Surrealism and Architectural Atmosphere

The International Journal of Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design, 2018

A vital component to any architect’s education is learning how to effectively utilize building materials as carriers of architectural meaning; the development of a coherent tectonic language is fundamental to teaching architecture. This requires a careful understanding of the most basic components of architecture, its language, its words. The words are composed of materials, the sentences written in a building’s tectonics and detailing. Learning how to speak is the first step towards writing poetry. Learning the building art’s material language is the first step to creating architecture. Many academics and practitioners who are attracted to design build share a common belief that the materials and methods of construction matter, and are essential to an architect’s education. Latent in this line of inquiry is that if these elements are significant, that significance should be made manifest in the final, constructed reality of the building. This conception runs strongly counter to the direction of most contemporary architecture, in which seamlessness, weightlessness, and the suppression of materiality are ascendant. With these ideas in mind, how should an architect be trained? This paper will explore one method, using design build pedagogy to engage architecture students in a patient search for their own tectonic philosophy.

Architecture and its shadow Reflections on past, present and future incarnations of the artist-architect If thinking is ever useless, thinking about art has been completely useless to many architects and architecture students over the last ten years or so. There has been little to no contact, no debate, no mutual exploitation and no affection worth mentioning between artists and architects for at least a generation. What there has been can only be characterized as reciprocal indifference and suspiciousness. Art and architecture have been engaged on separate trajectories; the artistic one vastly more complex and multifarious than the architectural one. And -let's be honest -architects, who have been immersed in technique and gripped by the enthralling new design potentials offered by computers, have mostly ignored art. Now that appeal is slackening; the techniques are no longer so new, so different and so seemingly original. They don't inspire the same amount of new ideas anymore, which was what they were most useful for, after all. Using a computer, and all that this entails for the design, construction and building processes of architecture, has become normal.

1987

Denys Lasdun, appalled by the onset of postmodernism in the 1980s, invited eleven renowned architects to explain their approach to their work. He's disappointed at how they depart from his idea of the true way. But the outcome is to be expected. A fascinating glimpse of the underpinnings of architectural aesthetics.

Economic Times, 2020

The built environment must progress in step with progress of society. It is therefore the task of the avant-garde segment of the academic discipline and profession of architecture to theorize and explore how best to guide the development of the built environment in ways that are congenial to the opportunities and challenges of societal development at the frontier of progress.

The Public Value of the Humanities

Architecture is, like all areas of the arts and humanities, a complex affair, and involves a very wide range of people and personalities, ideas and philosophies, theories and actions. But, more than any other artistic endeavour, architecture is also an inherently interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary practice, and is inextricably linked to our everyday world of business, work, leisure, health, environment and social life. We can do almost nothing in our lives without encountering architecture, whether as offices, housing, hotels, sports facilities, hospitals, train and bus stations, or architecture in drawings, fi lms and video-games, or architecture as part of the hidden world of communications and virtual technologies. For this reason, the UK's research into architecture must-and does-deal with a wide spectrum of concerns, all of which have the potential to impact directly on our lives today. Architecture and architects Architecture is perhaps most often thought of as being the product of architects-that is as the product of a single person or of small groups of people, and of their thoughts, designs and actions. One of the most important areas of architectural research is, therefore, into who these fi gures were in the past, and who they are now and in the future. Who is 'the architect' and what does he, she or they do? (Saint Andrew 1993; Hughes 1996; Kostof 1987). There are, of course, many important architects in the UK who have made a major contribution to our society and cities. From Christopher Wren in the seventeenth century and John Soane in the eighteenth century through to Zaha Hadid and Norman Foster today, architects have used their considerable artistic imagination, technical innovation and entrepreneurship to produce some of the most signifi cant and lasting constructions in the contemporary world. These are important fi gures to understand, not only in terms of themselves but also in terms of how their ideas and designs have reached out far beyond their own buildings and have had a pervasive infl uence throughout the world of art, design and the creative industries. Much of what we see and understand as 'architecture' in the world today is because of a relatively few number of architectural designers and thinkers, and, as a result, we need to record and explore this important historical and cultural legacy. The more detailed results of this research are, however, frequently quite surprising, for they tell us that 'the architect' is, very often, not a single kind of person at all. Such research reveals, instead, that an architect might be a builder, a developer or a technician, or that an architect might be an artist,

