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(Science Introductory Essay)
Architecture + Science and Mathematics
Scott Drake, Louis Laybourne Smith
School of Architecture and Design, University of South Australia
From systems of proportion used by Vitruvius to the first sectional
drawings in the Renaissance, from the influence of physiognomic studies
in the French Academy to the recent appropriations of genetics and informations
systems, 'science' has long been a source of architectural theory and
composition. The ways in which science is 'added' to architecture varies
from the literal to the metaphorical, providing legitimation for both
its technological and symbolic aspects. In this session, papers explore
the ways in which science is added to architecture, providing inspiration
for its construction, operation, composition, appearance, or meaning.
Architecture and Progress
Harry Margalit, The University
of Sydney
Architecture, as much as any other field, has been held in the magnetic
field of progress. The dilemma can be expressed simply in terms of a
prevailing critical stance towards (or a disquiet about) consumption
generally, versus the undoubted achievements of material progress. This
paper aims to lay out some of the indicators of this field as evident
in architecture, and attempts to interpret them through terms drawn
from the psychoanalytic tradition. Of particular interest are the socially
critical theories of Norman O. Brown and Christopher Lasch.
The issues come together succinctly in the field of Eco-Tech architecture,
as defined by Catherine Slessor. Here the imperatives of an ecological
consciousness or concern are addressed, if not quite solved, through
the application of technology. Using the Freudian notion of repression
and its manifestations, the paper asks whether there may not be a psychic
dimension to both the formulation of, and response to, the problems
thrown up by progress. This in turn may shed light on how, through processes
acknowledged in psychoanalytic theory, particular aesthetic regimes
gain credence through symbolic action masquerading as rational response.
Cleanthes’s theory of design
Michael P. T. Linzey, University
of Auckland
Would it be possible to reconstruct even in outline a Hellenistic theory
of urban design? Was there any theoretical accounting for the high quality
of design that was regularly exhibited in Hellenistic cities? Malcolm
Schofield has recently drawn attention to a rare fragment of early Stoic
philosophy, called Cleanthes’ Syllogism, which, he argues, was
intended to be a political defence of eroticism in the government of
the city. I argue on the contrary that Cleanthes’ Syllogism may
have been an argument in favour of architecture. Furthermore it appears
to articulate a concept that may have been pivotal for the theory of
urban design. Cleanthes refers to the city in a relational sense. He
speaks of the city as a habitation of people, as a physical construction,
and as both of these; he appears to be expressing a triadic and relational
proposition about the existential nature of the city.
The idea of a relational city illuminates some aspects Hellenistic
theory, in particular sympathy and allegory, which we know to have impacted
on the art and architecture of the period. There is no supporting evidence
that Cleanthes himself wrote an extended discourse about architectural
design. It is argued rather, that if there was a Hellenistic theory
of design, it would have been informed and authorised by the dominant
philosophy of the day. Architects would have taken account of Cleanthes’
reference to the relational city.
Louis Kahn’s Situated Platonism
Steven Fleming, The University of
Newcastle
Sarah Williams Goldhagen dismisses as a myth the view that Kahn was
“[a] latter-day neo-Platonist… [who] believed it was the
architect’s job to ‘discover’ ideal forms and then
re-embody these archetypes in a new architectural language.” Goldhagen
makes a valuable contribution to Kahn scholarship, but she trivialises
Kahn’s approach to form generation, which bares less resemblance
to the preoccupations of the Neoplatonists than it does to Plato’s
theory of Forms.
The paper examines claims by various scholars including Jencks, Norberg-Schulz,
Burton, Scully, Brownlee, De Long, Auer, Gast, and Danto that Plato’s
philosophy may be a source of Kahn’s theory. The paper attempts
to explain why Kahn does not acknowledge Plato’s influence, by
demonstrating, through archival evidence and interviews, that Kahn obscures
the influence of numerous other figures and tries instead to present
an ex nihilo design philosophy. Yet, despite this tendency, Kahn does,
on one occasion in March 1960, state that an architect must “start
right at the beginning, as though he were Socrates,” when contemplating
ideal “forms.” This solitary reference by Kahn to Plato’s
mentor has been discovered by the present author in The Kahn Collection
in Philadelphia. It suggests that Platonism is indeed a source of Kahn’s
“form and design” theory. It is true that Kahn was a “this
worldly” practitioner of architecture, but the alchemic aspects
of his metaphysics, for which he is remembered, remain a legitimate
subject for continuing scholarship.
