Narratives of Modern Architecture: learning at the intersection of cross-historical constructions (original) (raw)
Related papers
2020
Contemporary research on cities has shifted its focus from analysing formal features to aspects related to change and interaction dynamics. Seeing a city with its architecture as a system of mutual interactions and connections enables us to consider and analyse the relationships, processes, heterogeneous meanings and interpretative possibilities. Thanks to this approach, we can explore diverse narratives focusing on architectural objects, shaped by, among others, changing social, political or economic conditions, as well as those resulting from the implementation of various conservation concepts. The article presents these issues primarily with reference to creating contemporary narratives and, at the same time, reinterpreting architectural heritage important for the local community. It is a particularly interesting and current issue, given the fact that, in contrast to other fields of art, the analysis of architecture is still dominated by an approach which defines objects in a st...
RE-THINKING THE ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY COURSE IN ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION
Timeless History Course in a Changing Present As a consequence of the general failure of our Modernist experiments in social life values, attitudes, disciplines and their practice, societies and above all meaning appear to be fracturing (Toffler 1980, Gür 2014). Old Modernist sense of architecture is lost. This has immense impact on architectural education: architectural education as a whole, but especially the conduct of studios and the delivery of history course definitely require significant reconstruction. In the present argument the focus will be on the architectural history course. The nature of the course will be expounded upon, its method of delivery and the content will be dealt with the aim of proposing here a timeless-flexible, adaptable and resilient approach for architectural history course which has implications for historiography, as well. At this point a concise explanation on the nature of the architectural history & theory course needs to be rendered, and the problems it shares with general history needs to be clarified.
This paper asks the following question: can university architecture students benefit from a change, more engaging and fun approach to learning history of architecture through drama? It presents the findings of a 5-year old pioneering project to spear-head a mood-change in teaching History of Architecture for university architecture students in Egypt. The approach, to be called “Collaborative Character Dramatization or CCD”; puts the student at the steering wheel of the course through a number of exciting activities that involve integrating drama and multimedia production of many types into their learning cycle. Rather than just memorizing a style or a school, student self-learn about the architect, institutions, society and events that shaped the architect’s style in an exciting and creative media production of their choice. Pre-and-post-drama surveys, word-clouds and personal observation of the students showed amazing results: a group of very inspired and learned students, whose course objectives fulfillment rates were very high, and with impacts on their own awareness and personality exceeding the course boundaries. The findings were consistent and progressing throughout the years, producing a new breed of motivated, confident and creative students.
Looking at how meaning is constructed in buildings and how it is communicated to the viewer, this intriguing study will be of interest to anyone concerned with archi tecture and culture; from architects to museum specialists and exhibition designers. Arrangement of spaces, social relationships and cultural content is fundamental to how buildings are shaped, used and perceived. Narrative enters architecture through the ways in which space is structured to achieve specifi c effects on our perception. Architects employ conceptual-formal patterns independently from a viewer's experience, but also organize space from the viewpoint of an observer. The act of perceiving is linked with the sequential unfolding of information as our bodies pass through space. Examining the notions of conceptual, perceptual and social space, Architecture and Narrative explores the ways in which these three dimensions interact in the design and life of buildings. Sophia Psarra is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, USA. She has collaborated with leading cultural institutions in the UK and the US on issues of spatial organization, planning of exhibitions and visitor experience.
Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century
2021
W riting Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century gathers together recent scholarship to explore the opportunities presented by rethinking issues of evidence and narrative in architectural history. Unifying the volume is a set of intertwined questions: What kinds of evidence does architectural history use? How is this evidence organized in different narratives and toward what ends? What might these concerns tell us about architectural historians’ disciplinary and institutional positions in the past and present? And finally, how can consideration of evidence and narrative help us all reimagine the limits and the potentials of the field? These matters have not generally been addressed in architectural history.1 The twenty numbered chapters in Writing Architectural History represent a broad range of subjects, from medieval European coin trials and eighteenthcentury Haitian revolutionary buildings, to Weimar German construction firms and present-day refu...
