Student
Projects
There
are 2 requirements for the course.
1.
The weekly papers on the readings and class discussions
Each
student will be required to write a one page weekly commentary on
the readings or the class discussions. These can be submitted via
e-mail, www posting or as a hard copy. The purpose of this requirement
is to have livelier discussions during the classes and give the
students the opportunity to think of any questions they may have
on the readings.
2.
The semester projects
Students
can -if they so wish- structure their paper as an episode in the
Life and travels of Paragone. They must develop a dialogue between
Paragone and the author of the reading. Write an exchange in the
market place. It might begin like this:
Tell me dear...............Who am I? and what can I learn about
architecture from you apples?
or any of the other questions:
What is geometry? What is a body? What is extension? What is time
and space? What is causality? etc.
Examples:
Possibly
give models of dialogue or drawings and photographs for the use
of geometry in their projects. The course must contain images from
architecture. Here is an example from Paragone life as a master
builder which he told his tenth grade son:
There
are plans to build a train track to connect two construction sites,
A and B. Between the two site there is a inaccessible swamp. In
order to establish the cost and material quantities it is necessary
to know the distance between site A and B. How do you calculate
that distance?
Graphic solution: From a point C situated outside the swamp
from which the two sites are simultaneously visible, we measure
the angle ACB, as well as the distances CA and CB. We construct
a triangle abc which is similar to the larger triangle ABC. if we
select the ratio of similarity ac/AC=k in such a way that the triangle
abc fits on a piece of paper, we can than measure ac. From the ratio
ab/AB=k we obtain AB=ab/k which will give us AB in terms of ab and
the ratio of similarity.
The
hermeneutic question:
Two
different strategies for interpretation -hermeneutic and phenomenological
1.
Hermeneutic strategy- the use of story devices and (metaphorical naming)
in order to create an immediate noetic (thought) context. The story
creates a condition that immediately sediments the perceptual possibility-
perception takes shape within and from the power of suggestion of
a language-game.
2.
Phenomenological strategy- centering on the subject, the way in which
perception functions is made thematic -the instructions of how to
look, rely on certain knowledge of the mechanisms of perception and
on a turn to the subject as active perceivers.
1.
attend to phenomena as they appear. A parallel rule, which makes attention
more rigorous, may be stated in the Wittgensteinian form: describe,
don't explain.
2.
carefully delimit the field of experience to avoid a confusion of
immediacy with non-experienced elements presumed or posited in explanation
3.
horizontalize or equalize all immediate phenomena. -do not assume
an initial hierarchy of 'realities' -This procedure prevents one from
deciding too quickly that some things are more real or fundamental
than others
Metaphors:
geometry, organism, nature, machine, language, music, oregon box,
skinner box, the collective subconscious, myth, revolution
Paradigmatic
shifts in architectural thought: (changing world view, Thomas Kuhn)
- Ancient
Middle Ages -truth was contained in the bible and Aristotle
- Renaissance
-Vitruvius "Ten Books"
- 17th,18th
Century-
- Galilean
New Science(see play by Brecht and his trial)
- Francis
Bacon "Novum Organum"
- Descartes
positivism in the human sciences for the next two centuries
architecture tried to emulate the mathematization functionalization
of science (middle of the 17th Cent Durand theory – "Claude
Perrault 1690 (commented on Vitruvius, designed the east facade
of the Louvre ) The dispute of the Ancients and the Moderns"
his brother Charles. -Joseph Rykwert, "The first moderns"
chp. 1 and 2 -Francois Blondel's reaction (page 39): beginning
of baroque attitudes substituted the practical realm for a conceptual"
Notes and dialogue ideas from "Architecture and the Crisis
of Modern Science" by Alberto Perez Gomez -"The creation
of order in a mutable and finite world is the ultimate purpose
of man's thought and actions" -"the malaise from which
architecture suffers today can be traced to the collusion between
architecture and its use of geometry and number as it developed
in the early modern era" from Bachelard who calls him self
a TOPOLOGIST -"In the mind, the formal imagination is fond
of novelty" p. Ix -"the poetic act has no past, at
least no recent past" p.XI -"the poetic image is independent
of causality" p.XIII From Rorty 'The Contingency of a liberal
community' -"the vocabulary of the Enlightenment rationalism,....
has become an impediment..... -"We must find a new vocabulary
which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation
rather than around notions of truth, rationality, and moral
obligation -" ...I shall be trying to reformulate the hopes
of the liberal society in a non-rationalist and non-universalist
way…" -"in its ideal form, the culture of liberalism
would be one which was enlightened, secular" To realize
the relative validity of one's own convictions and yet stand
for them unflinchingly, is what distinguishes a civilized man
from a barbarian." To demand more than this is perhaps
a deep and incurable metaphysical need: but to allow it to determine
one's practice is a symptom of an equally deep, and more dangerous
moral and political immaturity" Joseph Schumpeter, quoted
by Isaiah Berlin -"freedom as recognition of contingency"
-"language speaks man......the account of language as a
historical contingency rather than a medium which is gradually
taking on the true shape of the world or true self.." Heidegger's
A standoff between the traditional view that it is always in
point to ask -"How do you know?" and the view that
sometimes all we can ask is -"Why do you talk that way?....
It would be better for philosophers to admit there is no one
way to break such a standoffs..... There are instead as many
ways...One can come at the issue by way of different paradigms
of humanity-the contemplator as opposed to the poet, or the
pious person as opposed to the person that accepts chance as
worthy of determining her fate. Or one can come at it from the
point of view of an ethics of kindness, and ask if whether cruelty
and injustice will be diminished if we all stopped warring about
"absolute validity" or whether, on the contrary only
such worries keep our characters firm enough to defend unflinchingly
the weak against the strong. Or one can-fruitlessly, in my view-
come at it by way of anthropology and the question of weather
there are "cultural universals", or by way of psychology
and the question whether there are psychological universals......."
-" I hope that culture as a whole can be "poeticized"
rather than as the enlightenment hope that it can be 'rationalized'
or 'scientized'....in my view, an ideally liberal polity would
be one whose culture hero is Bloom's "strong poet' rather
than the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth seeking,
'logical, 'objective scientist."
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