GSAP onlineAdministrationDegrees | ProgramsAvery LibraryLectures | EventsProjects | CoursesDiscourse ADMINISTRATION

    A4563 Architecture and Time: museums and memorials

    History/Theory Seminar
    Andrew Benjamin

    This seminar will take as its point of departure the proposition that time is an already present quality within building. Time is not limited to the complete and the incomplete but is inextricably connected to function and thus to the way in which the relationship between form and function is to be thought. Time will have a plurality of forms and thus be present in the articulation of different functions. It will be argued that museums are only able to function because of the implicit or explicit commitment to differing enactments of historical time. The site of this enactment is the building's structuration. In the case of memorials, they will also involve a similar commitment to historical time which will be evidenced in the way the project of remembrance is staged by the memorial's actual presence. An important part of this seminar will be an analysis of the contemporary force of Freud's Mourning and Melancholia for an understanding of the project of remembrance at the present. This text will be central when what is involved is a Holocaust memorial.
    Starting with the writings of Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin that seminar will move between a study of philosophical or theoretical texts and an analysis of specific buildings. In the case of the latter the central question will concern the presence of differing conceptions of time within different building projects. The final part of the seminar's own project will be to show that a fundamental part of the criteria of judgement for any building will be structural presence of time.

    CENTRAL TEXTS
    W. Benjamin, Re. the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, in G. Smith, ed., Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, University of Chicago Press
    W. Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in Illuminations, Harcourt, Brace
    S. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, in the Standard Edition, Volume XIV
    T. Adorno, Functionalism Today, in Oppositions 17, Summer 1979
    T. Adorno, Valery Proust Museum, in Prisms, MIT Press
    G. Bataille, Inner Experience
    J. Young, The Texture of Memory. Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, Yale University Press