ARC 386M
Current Theory by Case Study

Instructor: David Heymann
Prerequisites: Arch. History Survey I & II; enrollment limited to 20

Seminar: Thought in Form - Buildings From 1966 Forward

Content: The conceptual center-line of this seminar is the proposition that theory begins as a specific indwelling characteristic of buildings, made evident in their experiencing, which attains critical form by the actions of intelligence upon the knowledge gainsaid from the experiential condition. Theory is not, at first, something applied to a building - it arises out of attempting to cohesively order the sensate condition of the building.

Theory so conceived is theory of presence. Such theories (as versus theories of method) have, generally, two agendas: to explain a building to itself specifically, and to explain a building to other buildings generally. Traditionally it is this second agenda of theory to which you are most exposed: how else could History be taught cohesively?

But it is the first agenda of theory which may be more meaningful to you as a young designer, and the first aim of this course is to have you devise a loose methodology of constructing the theoretical underpinnings of buildings by pursuing the ramifications of their experiential conditions. The method is roughly analogous to detective work: (with the building considered a crime) working from odd evidence to motive. To prepare you for this, the first required reading for the course, undertaken in the first week, includes any three of Simenon's Maigret mysteries.

The second aim of this course is to reconstruct the major directions that architecture, as a critical activity, has taken since 1966, the year in which both Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Rossi's The Architecture of the City were published, effectively - perhaps only apparently - discrediting the Modernist ethos in building. We will look at about twelve buildings by case study, beginning with the Farnsworth House by Mies (as a control), and including the Vanna Venturi House (Venturi), the Modena Cemetery (Rossi), the Frank House (House VI, Eisenman), the Gehry House (Gehry), the Berlin Masque (Hedjuk), the Menil Collection (Piano), the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Lin), the Lille Expocenter (OMA) and several others.

In addition, three class sessions will be devoted to discussions of thematic similarity among recent buildings. Those three themes are: translucency, the sliding plane, and the obscure object. The discussion groups will each present buildings relevant to the topic at hand, and the buildings will include works by Ando, Zumpthor, Herzog and DeMeuron, Siza, Moneo, Bruder, Williams and Tsien, Coop Himmelblau, and others.

Format: The primary readings for the course are the buildings themselves, at least in published form. Four types of readings are typically given for each building: drawings and photographs of the building in question; a written description of the building and the specifics of the site, client, etc.; an essay placing the building or its point of departure within a general critical context; and an essay, while usually not about the building itself, which explores the limits of that critical context. You will be expected to be completely familiar with the buildings before class, and the seminar will, in order to insure this, be broken down into discussion groups, which will turn in "minutes" of their discussions.

You will be asked to project yourself into the buildings, and to pursue the buildings as detectives might search for evidence: parts not understood or too easily accepted, seeming inconsistencies, etc.. This evidence is gathered in seminar and the class attempts to reconstruct each building's theoretical underpinnings in a form of synthetic police work based on its close reading. Our reconstructions will then be compared with a series of texts about the building (often the architect's own writings) in order to map out differences between internally and externally developed theoretical models.

Evaluation: Grades will be based on 1. participation; 2. minutes; 3. a paper (analysis or tentative manifesto); and 4. the design or description, in model form, of a critical detail with regard to the paper.