Marine and Underwater Cities 1960-1975
Peter Raisbeck, Department of Architecture,
University of Melbourne
Of the techno-utopian schemes for new cities developed by architects
in the post Team X climate the sporadic emergence of the marine city,
either fully or partially immersed is one of the more curious minor
architectural traditions of the 1960’s. Considering the marine
city highlights the ways in which architectural neo avant-gardes sought
to locate, explore, spatialise, extend and re-territorialise, what Deleuze
and Guattari have described as the smooth space of the sea.
Polemicists and promoters of underwater technologies in the architectural
press such as Hussein, Banham, Jencks, McHale and Cook will be discussed.
In tandem projects for marine cities by the Metabolists, Archigram,
Fuller, Friedman, Dahinden, Rougerie, Maymont and others will be briefly
presented and described. The Marine Cities produced by these architects
utilised mimetic organic, archaic, and mechanistic metaphors to generate
urban morphologies and forms isolated and physically separate from the
land.
In explaining the desire for and production of marine cities between
1960 and 1975 an understanding of the relationships between modern architecture,
capital flows, technology and popular culture is further developed.
Sebastiano Serlio’s Symbolic Perspective
Desley Luscombe, University of
New South Wales
Five years before the printing of his Il Secondo libro di prospettiva
(1545) Serlio had used his perspective technique to create a symbolic
representation of architecture as a discipline. This paper analyses
the frontispiece to Serlio’s Il Terzo libro nel qual si figurano,
e descrivono le antichita di Roma printed in 1540, to support the
claim that Serlio incorporated into the visual structure of the frontispiece
a hidden or disguised rhetorical agenda. This was an agenda, which demonstrated
that Renaissance audiences understood that perspectival techniques had
the potential to become both a visual metaphor for depicting a contested
understanding of the relationship between the civic and celestial domains
and also a site in which to introduce symbolic commentary. This paper
questions the purpose of the inter-relationship between such symbolic
content and a drawing technique.
Whilst methods used in the analysis of Serlio’s frontispiece
are iconographic in their source, I am cognisant of the controversy
of the theoretical methods proposed by Erwin Panofsky. Discussions of
these issues are examined in a number of texts including those by Michael
Ann Holly, Hubert Damisch, and James Elkins but cannot be addressed
in any complexity within this paper. For this paper, Erwin Panofsky
alerts investigation to the symbolic re-conceptualisation of substantive
space during the Renaissance that parallelled the development of techniques
of perspective construction. In few other images of the Renaissance
is this parallel development depicted more clearly than in Serlio’s
frontispiece to Il Terzo libro.
Sharing Thoughts, Reflection as Architectural Design, How We Reflect
Together
Mark Burry, Jane
Burry & Grant Dunlop, Spatial
Information Architecture Laboratory, RMIT University
New and original design approaches lead to the invention of new means
of description and communication. This paper places the very contemporary
problem of communication between collaborating designers in the historical
context of the interpretation of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí’s
unique working method, one that he never described and which has had
to be established through apprenticeship lineage and archaeological
process.
The contemporary research for the continuing construction of Gaudí’s
Sagrada Família church has taken full advantage of the burgeoning
fast telecommunication systems that are bringing together a much wider
range of disciplines and wider distribution of participants than would
otherwise seek to collaborate. This “communication Mecca”
is presenting a rich opportunity for inventive design approaches. It
is also highlighting an old problem. However quickly and widely information
can be generated and distributed, communication relies on many other
factors, not least the sharing of knowledge that still remains consolidated
in narrow disciplines or vested in those with experience and close engagement
such as the plaster model makers at the Sagrada Família church.
Temple plus: Looking at Palladio's Villas, Again
Alex Selenitsch, Faculty of Architecture,
Building and Planning, University of Melbourne.
Andrea Palladio's Villas, built on the Veneto mainland from 1540 to
1570 have influenced much architectural design through being visited
and through their drawn representations in Palladio's books.
In the 20th Century, they have also been subjected to influential
compositional analysis. The most well known is probably Rudolf Wittkower's
abstraction of a tartan grid from the Villa's plans, a precursor of
computerised Palladian systems of composition such as that formulated
by Richard Freedman & George Hersey. There have been few analyses
that approach the Villas as a whole, and as built form.
This paper therefore offers another way of looking at these buildings:
as a built form, more specifically as a deliberate composition of mundane
additions designed into and around a (possibly) pre-existing temple.
On this basis, a typology of the Villas is discussed. This 'Temple Plus'
interpretation contradicts Wittkower's and Freedman & Hersey's analyses
and illustrates the problem of describing a complex architectural objects
through a single image, in this case a diagrammatic plan. The discussion
sets up a field of questions for practitioners and theorists of composition,
including issues of observation and measurement, architectural representation
and compositional strategies.
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