Student Projects

There are 2 requirements for the course.

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.

Click here to submit your weekly commentary or to read the previous postings.

The semester projects

Possible Format

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 that:
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 of 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.

Click here to view some examples of student projects from the past semester.

Rules for students

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.

Operational rules

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 Hot Muscle dudes the warrior, the priest, the sage, or the truth seeking, 'logical, 'objective scientist."