The conceptual centerline of this seminar is the proposition that theory is not, at first, something applied to a building. Theory, in this course (and, to be clear, there are other conceptions of theory), is what you do when you attempt to cohesively order the sensate condition of the building: you struggle to explain why, and, in so doing, posit a framework of meaningfulness. Your intelligence seeks to give order to the knowledge of experience - that order is theory, in this class.

Theory so conceived has one primary agenda: to explain a building to itself. This is quite different from a second type of theory that you will encounter in architecture school: explaining buildings to each other as proofs of cultural tendencies. Traditionally it is this second type of theory to which you are most often exposed: how else could history be taught cohesively? So, for example, at a remove in time, you can see the effect (and study the source) throughout buildings of the development of the geometric intellect at the start of the Renaissance, and apply this knowledge in your assessment of these buildings when comparing one to another.

Yet this latter type of theory may be less meaningful - less useful - to you as a young designer, struggling to make a single thing well, since there is a fundamental difference between buildings as signposts of larger cultural tendencies, and buildings as resolutions of highly specific programmatic, economic, and site related concerns. Consequently, the first aim of this course is to have you devise a method of looking at buildings, based on imagining their inhabitation, that allows you to value their singular meaning. This is theory as a verb: to theorize. Central to this aim is the notion that, when you progress into Theory II, which is largely text rather than building centered, you will have an idea of how written theories might make the jump to the inhabited framework of experience that buildings offer.

The second aim of this course is to initially explore the major directions that architecture, as a cultural activity, has taken over the past forty years, roughly since Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City were published, giving concrete voice to a growing dissatisfaction with the Modernist ethos in building. In so doing the course hopes to allow you to link your singular understanding of artifacts to larger cultural developments.

To be certain, there is no common agreement about where architecture has gone, much less how it can be considered meaningful. Really what we will be looking at are different arguments about meaningfulness. We will explore in depth twelve to thirteen buildings by case study, beginning with the Farnsworth House, by Mies (as a Modernist control), then looking at the two waves of the after Modern - the first concerned with the primacy of appearance, the second with, for better or worse, the crisis of conventional sources of meaning. Each of the buildings chosen for the course is exemplary of certain primary concerns present in architectural discourse. But the list is only partial. So many buildings, so little time! Each building chosen means others we will not see: each week I will try to list other buildings you might look at to further explore the questions being asked by the building under study.

FORMAT: The primary readings for this course are the buildings themselves, at least in published form. Four types of readings will be given for each building: drawings and photographs of the building in question; a written description of the building, site, client, etc.; an essay placing the building or its point of departure within a general critical context*; and an essay, while not necessarily about the building, which expands and explores that critical context. You are to familiarize yourself with the building before class, and, in order to insure this, the class will be broken into discussion groups, which will be asked to turn in "minutes" of your discussions.

You will be asked to as much project yourself into the buildings, and to work as detectives might search for evidence; parts not understood ("I wouldn't have done it that way") or too easily accepted; seeming inconsistencies, etc.. The evidence is gathered in group and seminar discussion and the class attempts to reconstruct each buildings conceptual underpinnings in a form of synthetic police work (evidence to motive) based on close reading. Our reconstructions will then be compared with a series of texts about the building (often the architects own writings) in order to map out internally and externally developed theoretical models.

*Just prior to the start of the school year (i.e., too late to order books) I decided to adopt Rafael Moneo's book Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects (Actar, 2004, distributed by the MIT Press). We will be seeing buildings of many of these architects. Moneo's chapters serve as a perfect counterpart to the course: each describes the horizontal development of the architects' work. In contrast, we will be working in a sense perpendicular to these writings, plumbing each building not as a proof the architect's intentions, but as a specific framework of experience that in turn suggests how meaning is ordered. You will need to obtain this book yourself.

EVALUATION: Your grade for this course will be assigned on the basis of:

1. Paper: 30%
2. Tentative Manifesto: 30%
3. Participation: 30%
4. Minutes: 10%

The paper will be described more thoroughly in class. It will consist of a written (4-5,000 words) and graphic analysis of a building not included in the class. In addition to the paper, I want you to summarize your own developing point of view in a tentative (500 - 1000 word) manifesto, also to be described in class, that will serve as the final. A substantial portion of the grade is based on class participation in the discussion. Attendance is mandatory. One class session is the equivalent of two normal classes, so two absences will constitute a letter grade drop, and with three absences you will be stricken from the roll. The best way to get in touch with me is by email: heymann@mail.utexas.edu