Architecture is an amalgam of creativity, craftsmanship & technology. Fingers are the tools for the mind. The mind assesses the needs, evolves the solutions and expresses them as innovative ideas. The creative pursuit for developing further, shapes up as multi-dimensional results. The syntax of such an expression has been boundless since the evolution of the mankind. Archaeological excavations continuously amaze us with blend of necessity and inventions, be it the Stone Age tools, the Sanjhi paintings on the mud houses in the deserts or the Stilted cottages in the cyclone affected areas. Neither Creativity knows any barriers nor does the process of improvisation. The flowchart of progress is effected upon in the augmented reality. A logical control on the process of development can be monitored to be deterministic or random. The program of design development is measurable with respect to the environment and the users for whom it is done. The techniques to represent the designs graphically, are limitless. The choice of materials to be used is a derivative of whatever is available both in the design studios and at the sites. vis; the Sand Art, the Rock-cut caves or the Igloo. Hence the transformation from the Bhoj Patra to pencil and paper; and to the earnestness to adopt the pen and the Tablet or the Mouse and the Computer. The change in the medium of representation brings a change in the language and eventually leads to growth in the society. The advent of computers has encompassed every sphere of life. The Graphical media have adopted a new meaning. It has become all the more imperative to learn the language of the computers. The Architects are no longer practicing as individuals at the centre of the design process rather they constitute the core of the Construction Houses providing in-house comprehensive services. The paper aims to look at these languages, programs and their inclusion in the architectural curriculum at different stages.

2004

This seminar explores contemporary architecture through the lens of its ever expanding field, taking as a starting point the view that we “both do and do not know” what architecture is. What happens, for instance, when architecture intensifies its engagement with—or takes the form of—experimental research, theory building, civic action, or museum display, along with (or instead of) the design of physical structures? Adapting our course title from Rosalind Krauss’s prominent essay on sculpture (1979) but not strictly following its argument, we will pay special attention to ways that architecture intersects newly with art and other disciplines, whether through direct collaboration, cross-referencing, role-swapping, or the engagement of parallel topics or methods. A series of talks by internationally known practitioners who work at the interface of architecture and art will form the basis of our discussions. In probing architecture along its peripheries, or even from an outside perspective looking in, this seminar seeks to expand insights into what architecture is, and might be, today. We might furthermore consider: is it meaningful, or even possible, to map the contours of the field at this stage?

Journal of Visual Culture, 2016

This themed issue of the journal of visual culture entitled Architecture! has two aims. First, to present a collection of articles and shorter provocation/ position pieces about the failure of contemporary architecture to address the full complex of issues engaged by visual culture studies. Second, these lines of inquiry are meant not merely to critique architecture and its discursive conceits, but rather any critique is only valid to the degree that it identifies what is significant and vital about architecture for visual culture as such. We would like to stress that this is a critical examination of architecture (as bothobject and discourse) in contemporary visual culture: its failures, blindspots,refusals, and symptoms, yes, but also its successes, minor discourses, and alternative models of practice. In short, we are most interested in discovering an ‘outside’, that is, a passage beyond ‘starchitect’ vanity/ideological projects in favor of a critical – vital – interest in architecture as a socio-cultural and historical means of transmitting unforeseen aesthetic possibilities and modes of knowledge. This requires forcing ourselves not only to think ‘architecture from the outside’ (as Elizabeth Grosz, 2001, has said), but from the inside as well because only along this fold does architecture become a plane within which visual cultures are immanently composed. It is along this fold that architecture presents its full powers: to create intervals and delays, to demarcate and cross thresholds between political and temporal blocs, to attract or magnetize disparate communities of people, and to render ontological immanence visible. In short, we want architecture to live up to its claimed singular promise, which Peter Eisenman (2001: xiii) puts this way: ‘only in architecture can the idea of an embodied and temporal virtuality be both thought and experienced.’

2018

The Chair of Methods and Analysis at the Department of Architecture of TU Delft investigates architecture in two ways. We study and test the tools, procedures and methods used by architects to engage with the built environment. At the same time, we critically and systematically analyse the built environment in order to understand its components, logic and processes. We hold that operative interrelations between methods and analyses establish the condition to learn about architecture. Based on these two premises, we have assembled this small selection of projects which represents our collective interests and ambitions. All of these projects were developed between 2014 and 2018, in courses offered by the Chair. The projects expand known architectural tools such as drawing, writing and modelling, and show how a better insight into the capacity of these methods offers a more locally responsive and socially inclusive architecture.