Fue theory 4 lecture 2 history of theory

FUE - Future University in Egypt Faculty of Engineering and Technology

Department of Architectural Engineering

ARC 322: History & Theories of Architecture (4) Fall 2016 Instructor: Dr. Yasser Mahgoub Lecture 2 - History of Theory

History of Theory

History of Theory • Antiquity • 1st century BCE, with the work of Vitruvius.

• Vitruvius was a Roman writer, architect, and engineer active in the 1st century BCE. He was the most prominent architectural theorist in the Roman Empire known today, having written De architectura (known today as The Ten Books of Architecture), a treatise written in Latin and Greek on architecture, dedicated to the emperor Augustus.

History of Theory • Antiquity • 1st century BCE, with the work of Vitruvius.

• Probably written between 27 and 23 BCE. It is the only major contemporary source on classical architecture to have survived.

Divided into ten sections or "books", it covers almost every aspect of Roman architecture, from town planning, materials, decorations, temples, water supplies, etc.

History of Theory • Antiquity • 1st century BCE, with the work of Vitruvius.

• It rigorously defines the classical orders of architecture. It also proposes the three fundamental laws that Architecture must obey, in order to be so considered: firmitas, utilitas, venustas, translated in the 17th century

by Sir Henry Wotton into the English slogan firmness, commodity and delight (meaning structural adequacy, functional adequacy, and beauty).

firmness, commodity and delight structural adequacy, functional adequacy, and beauty

Firmitas firmness

Utilitas

Venustas

commodity

delight

The Vitruvian triad

History of Theory • Antiquity • 1st century BCE, with the work of Vitruvius.

• The rediscovery of Vitruvius' work had a profound influence on architects of the Renaissance, adding archaeological underpinnings to the rise of the Renaissance style, which was already under way.

• Renaissance architects, such as Niccoli, Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, found in "De Architectura" their rationale for raising their branch of knowledge to a scientific discipline.

History of Theory • Middle Ages (Medieval) • Throughout the Middle Ages, architectural knowledge was passed by transcription, word of mouth and technically in master builders' lodges.

• Due to the laborious nature of transcription, few examples of architectural theory were penned in this time period.

History of Theory • Renaissance • Leon Battista Alberti, De Re Aedificatoria, which placed Vitruvius at the core of the most profound theoretical tradition of the modern ages. From Alberti, good architecture is validated through the Vitruvian triad, which defines its purpose. This triplet conserved all its validity until the 19th century.

History of Theory • Enlightenment • New interest in Classical art and architecture.

• Thus the term Neoclassicism, exemplified by the writings of Prussian art critic [Johann Joachim Winkelmann], arose to designate 18th-century architecture which looked to these new Classical precedents for inspiration in building design.

• Major architectural theorists of the Enlightenment include Julien-David Leroy, Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Robert Adam, James Stuart, Georg Friedrich Hegel and Nicholas Revett.

History of Theory • 19th century • Reaction against the dominance of neo-classical architecture came to the fore in the 1820s with Augustus Pugin providing a moral and theoretical basis for Gothic Revival architecture, and in the 1840s John Ruskin developed this ethos.

History of Theory • 19th century • The American sculptor Horatio Greenough published the essay American Architecture in August 1843 in which he rejected the imitation of old styles of buildings and outlined the functional relationship between architecture and decoration.

• These theories anticipated the development of Functionalism in modern architecture.

History of Theory • 20th century • In 1889 Camillo Sitte published ”City Planning According to Artistic Principles”. For Sitte, the most important issue was not the architectural shape or form of a building but the quality of the urban spaces that buildings collectively enclose, the whole being more than the sum of its parts. Sitte's work was revisited by postmodern architects and theorists from the 1970s.

History of Theory • 20th century • Louis Sullivan "form ever follows function“ (The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered of 1896) a central tenet of Modern architectural theory.

History of Theory • 20th century • Ebenezer Howard, founded the garden city movement.

History of Theory • 20th century • Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier provided the theoretical basis for the International Style with aims of using industrialised architecture to reshape society. Towards the end of the century postmodern architecture reacted against the austerity of High Modern (International Style) principles, viewed as narrowly normative and doctrinaire.

History of Theory • 20th century • Frank Lloyd Wright, while modern in rejecting historic revivalism, was idiosyncratic in his theory, which he conveyed in copious writing. Wright did not subscribe to the tenets of the International Style, but evolved what he hoped would be an American, in contrast to a European, progressive course. Wright's style, however, was highly personal, involving his particular views of man and nature. Wright was more poetic and firmly maintained the 19th-century view of the creative artist as unique genius.

