Architecture and Culture Beyond the Academic Book: New " Undisciplined " Corporeal Publication (original) (raw)
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Perspecta 38: Architecture After All explores the ever-widening array of political, social, technological, and economic influences in architecture today. Many leading designers and thinkers have turned away from the ideological hegemony of critical theory towards a rediscovered focus on praxis as a means of conceptual positioning.
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PEP/COPPE/UFRJ, 2022
According to philosopher Vilém Flusser, the emergence of historical consciousness in the Western world was a product of a culture based on linear writing. This culture shaped by linear writing is the only one that can really be called “historical”—the cultures that preceded it were prehistorical, and our current culture, shaped by the technical images produced by apparatuses like smartphones, computers and tablets, is posthistorical. This increasingly abstract culture has engulfed almost all the media that made up the “body” of the previous culture, but while drawings, photographs, books, films and music have all become digital, architecture seems to be one of the last points of resilience of the material world. However, to which extent are the ways in which we relate to our buildings and cities—and especially the way we analyse and value these objects—still based in historical criteria? In the increasingly abstract universe of technical images, is the materiality of architecture an ahistorical presence connecting different worlds, or a problem to be overcome? This thesis will explore these questions with the intention to devise strategies to help contemporary architects to structure our existential space in terms that can be understood and appreciated in this new era, shaped by gestures that seem to lack any historical precedent.
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In the course of the twentieth century, a number of modern architects developed a form of empirical research that qualified as quasi-ethnographic by mid-century and has since, due to progressively greater scientific rigor, become genuinely ethnographic. In this essay, Sascha Roesler distinguishes between three forms of architecturalethnographic representation and argues that we need to acknowledge the epistemological specificities of this research. In contrast to the widespread notion that ethnographic research in architecture is tantamount to conducting building surveys, Roesler proposes a representational model that sees buildings as cultural “systems of inscription.” He discusses this model with reference to the work of Dorothy Pelzer, Trevor Marchand, and Hassan Fathy.
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This thesis aims to develop a cognitive map of architectural reproduction to better understand it as both a medium for and the end result of disciplinary practices. To this end, the production of architectural space is understood as a form of mediation in which social relations are reproduced. This analysis is undertaken in an original manner – departing from live experiments in design workshops; using tools of Marxist cultural theory, the sociology of art, and accounts of the production of subjectivity; and focusing on the contradiction between ‘discipline’ and ‘dialectic’. The aim is to investigate possible routes for counter-hegemonic architectural practices that confront ideology and engage in politics. This cognitive map thus aims to clarify – in order to question – the traditional myths of the field and the notion of the individual architectural genius as an independent agent. To call these myths into question, we present an alternative to the narrative of the individual archi...
VRA Bulletin, 2007
The study of architecture has a special and problematic niche within the larger field of art history and visual culture. For many scholars, the complicated terminology of architectural components and the complex mathematics of engineering issues provide a powerful deterrent to engaging with architecture. The vocabulary of architecture is, by and large, not shared with painting and sculpture, although there are some exceptions; for instance, concepts such as texture and lighting are employed in architectural ekphrasis. Beyond the already mentioned engineering issues, formal issues such as massing, proportions, composition, and detailed studies such as profiles and capital analyses share vocabulary with the other arts, but the thrust of the question lies along very different lines. More impenetrable still is the architectural drawing, the abstract rendering in two-dimensions of threedimensional reality, whose conventions are often illegible to the uninitiated. At a fundamental, methodological level, the questions asked of architecture only rarely coincide with those investigated in painting or sculpture. Functional issues of use, social implications, political ramifications, gender questions and religious, devotional repercussions all carry a very different weight in architecture than in painting and sculpture. While these issues are reflected and embedded in other major media, buildings were and are designed to frame and control all these discourses, resulting in architecture being the locus of the lived historical experience, painting and sculpture serving as aspects (among others) of that experience within the building. Thus while the scholarly apparatus surrounding painting and sculpture on one hand and architecture on the other have developed into different organisms, the objects under study belonged together, forming part of the same experiential culture, not just visual in nature but simultaneously encompassing all of the senses, emotions, and intellect.
pp. 188–209, in: Architectural Theory Review 22, no.2, 2018
Learning to account for material formation as 'embodied and embedded, relational and affective' figurations amounts to nothing less than an ethical project. This paper speculates on the agentic status of material arrangements to address a certain impasse yet to be overcome in the productive understanding of the built environment. In its central parts, it respectively revisits two favorite clichés of architectural theory—the Foucauldian dispositif (apparatus) and the Deleuzo-Guattarian agencement (assemblage). Therein I will reclaim their different conceptions of arrangements with the aim to outline where architectural theory could advance a radically more productive understanding of the built environment. The paper here proposes a tactical alliance with the flat, monist, and process-ontological angles of new materialist perspectives. Proposing that there is a clear project waiting for post-critical theory, the paper concludes with some consideration on how architectural theory could affirm this new theoretical agenda.
Corporeality of Architecture Experience
Dimensions
Editorial Summary In »Corporeality of Architecture Experience« Katharina Voigt examines the embodied knowledge in the perception and the exploration of architectural spaces. She highlights embodiment, experience, and sensation as primary fields of investigation. The interrelation of architecture and the human body is described as dependent on bodily ways of knowing and movement as access to sensory encounters with architecture. Relating to the practice of contemporary dance and particularly the work of Sasha Waltz, she regards the body as an archive, generator, and medium of pre-reflexive knowledge, emphasizing its resonance with the space. She exploits the potential which an investigation of the body-based, sensory experience holds when being explicitly addressed and regarded as an integrated part of both, the perception and the design of architecture. [Uta Graff]