poster

	1st Act: Paragone in Paradise
*THE STAGE MANAGER PRESENTS THE STORY* Dear students, Welcome, I shall begin with a story. The reason this should be of interest you is because it is about your life as an architect. The descriptions herein are the adventures of Paragone, the first architect in the market place of ideas. Allow me to begin...	Paragone was endowed by God with knowledge of all things man made. He was assigned a very well defined role in the total scheme of things within the universe; that of the Master Builder. He was all knowing, productive, happily living on the top of a hill in an orchard full of apple trees. God warned him of only one sacred rule: Do not ask why, just build. Well, Paragone restrained himself as long as he could until one day when faced with a particularly difficult choice in the way of construction, he inadvertently asked himself the forbidden question: Why was one solution better than the other? And all hell broke loose. God was very angry with Paragone. In his anger he condemned him to a life as a blind "architect philosopher." Paragone was struck with total amnesia. God than turned all the apples in the trees to stone. Burdednd by the weight, they fell to the ground and rolled down the mountain mixing with each other. God told him that he can find the answer, that perfect metaphor of salvation for architecture, inscribed on one of those stone apples that were now being picked up and sold at the market by others. Paragone's punishment was to perpetually "fill in the blank" of series of one liners contained on each apple: "Architecture is "X1,3,5,7 etc.........." This was a prime series and therefore tending towards randomness as it grew. Like Sisyphus before him, Paragone must go down the mountain in the murky depth of confusion to find the stone. In the market place of ideas where these apples were bought and sold, Paragone encountered many merchants of metaphors. With great trepidation he occasionally bought a stone apple. In order to decode its meaning he was required to roll it up the mountain to the top of eternal knowledge and beauty. However, every time he was near the top he realized that it was the wrong stone. He lets go and the stone goes rolling down the mountain. Paragone has to start all over again. In the market place there were many stalls with wonderful bits of knowledge and useful concepts. Each stall specialized in a different subject matter: art, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, mathematics and geometry, physics, biology, sociology, psychology, literature, literary criticism, political science, to name but a few. He craved back to a time when the these subjects were not that isolated from each other, and it was possible for one philosopher to wear all of these hats and think and write about them. This list could be organized based on the ancient and modern categories of knowledge and by major historical periods...
	2nd Act:
The next four acts will portray the same torment in different periods of history. Each stone is a different Metaphor. Each time down the mountain Paragone encounters another Metaphor Merchant	One day Paragone woke up to find himself in the second half of the XXth Century. The shock of time travel undid his amnesia. In a flash he saw the answer in his mind's eye. Believing he had found the truth he wrote a definition of architecture. The definition contained seven apples, each being a partial answer. But one of them appeared to shine more having been handled by many buyers at that historical time. Here it is as Paragone saw it: And then, just as suddenly, he lost it again. The first thing he tried to do was to build a Head Trauma Clinic in order to find some medical help. While in the sanatorium, slowly and painfully over the course of the XXth century he tried to construct that definition of architecture again. He was given three basic metaphors to work with: Architecture is like.......machine, organism, and language. The market place of ideas was full of goods. There were many variations and overlaps between these but when stripped to their essential bare bones, they can be catalogued between these three types. <<<In class we will discuss the fuller implications of each of these and what they imply about the nature of architecture, the nature of human beings, their life as bodies and minds.>>>
List the Apple Merchants
Jacques Monod, the biologist was obsessed with only one question: How can you tell apart natural from artificial objects, and what drives living organism? He gives a scientist's view of these questions. But he does point Paragone towards two other major questions, two other paradoxes in human knowledge... We will discuss them in class.	The first merchant of metaphors was a French Biologist named Jacques Monod. Then came a mathematician, several philosophers, a physicist, a poet, a theologian, and many artists. With the visual artists Paragone found a lot in common, because they shared a common activity: the shaping of the material world, the making of objects. And at least one other philosopher named Vico, agreed with the artists that the truth is in the made: Verum ipsum factum.
Structure of a typical episode. In the manner of Cezanne and Wallace Stevens:
After 2000 years Cezanne leads us out Plato's Cave.	Paragone always asks the question: "Who am I?" Cezanne's doubt was Paragone's. Cezanne’s doubt a hundred years ago is our question today:
Critical Questions -The Central Plot of Architectural Theory in the XXth Century-	"What is the world, if my very vision, modeled by my artistic predecessors, is no longer certain of its own reality? And who am I, if my image in the mirror vacillates, unsure of its own objectivity?"
	A brief visit with a poet: Wallace Stevens. Poets, known for their brevity, give Paragone the whole truth in eight lines called Theory. In the Head trauma clinic Paragone meets Miss D. From Monod, Paragone goes to Deleuze who thinks that the key question is: What is an event? That leads him backwards in time to Whitehead (1915) and then Leibniz (1765) and Aristotle (500 BC).
	All of these merchants at the beginning talk to Paragone about everything in general concerning the meaning of life. That all sound good, but Paragone's natural obsession is with geometry Paragone is an obsessive builder of systems. In spite of the fact that many wise people have said to him: "You can not put all your apples in one basket, he can't help himself from his addiction to the construction of wholes, of totalities. His desire is to know what God knows and he has forgotten. He attempts to make a chart, a kind of periodic table containing a complete list the elements of architectural knowledge based on the three terms borrowed from Jacques Monod. He is still working and reworking this endless task.
*Will you join him in his search?*

PARAGONE, THE ARCHITECT SEARCHING FOR THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE

An Architect's Consumer Guide to Metaphor Shopping