A4229 Studies in Tectonic Culture
History/Theory SeminarKenneth Frampton
The tectonic suggests itself today as a critical strategy largely because of the current tendency to commodify architectural form. In some respects, this interest arises out of a reaction to Robert Venturi's concept of the decorated shed. In this sense it is response to the current fashion for treating architecture as though it were little more than an expendable mise-en-scene . This amortizable scenographic approach has been accompanied by the general dissolution of references in the late modern world.
Greek in origin, the term tectonic derives from the term tekton, signifying carpenter or builder. This in turn stems from the Sanskrit taksan, referring to the craft of carpentry and to the use of the ax. In Greek it appears in Homer, where it alludes to the art of construction in general. The poetic connotation of the term first appears in Sappho where the tekton , the carpenter, assumes the role of the poet. This meaning undergoes further evolution as the term passes from being something specific and physical, such as carpentry, to a more generic notion of making, bordering on the poetic.
That the idea of tectonic and the term itself acquired an altogether richer connotation in Germany is suggested in an 1850 definition provided by the architectural scholar, K.O. Muller who was to define it as pertaining to a series of arts which form and perfect dwellings and places of assembly ...we call this class of artistic activities tectonics. Their highest point is architectonics which rises above the trammels of necessity and may become powerfully representative of deep feelings.
Strongly influenced by Muller, Gottfried Semper was to endow the term with similar connotations in his categorical break with the Vitruvian paradigm. Semper announced this rupture with the publication of his Four Elements of Architecture in 1852, wherein a new ethnographic theory of culture divides the primitive hut into four basic elements; (1) earthwork, (2) hearth, (3) framework/roof, and (4) a light-weight enclosing membrane. Semper went on to classify the process of building into two basic procedures; into the tectonics of the frame, in which light-weight, linear components are assembled so as to embody a spatial matrix and the stereotomics of the earthwork, formed out of the repetitious stacking of heavy-weight units.
In a 1963 essay entitled Structure, Construction, and Tectonics (1963), Eduard Sekler distinguished between structure as the fundamental ordering principle of a work, construction as a particular physical manifestation of this principle, and tectonics as an expressive form representative of the other two modes. This course attempts to re-examine twentieth century architecture from the point of view of the role played by structure and construction in the development of modern form. The lecture sequence will address itself to the so-called autonomy of architecture not so much in terms of space and form but rather from the standpoint of a poetics of construction as this has made itself manifest over the past 150 years.
COURSE REQUIREMENTS
Students may fulfill the requirements of this course through three alternative options; (a) a 3500-5000 word essay on a topic to be agreed with the instructor, ( b) a group study model of an unbuilt work to be agreed upon with the instructor and (c) a take-home examination to be issued on the occasion of the last lecture. The first two options will only remain available up to lecture No. 7.
LECTURE TOPICS
1. Introduction: Notes on the Scope of the Tectonic
2. Graeco-Gothic & Neo-Gothic: The Anglo-French Origins of Tectonic Form
3. The Tectonic Idea and the Prussian Enlightenment
4. Hendrik Petrus Berlage and the Tectonic Synthesis
5. Otto Wagner and the Culture of Ringstrasse
6. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Textile Tectonic
7. Auguste Perret and Structural Classicism
8. Mies Van der Rohe: Avant Garde & Continuity
9. Louis Kahn: Modernization and Monumentality
10. Jorn Utzon: The Pagoda and the Podium
11. Carlo Scarpa: The Logos of Techne
12. The Tectonic Trajectory