ROLODEX

An Architecture Theory Rolodex compiled from classmates presentations and readings throughout ARCH 5302. Use the links and tags to find containing cross-referenced entries for the architects, critics, buildings, titles and concepts that we have visited this semester.

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Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao 

the dancing behemoth, met with hysteria nothing less of a mystic visitation. It represents accomplishment in its own right, but doesn’t qualify as the summary statement on the relations of society, form and modernization at the end of a great modern century.

Compares Bilbao Guggenheim to Gehry’s earlier Disney Concert Hall and to Frank Lloyd Wright’s New York Guggenheim Museum

- Kwinter believes the Bilbao museum replaces the earlier promise of the Disney Concert Hall, but that both are not nearly as innovative or radical as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim, which was the “kind of innovation not attempted often in this generation”

Philip Johnson thinks this building is a big deal

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Mosque of Córdoba

 Independent elements are combined additively to form an indeterminate whole. And the local syntax is fixed but there is no overarching geometric scaffolding. Parts are not fragments of whole, but simply parts. Lastly, the possibility of incremental growth is anticipated in the mathematical relations of the parts. Transformation over time- each stage is a replication of the previous. 

Alluded to by Stan Allen.

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Open Field vs Closed Field

Open Field- An essential impediment to total politics; it is driven by the complexity and competition of its parts. The domain of enlightened traditionalism (Popper). “Open as an idea and closed as a fact.”

   vs

  Closed Field - The domain of utopia and of the bricoleur. Due to the complexities of modern society, the closed field rarely materializes.

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Peter Eisenman

Cornell (B.Arch) and Columbia (Master of Science in Architecture), and Cambridge (M.A. and Ph.D.), is part of the New York Five (more social and academic allegiances than anything) He respects Derrida and collaborated with him at Park de la Villette 1982 competition. A ssociated with Deconstructivism.

  Writings include

Houses of Cards. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Diagram Diaries (Universe Architecture Series), Thames and Hudson, 1999.

Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial : Eisenman Architects 1988-1998 

Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques, New York, The Monacelli Press 2003

Eisenman Inside Out. Selected Writings 1963-1988, New Haven-London, Yale University Press 2004

Ten Canonical Buildings 1950-2000, New York, Rizzoli International Publications inc. 2008

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Jacques Derrida

Cited in Mark Wigley's text,  Derrida (1930-2004) A French-Jewish philosopher founded the critical theory- 'deconstruction'. Derrida challenged the fundamental privilege of a unify principle, and suggested the notion of multiplicity and identity. “Deconstruction” is a “translation” of two of Heidegger’s terms: Destruction, meaning “not a destruction but precisely a destructuring that dismantles the structural layers in the system,” and Abbau, meaning “to take apart an edifice in order to see how it is constituted or deconstituted.” Derrida follows Heidegger’s argument that this “destructuring” or “unbuilding” disturbs a tradition by inhabiting its structure in a way that exploits its metaphoric resources against itself.

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Martin Heidegger

(1889 to 1976) who was an influential German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the 'question of Being’, agreed with Kant that laying the foundations is the necessary task of all metaphysics. He also used architecture as metaphor to display his idea about the relationship between edifice and foundation. In his reading, edifice and foundation are not simply two separate parts. 'Edifice' is not an addition to the foundation; rather, it reveals the foundation. The edifice and its structure is a representation of the foundation. So you can see in this diagram. The change in foundation is reflected in the change in the form of the edifice. Thus the restriction imposed on the foundation, is the restriction that restrict free form of representation of the tower.

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Sarah Whiting

BA Yale University, MArch Princeton, Ph.D from MIT. Dean of the Rice University School of Architecture. Has held teaching positions at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, the Princeton University School of Architecture, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky and the University of Florida. Is a design principal of WW Architecture.

Writings include

Whiting, Sarah. “Superblockism: Chicago’s Elastic Grid,” Histories of Cities: Design and Context, eds. Rodolphe el-Khoury and Edward Robbins (London: Spon/Routledge, 2004): 57-76.

Whiting, Sarah. “Bas-Relief Urbanism: Chicago’s Figured Field,” in Phyllis Lambert, ed. Mies in America (CCA + Whitney Museum, 2001): 642-691.

Somol, R.E. and Whiting, Sarah. "Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism." Perspecta 33 (2002): 72-77.

Koolhaas, Rem and Whiting, Sarah. "Spot Check: A Conversation between Rem Koolhaas and Sarah Whiting." Assemblage, No. 40, 36-55. Dec., 1999.

