readings

After digging through my readers and binders and notebooks and bookshelves and trying to reread it all, here are 5+ readings that spur my thought reservoir relative to an architectural thesis. The Gourmet magazine article (attached) on Berkeley is a bonus reading. What does the eclectic and hyperpolitical Berkeley environment contribute to our education as architects? How does Wursterworld contribute?

Steven Holl: Questions of Perception, Phenomenology of Architecture (pg 40 of the July 1994 special issue of Architecture and Urbanism) --- on situating intent (I can scan and email this later if anyone wants it.)

Keller Easterling: Organization Space - Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America --- research and synthesis. This strikes me as a thesis-become-book, thoroughly researched and carefully narrated. This book is worth owning, but you can get the idea from the introduction.

Mark Wigley: Local Knowlege (p101-109 in Phylogenesis, FOA's ark) -- on architecture as intellectual pollination and foreign vs. local. Important to read the last two pages.

Antoine Picon: Architecture, Science, Technology and the Virtual Realm (in Architecture and the Sciences, Exchanging Metaphors): --- runs the gamut from the Renaissance to cyborgs, but important, I think, because it asks what architecture can be, namely experimental and relational. [object-assembly-system]

N. J. Habraken: The Control of Complexity --- a methodology for considering architecture as an adaptive system, along with a vocabulary for discussing it.

M. Tafuri: Introduction to Theories and History of Architecture -- if a thesis is a critique, it is a critique beholden to critics and the idea of criticism itself. This is dense writing that I'd like to better understand. (I came across this in Joan Ockman's Architecture Culture 1943-1968.)

Gourmet magazine article (March 2002, 4 pages) on Berkeley by Michael Chabon--- attached as images. Read it for fun. Does the flavor of Berkeley pervade Wurster? (Email me if you want a pdf file with all 4 pages.)

Additional:
Reiser & Umemoto: Atlas of Novel Tectonics
Jane Jacobs: Death and Life of Great American Cities
Stan Allen: Points and Lines

Readings: The Notion of Place

Some readings from an art & humanities perspective, gathered around the notion of place. All have been inspiring to me (over many years).

Isaac Babel, The Red Cavalry. Babel's stories--vivid, concise descriptions of the Western Ukraine during the Russian Civil War--stirring and heartbreaking, often at the same moment.

Edmund Keeley, Cavafy's Alexandria. The poems of C.P. Cavafy, understood against the city that was their locus. (You'll need the poems, separately, as well.) The structure of the argument in Keeley's book is important--his treatment of history and metaphor.

Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One. Essays by the revered Russian poet of the Soviet post-war era. Read "A Room and a Half"--Brodsky's tribute to his parents--and an unforgettable description of their gray Leningrad apartment.

Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm. You might start instead with Milosz's Native Realm--which he calls "an intellectual autobiography." Then, The Land of Ulro. The title comes from Blake--but the book itself presents Milosz's essays on a counter-Enlightenment tradition.

Franz Kafka, Diaries 1910-1913. Prague. Kafka's observations of daily life, as it intersects with the life of the imagination. The writing is unique.

Walter Benjamin, A Berlin Childhood, also his Moscow Diary, and the writings on Paris . Place, memory and the physical world--intertwined and re-imagined. Benjamin at his best.

W.S. Sebald, Austerlitz. A master novel in which architecture and place are made absolutely compelling. This is a book about place and innerness--and the impossible consequences of memory (or the impossible memory of consequences).
The photo above comes from this book--an example of how Sebald mixes photographs and text--always at their most evocative.

James Joyce, Dubliners. Joyce's first stories, maybe still his best. Unique piecing together of a city through fragments of the imagination. The Dead, Evangeline, Ivy Day in the Committee Room...

Willa Cather, My Antonia. The American mid-west--Nebraska in the 1860s. One of the best novels we have about the emotional consequences of how we deal with physical space--from boundless prairie to gridded plain.

Henry Roth, Call It Sleep. Immigrant New York. Impressionistic but vivid. This was a cult favorite for many years, until Roth was rediscovered (and then some).

William Faulkner, Absalom Absalom (well of course...)

Activism and Architecture

Hello buddies-

I met with Greig Crysler today about a potential class for the fall that, very roughly, would examine the connection between social movements, activism and architecture; attempting to ground the discussion historically, looking at the movements of the 60's and beyond and asking what lessons can be learned for today. Anyway, Greig is going to but together a more formal description that would include some of the readings (which I will post when I get it, probably early june), but he is still unsure whether to make a full fledged course out of it. Options include a one credit course that would spill into a full course in the spring (bad for us thesis people), A somewhat more substantial student led course (probably 2 credits, not too formal, limited reading) or a 3 credit normal old course (still trying to keep reading down for all us illiterate M.Arch studs). Reactions, feedback and suggestions welcome and encouraged. Greig is very interested in getting student feedback to develop the course and determine its direction, so share your thoughts.

Welcome!

Here is a basic blog that we, the students of CED Thesis, 2008, can use to communicate and participate in each others' thinking. Please feel free to post any suggestions. To begin, it was suggested at our first thesis meeting that we use this blog to compile a communal reading list. Please suggest a handful of readings that have been seminal in your thinking about architecture and beyond.

My faves, by no means comprehensive:

Architecture:
Louis Kahn - 'On Monumentality' and 'Order Is'
Classic Modernist texts. Why post and beam doesn't cut it anymore, and why form, design, order, structure are important.

Peter Zumthor - 'Thinking Architecture'
Architecture of things in themselves. Memories and impressions of material and spatial qualities.

Hans Ibeling - 'Supermodernism'
Best description of contemporary practice set in timeline of history I've seen. Though it's now ten years old...

Bruce Mau - 'Incomplete Manifesto'
Survival guide to architectural life.

Grant Hildebrand - 'Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright's Houses'
Prospect and Refuge explained.

Greg Lynn - 'Animate Form'
The animate, emerging process of design in the 21st century.

Jane Jacobs - 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'
Why New York is awesome. The streets need eyes. Early writing on emergent systems thinking.

Beyond:
Italo Calvino - 'Six Memos for the Next Millennium'
Multiplicity, Lightness, Exactitude, Visibility, Quickness and ....

Milan Kundera - 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being'
The poetry of our own dialectic of existence. Are we grounded or light? Concrete or glass?...

Hegel - 'The Science of Logic'
The original dialectician. A thing and it's opposite together create the improved synthetic proposition.

Karl Marx - 'Alienated Labor'
Why do all architects houses look like hovels?