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