Essay
1
Over the past few weeks, we have discussed several
themes surrounding ideas of modernism, postmodernism, ideology, imagination, space,
and utopias. For this first major
assignment, students will compose an essay in which they explore some of the
ideas we have been discussing in class, respond to them, and explain why they respond
to them as they do.
To begin this essay, students will go back to their
blog comments, the blog comments of their peers, and their class notes and
explore some of the major issues that have arisen from our discussions, both
online and face-to-face. You will want to
explore your own comments and trace the themes, questions, ideas, and issues
that interest you the most. Take notes
in a way that seems useful to you, making sure to underline and keep track of
important ideas from your own writing, your peers’ writing, and the published
writers we have read and discussed in class.
Use past writing as a way to begin this essay and expand upon ideas you
have explored in previous blogs.
In developing a focus for your essay, you may want
to draw upon my questions on the blog as a starting point for writing, but
remember that this essay assignment is ultimately about pursuing your own
critical questions and engaging your own interests and ideas. Regardless of the scope of your essay, you
must bring the writers we have been exploring in this course into some sort of “conversation,”
meaning that I expect you to draw from several authors in order to bring
complexity, nuance, and support to your own ideas.
To help you develop your essay, students will post a
rough draft of their essay to the course blog by Tuesday at 5:00 pm. Before class on Friday, students will read
through all of their peers’ essays and write a 100-250 word response and
assessment for revision to each of their peers’ papers. Do not write this assessment on the blog, but
bring your assessment to class for discussion. Also, bring copies of your peers' essays by either printing them out or having access to them on a laptop or tablet.
Ar-chi-tect (noun): a person who designs buildings and advises in their construction; a person who designs and guides a plan or undertaking. (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).
ReplyDeleteOrigin of ARCHITECT: Middle French architecte, from Latin architectus, from Greek architekton: master builder (from archi + tekton = builder + carpenter) (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).
Build-er (noun): one that builds; especially: one that contracts to build and supervise building operations. (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary)
Use-ful-ness (noun): the quality of having utility and especially practical worth or applicability. (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).
Is Bernard Tschumi describing himself and his work when he says that postmodernism ultimately led to "the narrowing of architecture as a form of knowledge into architecture as mere knowledge of form" (Architecture and Limits I)? Probably not since he would be too proud to ever make such a declaration in regards to himself, but this statement unfortunately does ring true. In no way do I intend to pick on Mr. Tschumi, I don’t know him and I am not very familiar with his work, but his case with the Acropolis Museum he designed in Athens, right on the foot of the hill that holds the real Acropolis, makes the perfect case in point to illustrate why this kind of thinking bothers me so much. Having visited Tschumi’s Acropolis Museum I can say that the crowning achievement of this piece of architecture is the top floor which was designed to basically hold the real Parthenon exactly as it stands in the Acropolis: same footprint, same angles of direction, same height. But as one teacher recently commented:
“If one wants to truly experience the Parthenon, head up the hill or visit the British Museum”. Ouch!
And yet, this comment made me think even more about the subject of form in architecture. What would lead a Greek architect to say something like this about a piece of architecture meant to hold the “crowning achievement” of Greek history? "Building may be about usefulness, architecture not necessarily so" ( Tschumi, Architecture and Limits 1), and this is the answer. It seems that the Acropolis Museum is architecture: it serves no useful purpose since the authentic pieces of the Parthenon are located in London, nor is it useful in terms of how the spaces work and relate to each other, how the spaces relate to the outside shell, how this shell responds to the context of the city of Athens.
The sad part is that this exact same sequence of analysis can be applied to so many pieces of architecture the whole world over, whether designed by “starchitects” or not. I was surprised to find that a major qualifier for earning the status of “starchitect” is the amount of press and media space an architect receives; if an architect stops receiving press time she/he loses the mention.
Architecture has been forever doomed since the moment the term “starchitect” was created and since the first person to be given the title allowed himself to be dubbed thee. It is no wonder mere mortals think of all architects as divas impossible to work with. Some of these architects so presumptuously dare write that they, not their clients, know what is best for the clients to live the perfect life, whether it is at home, work, a museum, or the experience of the Parthenon.
For millennia human kind has survived without the need for architects, but they have needed builders to provide the basic and universal human necessity of shelter. It is about time that all architects around the world return to constructing Buildings, the kind Tschumi says may be about usefulness. People are too important for architecture to be done in any other way.