ARC 327R Seminar
Tues 2:00 – 5:00pm, GOL 2.110
Open to all SOA and non-SOA undergraduate students
David Heymann: heymann@austin.utexas.edu
Using case studies of key buildings, Contemporary Architecture Theory by Case Study explores the directions that architecture has taken as a critical cultural activity over the past half-century, starting with the collapse of the Modern. This period differs from the full century immediately before in that the recent past has not been ruled by the sorts of dogmatic theories and movements that to a great degree defined the 20th century. If there is no common agreement about where recent architecture has gone, much less how it can be considered meaningful, the architecture of the recent past still has surprising consistencies. But these do not stem from a single, agreed-upon agenda. So, we will discover how distinct arguments about current meaningfulness overlap.
We’ll examine one primary building per week, and indirectly study some twenty to thirty more, over three generations of architects (one Post-Modern, two After-Modern). What makes this class distinct is that, in it, a building is not an expression of an architect’s autobiography. Instead, we are interested in the world of experience a building organizes for its inhabitants. That is what an architect has to justify for a client to pay the remarkable expense of a new building – and clients aren’t fools! But explaining the complex reasons why a radical form makes sense for someone’s specific need or circumstance takes a nuanced understanding of what people need and why, and why now. So, the second goal of this course is to have you learn to look at buildings, imagine and understand the order of their singular inhabitation, and therethrough value their singular current meaning.