This limited the relevance of his theoretical propositions.

History of Theory • Contemporary • In contemporary architectural discourse theory has become more concerned with its position within culture generally, and thought in particular. … discussing philosophy and cultural studies as buildings, and why advanced postgraduate research and doctoral dissertations focus on philosophical topics in connection with architectural humanities.

History of Theory • • • • • • • •

Contemporary Peter Eisenman's and Bernard Tschumi's interest in Derrida's thought Anthony Vidler's interest in the works of Freud and Lacan Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space or texts by Gilles Deleuze.

Phenomenology, Christian Norberg-Schulz Philosophers and historians of science, Nader El-Bizri, Manfredo Tafuri, are interested in new dontological ( the way things are) definitions of architecture vs epistemological definitions (the way we know things) Mark Wigley, architecture is compared to a language which can be invented and re-invented every time it is use - deconstructivist architecture Christopher Alexander's emphasis on The Timeless Way of Building (1979) based on pattern languages that are optimized on-site as construction unfolds.

History of Theory • • • • • • • • • • •

Since 2000 rapid rise of urbanism and globalization developing a new understanding of the city new understandings of the urban conditions of our planet fragmentation and architecture high technology Ecology mass media economism.

"Digital" Architecture.

Biomimicry! (the process of examining nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements, to emulate or take inspiration from them in order to solve human problems. Architects also design organiclooking buildings in the attempt to develop a new formal language.)

History of Theory • Since 2000 • Digital morphogenesis (computational techniques that are influenced by algorithms relevant to biological processes) • Genetic algorithms developed in computer science are used to evolve designs on a computer, and some of these are proposed and built as actual structures.

• Since these new architectural tendencies emerged, many theorists and architects have been working on these issues, developing theories and ideas such as Patrick Schumacher's Parametricism.

History of Theory • Since 2000 • We are witnessing the birth of an entirely new type of architectural theory and practice.

• Contemporary architecture's theoretical world is plural and multicolored.

• There are different dominant schools of architectural theory which are based on linguistic analysis, philosophy, poststructuralism, or cultural theory.

Timeline of architecture

Some architectural theorists Historical • Vitruvius • Leon Battista Alberti • Andrea Palladio • Sebastiano Serlio • Gérard Desargues • Filarete • Francesco di Giorgio • Teofilo Gallaccini • Marc-Antoine Laugier • Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremere de Quincy • Giambattista Piranesi • Carlo Lodoli • Francesco Milizia • John Ruskin • Horatio Greenough • Eugène Viollet-le-Duc • Karl Friedrich Schinkel • Paul Sédille • Hermann Muthesius Formalism and space • Hans Auer • Konrad Fiedler • Henri Focillon • Paul Frankl • Adolf von Hildebrand • Emil Kaufmann • Theodor Lipps • Alois Riegl • Geoffrey Scott • August Schmarsow • Gottfried Semper • John Summerson • Robert Vischer • Heinrich Wölfflin • Wilhelm Worringer

Modernist • Reyner Banham • Ernesto Nathan Rogers • Bruno Zevi • Sigfried Giedion • Leonardo Benevolo • Steen Eiler Rasmussen • Otto Wagner • Le Corbusier • Adolf Loos • Lewis Mumford • Edoardo Persico • Raymond Unwin • Ebenezer Howard • Rudolf Arnheim • Lúcio Costa Postmodern and contemporary • Christopher Alexander • Stan Allen • Pier Vittorio Aureli • Andrea Branzi • Markus Breitschmid • Preston Scott Cohen • Peter Cook (architect) • Gillo Dorfless • Nader El-Bizri • Peter Eisenman • Hal Foster • Kenneth Frampton • Marco Frascari • K. Michael Hays • Charles Jencks • Jeffrey Kipnis • Rem Koolhaas • Leon Krier • Sanford Kwinter

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catherine igraham

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Sylvia Lavin David Leatherbarrow Marc Linder Christian Norberg-Schulz Werner Oechslin Juhani Pallasmaa Alberto Pérez-Gómez Paolo Portoghesi Aldo Rossi Colin Rowe Joseph Rykwert Yehuda Safran Denise Scott Brown Richard Sennett Daniel Sherer Robert Somol Deyan Sudjic Manfredo Tafuri Robert Tavernor Panayotis Tournikiotis Peter Trummer Bernard Tschumi Oswald Mathias Ungers Robert Venturi Dalibor Vesely Anthony VIdler Paul Virilio Sarah Whiting Bruno Zevi

Thank You.