Landscape/Site/Time

Carol Burns, "On Site: Architectural Preoccupations" Drawing Building Text, ed. A. Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991) 147-65

John Brinckerhoff Jackson, "The Word Itself" Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press,1984) 2-8

Rafael Moneo, "The Murmur of the Site" Anywhere (New York: Rizzoli, 1992) 48-53

John Brinckerhoff Jackson, "A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time" A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press,1994) 24-26

Question:

Site and Landscape are terms that we have over used to the point that many of us no longer know the meaning of the words. Carol Burns defines site to mean the local position of a building, town, or monument, and landscaped is defined by this author as the portion of land that the eye can comprehend in a single glance. Having read these definitions I got to thinking, What is it that we are architects do to the 'site'? How do we treat the 'landscaped' that surrounds our given site? Have architects completely forgotten about the meaning of these words and thus have they forgotten their purpose?

Weathering/Shadow/Memory

Readings:

David Leatherbarrow and Moshen Mostafavi, On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1993) 4-135 (text only)

Adolfo Natalini, "Forward" and "Places," Figures of Stone (Milano: Electa Editrice, 1984) 7-15

Alex T. Anderson, "Thinking in Shadow" Column 5: Volume 25 (Seattle: Department of Architecture, University of Washington, 2001) 40-45

Question:
Architecture and weathering, for many architect it is their job to create buildings that can withstand the test of time in some way. We look to the past for our examples of how well buildings should withstand the test that time sets forth. Many of the buildings we look at ruins are now, but at the same time they are still examples to how 100years or more should effect a building.

However, recent trends in architecture have lead us to believe that allowing a building to age is a bad thing. We are constantly preforming mini face lifts on building to keep them looking younger and new. By doing so we gradually change the building from what it was meant to be into something else. The building gradually loses its soul. That said if nothing were done the building would slowly fall apart and be no more. Is there a happy medium for building to be allowed to age to that perfect point were we love them all the more without falling into despair? Can we create architecture that bends in the wind but does not break? Architecture that ages gracefully without the constant need for maintenance?

Proportion

Readings:

Primary Readings

Aldo van Eyck, "place and occasion" (reformatted excerpt) Team 10 Primer, ed. Alison Smithson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1968) 101(also available in other publications)

Aldo van Eyck, "Wasted Gain" Architecture in the Age of Scepticism; compiled by Denys Lasdun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) 234-236

Aldo van Eyck, "The Interior of Time" Meaning in Architecture; edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird (New York: George Braziller Inc., 1969) 171

Aldo van Eyck, "Building a House" (excerpts) Hubertus House (Amsterdam: Stichting Wonen, 1982) 43-65

Samuel Mockbee, "Rural Studio," Architectural Design : A.D Volume: 68 Issue: 7-8 (July 1998) 72-79

Samuel Mockbee, "The Role of the Citizen Architect," Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service Through Architecture, edited by Bryan Bell (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004) 151-156

Secondary Readings

Robert Venturi, "The Inside and the Outside," Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966) 71-89

William Willoughby, "'. . . place and occasion mean more.' -- Contested Divisions between the Inside of Occasion and the Tempo of Place" ACSA West Regional Conference, October 11-13, 2001 (Bozeman, Montana)

Question:

Proportion is something that is instinctual for so many people, we immediately know when something is off, or does not look right. We recognize symmetry, and use it to determine if something of someone is beautiful. However there are many measures of proportion, we could probably count forever trying to get an exact number, some of the more well know proportioning systems architects refer back to are the Vitruvian Man, Golden section, and the Fibonacci Spiral. That's all well said and done, but what is proportion?

Proportion is often said to be relevant. Out of context would you recognize the worlds smallest man, or the worlds tallest man? Probably not, but as an architect or a student of architecture shouldn't we have our own individual proportioning system or the ability of 'guesstimate' with in a reasonable degree? Architects that actually sketch freehand, may have the ability to make rough drawings that are nearly accurate (meaning a bathroom is proportionate in size to a living room or bed room), but in that process does the proportioning or measuring of the drawings need to come in before or after the sketching starts? And if proportioning and freehand, creative sketching must be separate in the initial design process when should they come together?

