal realities. Built structures serve as significant memory devices in three different ways, which are materialise and preserve the course of time and make it visible, concretise remembrance by containing and projecting memories as well as stimulate and inspire us to reminisce and imagine. The significance of objects in our processes of remembering is the main reason why we like to collect familiar or peculiar objects around us. Besides, they expand and reinforce the realm of memories and eventually our very sense of self. This is true that we are not capable of deep imagination outdoors in wild nature or profound imagination calls for the focusing intimacy of a room. I agree that it is to distinguish the lived space from the physical and geometrical space, we can call it ‘existential space.’ Because existential space is structured on the basis of intentions and values reflected upon by an individual, either consciously or unconsciously. Moreover, existential space is a unique quality interpreted through the memory and experience of the individual. To me, every lived experience takes place at the interface of recollection and intention, perception and fantasy, memory and desire. Last but not least, landscapes and buildings are amplifiers of emotions and they reinforce sensations of belonging or alienation, invitation or rejection, tranquility or despair. Through their authority and aura, they evoke and strengthen our own emotions and project them back to us as if these feelings of ours had an external source.
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Name: Tan Wui Xiang Lecturer: Mr. Prince Reader/Text Title: Towards Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance
BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (HONOURS) IN ARCHITECTURE THEORIES OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM (ARC 61303) SYNOPSIS: REACTION PAPER (August 2017) ID No.: 0321128 Tutorial Time: 10am-11am Synopsis No: 4 Author: Kenneth Frampton
In the content, Frampton discuss about local character and reinterpret it with contemporary terms, rather than adapting the traditions directly. Also, architecture should not be captured by technology and history. Additionally, the technological improvements and the financial problems could be the limit of urban design. Therefore, the architectural thoughts are divided into two parts one is profits of technological prediction on the product, and the other one is the provision of a compensatory facade to cover the harsh realities of this universal system.
The two last decades have drastically changed the metropolitan focuses of the created world. Basically, nineteenth century city textures in the mid 1960's have since turned out to be dynamically overlaid by two advantageous instruments of Megapolitan improvement rise and the serpentine expressway. I found out that the movements in the architecture in the mid-19th century, with the starting of industrial process and Neoclassic form, was the reaction to the tradition part to the modernization as the Gothic Revival and the Arts-and-Crafts ideas take up a categorically negative attitude. According to the text, the fundamental strategy of critical regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place. In my mind, it is clear from the above that critical regionalism depends upon maintaining a high level of critic self-consciousness. Plus, it could find its governing inspiration in such things as the range and quality of the local light, or in tectonic derived from a peculiar structural mode, or in the topography of a given site.
Last but not least, I think that the proclamation for a revitalized regional architecture, has adequate roots in the more extensive inspirations. Despite the fact that we are advancing to the cutting edge world human advancement, the national soul and local esteem should not be dismissed later on improvement. Word Count: 311 Assessed by:
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