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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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