Video: smallest man, and tallest woman. (when you watch the smallest man look for his shoes on the window sill.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dJCfzyxTEY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSQ0PHHFHOs

People, Place, Occasion

We remember things by where we were or what we were listening to at the time that an event happened. Some say that great architecture should always take you back to a time and a place, it should create a memory or cause you to remember something that happened before. Figuratively speaking, architecture should be living. It should breath, react, and respond to the inhabitants, us.

As architecture is now, very few if any of the buildings we create respond to us in such away that causes us to respond and be happy with it. What can architects do to make people enjoy a building more? Can architect create a building that is more human like? By human like I mean can it respond to environmental changes, with or without the help of human kind?

Craft

Readings:

David Pye, "The Workmanship of Risk and the Workmanship of Certainty" The Nature of Art and Workmanship, Chapters 1,2, and 4 (London: Studio Vista, 1968) 5-10, 13-24

Bruce Metcalf, "The Hand at the Heart of Craft" from American Craft, Aug./Sept. 00, Vol. 60, No. 4 (New York: American Craft Council, 2000) 54-61, 66

Adolfo Natalini, "Elements" and "Building" Figures of Stone (Milano: Electa Editrice, 1984) 33-36 and 71-75

Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, "1.2 The Hand and the Machine" and "4.0 Processes We Do Not See," Refabricating Architecture (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004) 4-7, 68-101

Malcom McCullough, "7-Medium" from Abstracting Craft (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996) 193-220

Question:

Craft, before the industrial revolution it was a persons lively hood. It was a part of everyone, something that ran so deep that it could not be denied. With the industrial revolution the art of craft and the handmade began to change, the value of the machine became more and more important. Machines, for the most, have part taken over the jobs of the craftsman, mass producing object after identical object.

As machines continue to improve in their dexterity, and abilities to mimic the human hand and even human behavior will the human element of making things be lost? Will there continue to be a place of those who consider themselves craftsman and makers of things, or will more and more advanced robots be able to take their place?

Reference Video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78krbfy9hh0&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHFZVwQ53bk&feature=related

Sustainable Practices

Readings:

Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance" The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (ed.) Hal Foster (Seattle, Washington: Bay Press, 1983) 16-30

Wendell Berry, "The Whole Horse" The Art of the Commonplace (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002) 236-248

Rem Koolhaas, "Bigness: or the Problem of Large" Theories and Manifestoes of Contemporary Architecture, Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf, editors (West Sussex: Academy Editions, 1997) 307-311

Rem Koolhaas, "Junkspace" (exerpted and reformatted from the website "Bridge The Gap"), transcript from a conference talk in which Koolhaas participated in July 2001, Kitakyushu, Japan (website: http://www.btgjapan.org/catalysts/rem.html)

Question:

With experts on both sides of the fence of sustainablity one must question the validity of the argument. There is support for and against global warming, which is the reason that we are become more and more aware of the effect that we are having on our environment. Also, as more and more people are being born, the population increases, and with that increase comes the demand for more stuff. And obtaining stuff requires the use of materials, which, in todays industural socity means packaging, which takes up more space that the suff we aquire.

Is there a way for citizens to contiue to have all the stuff that we desire and the stuff that makes us confortabe in our environment, and still preserve or leave behind enough for our childs child to have the same quality of life that we have now?

Global vs Local

The Question:
Having listened to our class discussion and reviewing our readings I have come to the conclusion that we as citizens have been tricked into becoming consumers. (I am defining citizens as individuals that are aware and actively taking part in their environment and consumers as people with no regard to the limit availability of resources, who want what they want when they want it.)

As citizens we chose to move to the suburbs where we thought we could safely raise our two point five kids in our perfect houses with perfect lawns framed by that good old white picket fence. By moving to the suburbs we left the convince of the city, the shops that were located around every corner, the public guards and squares, and the social gatherings that we so crave. However as citizens of the USA we want convinces, so we allow the big businesses (like Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Chiles, etc.) to move in. Mind you, I have nothing against these or other companies, it is just that with the development of these businesses our suburbs become more urban, little cities of themselves.

Haveing established the perimeters for my question, I ask: How do architects, who have been trained to builded globally, return tothe local small twon environment and build structres that maintain the identiy of the local town?