A4398 Materia: organicism and assembly
History/Theory SeminarPeter Testa
The demise of a craft tradition, the pressure of economic demands, technological and scientific developments as well as new existential orientations in the twentieth century have challenged architects to reconsider the making of material forms. The seminar will study the nature of these fundamental transformations and investigate correspondences between structural materials, tectonic forms, and spatial configurations in selected 20 th century works. The research seminar will operate at a point of intersection where philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses overlap with industrial techniques, material knowledge, and spatial inquiry. It is the intention of the seminar to turn material, structural, mechanical, and techniques of design and construction into articulate issues allowing architects to seize control over the building process and to overcome the increasing separation between conception and execution that has led to a loss of qualities in the built world.
It is not simply a question of choosing the material over the dematerialized or the tectonic over the electronic. The seminar will purposefully maintain a critical alienation from the reactive assertion of architectural value, of the concrete nature of the discipline and the consistency of tectonic logic while remaining equally skeptical of the architect as flaneur on the boulevard of the media, embracing the spirit of the time on the fortuitous and immediate level . The challenge facing architecture and this research seminar is to expand the concept of the concrete and to extend the play of intuition to new domains that include the electronic and the archaic. In the context of increasing convergence between natural processes and artificial systems the seminar will critically re-examine the concept of Organicism understood as the relation between all elements of construction and form such that the whole and all the parts are simultaneously generated and mutually inter acting. This seminar seeks to make visible and articulate the tension between the physical and the intellectual in various architectural research programs in an effort to establish principles underlying the making of material forms in our time.
SCHEDULE BY WEEK
1. Introduction: Architecture as Material Culture in an Electronic Age
2. Lecture/Discussion: Archaic and Electronic Material Intelligence
3. American Experiments in Wood Frame construction: Wright/Venturi/Gehry
4. Natural processes and artificial systems: Marcel Duchamp/Alfred Hitchcock/Richard Artschwager
5. Alvar Aalto: Organic Assemblies
6. Le Corbusier: Idea and Form Maker
7. Mies van der Rohe: technology and the Efflorescence of Nature
8. Alvaro Siza: Combinatorial Transliteration
9. Experimental and Popular Architecture in America: Buckminster Fuller/Charles & Ray Eames/Chevron Station
10. Crafted Technology: James Stirling/Norman Foster/Nicholas Grimshaw
11. Archaic and Modern Material Intelligence: Louis Kahn/Herzog & de Meuron
12. The Aesthetics of Assembly: Venturi & Scott Brown/Frank Gehry
REQUIRED READINGS
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1979
James Brook and Ian Boal, Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information, 1995
Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, New York, Zone Books, 1989
RESEARCH PROJECTS
Seminar participants are to select two projects and carryout comprehensive research within the subject area of the workshop. Research projects will employ primary documentation with an emphasis on how a work is assembled materially and conceptually. The construction of analytical and experimental models, drawings, and other mediums will be used to study and represent relations between idea, form and material. Research will extend to consideration of the production processes underlying teach work. All studies will begin with the selection of a specific detail and move towards an analysis of the work and oeuvre of the architect. The instructor will meet students weekly to collaborate on research projects.