IDES’19 International Design and Engineering Symposium | Sustainability, Innovation, Production, 2019
Architectural history education is a fundamental component of architectural education curricula at undergraduate level all over the world. Although learning architectural history is an important means for architecture students to understand and interpret what others have done before, it is usually taken for granted. In most schools, it is taught as linear in following a chronological order, as subjective due to its origin in the discipline of history, and as non-global due to the dominance of the 'Western'-based and Eurocentric canon of great monuments and architects as important figures. Such approaches constituted the basis of architectural history survey books that were used to support architectural history courses until the 1980s. In 1985, Spiro Kostof's A History of Architecture became a turning point and significant attempt to globalise architectural history. Moreover, since the late 20 th century, all three of these notions have been continuously challenged and debates have occurred regarding how to redefine architectural history focusing on the issues of linearity, subjectivity and globalisation. This paper seeks to elucidate the issues of linearity, subjectivity and globalisation by analysing and comparing different views on them in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how architectural history can be redefined and taught more effectively.
How does teaching architectural history meld into design education? A quick studio
Artium
This study aims to reveal a design case in architectural education so that the gap between theory and practice can be reduced. For this purpose, an architectural history course and working in an architectural studio were chosen as the fundamental courses which constitute experimental area of the study. The inquiry orientation of this experimental practice is the discussion of the contributions and consequences of different perceptual methods to the teaching/learning level, as well as the provision of a variety of practices for direct learning. The method chosen was to adapt the architectural history course, which is generally based on theoretical narrative and supported by visual stimuli, for use in the architectural studio. For this purpose, the concept of style, borrowed from the architectural history course, has been turned into a useful design resource. Styles are described with the use of keywords in terms of their formal, structural, and conceptual features, and these features...
AMPS CONFERENCE 17.1 Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World. Stevens Institute of Technology, AMPS, PARADE, Architecture_MPS. 17—19 June, 2019 Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World., 2020
Architecture is faced with a crisis today: it concerns the loss of novelty and the search for a highly technological, sustainable function, though disconnected with humanity and environmental reality. Can young architects still conceive of and create spaces communicating the complexity and novelty of life? How could architecture be taught and perceived before the built work? I aim to explore how architectural education could respond to the development of a perception of what life is, within the spatial and social complexity of architecture. For this purpose, I would like to use the case study of a small village of the Cyclades; my argument is that studying big architectural drawings and maps, reading architectural descriptions of village landscapes or city areas, or applying sociological and anthropological principles to places is not enough. Only in these ways, students/young architects cannot acquire a profound understanding of what place is or how life evolves in it. Through narratives connected either with the reality of the village landscape or urban reality, I realized the value of metaphor as a natural language sharing a communal way of living connected with the natural and built environment. Consequently, metaphor, narrative and fiction are presented as tools. They offer students/young architects a broader and deeper understanding of what the world they will design for really is, and alleviate them from the preoccupation of what this world should be, as required by contemporary social and political commandments. They equip architects with a way to interpret the local tradition or urban structure into a contemporary way of living and innovation, without responding to architecture and dwelling through form and fashion – instead, they force them to tap more into the social and ethical function of architecture, a “meaningful regionalism” related with humans and the environment.
Narrative Thinking in Architectural Education
2014
Recent research indicates that mainstream architectural practice is in a general state of denial about participation and client/user involvement. Within this paper we argue that this general denial is already acquired during architectural education. Given the fact that architects are influenced by this ‘academic experience’ to such an extent that it influences their professional careers, we argue that it is acceptable to look to education for the root cause and potential alleviation of the problem. Framed within phenomenological thinking (Ricoeur) and pragmatic theory (Dewey), we develop narrative thinking as a basic design attitude which combines user based research and moral imagination. We implement narratives in the design studio to (re)connect designer and client/user. Our main objective is to stress the importance of narratives as a sustainable starting point for a real participatory process. Methodologically we link narrative thinking and research by design. More specifically...