Whiting, Sarah. "Bellyache". Log 4, 5-8.

Whiting, Sarah. "Critical Reflections." Assemblage, No. 41, 88-89. Apr., 2000

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Mark Wigley

Received his Bachelor of Architecture and PhD from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. He Taught at Princeton University, from 1987 to 1999, where he also served as the director of Graduate Studies. Since 2004, he has been the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning at Columbia University.

In 1988, Wigley co- curated an exhibition with Philip Johnson entitled "Deconstructivist Architecture" at the MoMA. The exhibition featured the works of seven architects, including Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi, Rem Koolhaas and Coop Himmelb(l)au.

  writings include:

"The Activist Drawing: Situationist Architectures From Constant's New Babylon to Beyond" (2001).

Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire, Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1998.

White walls, Designer Dresses: The fashioning of modern architecture, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995.

The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1993.

(with Philip Johnson) Deconstructivist Architecture, MoMA, New York, Little, Brown/New York Graphic Society Books, 1988.

(edited with Catherine deZegher and Catherine de Zegher) The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond, Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 2001.

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Metaphysics.

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world.  The study of Being and existence- single unitary Being. That all things are derived from a single cause (or Arche- origin), Universal science: the study of first principles, changing forms and motion are illusory. The true underlying reality is that “all is one”. The world is harmonious, and is intelligible to rational understanding.

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Zombie-Architect

architects tracing their predecessors’ footsteps unthinkingly or even instinctively.

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Fredric Jameson

BA Haverford College, PhD  Yale University American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. Professor at Duke University. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends.

Recent writing include:

A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London & New York Verso. 2002. 

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London & New York: Verso. 2005. 

The Modernist Papers. London & New York Verso. 2007. 

Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2007. 

The Ideologies of Theory. London & New York: Verso. 2009.  (One-volume edition, with additional essays)

Valences of the Dialectic. London & New York: Verso. 2009. 

The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit. London & New York: Verso. 2010. 

Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. London & New York: Verso. 2011, forthcoming.

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Field Condition

A formal or spatial matrix capable of unifying diverse elements while respecting the identity as a whole.  And it localized  phenomena, defined by intricate confined connections, interval, repetition, and seriality. 

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Stan Allen

an American architect.  has a BA from Brown university,  B. Arch from Cooper Union and an M.Arch from Princeton University.  He is the Dean of the school of architecture at Princeton University.

Writings include:  work in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) and his theoretical essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation

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Roland Barthes

French theorist whose ideas explored a vast range of fields and he influenced including a multitude of ideas including but in no way limited to structuralism and semiotics, to social theory.

Writings include : Degree Zero (le degré zéro de l'écriture)

Alluded to by Fredric Jameson, in context of both Tafuri and Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno, to Barthes reversal is useful because his problematic is the most distant from the rhetoric of materialism and materiality and consists rather in a vision of the nightmare of history as blood guilt and as that necessary and inevitable violence of the relationship ofany group to the others which we call class struggle. Then he provides an escape from this by projecting a kind of work from which all group or class signals have been eliminated which is greater than  bleached writing.

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Robert Somol

 A.B. from Brown University,  J.D. from Harvard Law School and Ph.D. in the history of culture from the University of Chicago. He had held teaching positions at Ohio State University ,  Princeton School of Architecture, and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Writings include:  

Somol, R.E. and Whiting, Sarah. "Notes around the Doppler Effect and Other Moods of Modernism." Perspecta 33 (2002): 72-77.

Somol, R.E. "Green Dots 101." Hunch 11 (2007): 28-37.

Somol, R.E. "12 Reasons to Get Back in Shape." In Content, edited by Office of Metropolitan Architecture. and Rem Koolhaas. Köln: Taschen, 2004.

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Normon Foster

aka Baron Foster of Thames Bank. Cofounder of Foster + Partners. Undergraduate at University of Manchester's School of Architecture and City Planning & Masters from Yale. Sylvia Lavin refers to two of his buildings in practice makes perfect. The Swiss Rebuilding, and the Dumas building from 1970.

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Immanuel Kant

Used in Mark Wigley's text

1724-1804, an 18th-century German philosopher

Used architecture as a metaphor. "Edifice" is the metaphor of metaphysics. He believed that the edifice (which is metaphysics) is erected on the foundation (which is philosophical argument) by concealing the abyss on which it stands. This repression produced the appearance of solid ground. The factures, which are the weaknesses inherited from traditional philosophical arguments that had been remained unquestioned, are formed by this abyss. He stressed the importance of a grounded foundation in metaphysics.