One question for each reading, format is down below, the attachment are the two readings, you don’t have to read every detail, but pick one point in the reading and develop a question. It doesn’t have to be as long as the examples.
example:
1.In the writing “In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind”, Robin Evans examines the representation of architecture in his 1983 review off Chamber Works, an exhibition of 28 of Daniel Libeskind’s drawings. He reviews the task of the critic/viewer and the draftsman, the anthropomorphization of the lines drawn by Libeskind, and the relationship of design and construction. In the final section of the essay (Architecture without Building), Evans writes “Architecture, which has always involved drawing before building, can be split into prior and subsequent activities: design and construction. The building can be discarded as an unfortunate aftermath, and all the properties, values, and attributes that are worth keeping can be held in the drawing; perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that they retract back into the drawing” (pg.9, 3rd paragraph). He discusses the distance between the process of composition and the result of what is being composed. Based on Evans’s views on how architecture has been accomplished in the past through drawing and only manifested through building, why is it that the author believes contemporary architecture has lost an intimacy between the “way of designing and the thing designed”? What could he be pointing to in contemporary architecture that shows this decline?
2. In Kenneth Frampton’s writing “The Case for the Tectonic”, he examines how architecture has been reduced from tectonic form to scenographic design through a shift to the inorganic commodity culture. He discussed the articulation of building through the meanings of the word tectonic. Frampton emphasizes the constructional and material articulation in architecture. The author references Gottfried Semper who “divided built form into two separate material procedures: into the tectonics of the frame, in which members of varying length are conjoined to encompass a spatial field; and the stereotomics of compressive mass that, while it may embody space, is constructed through the piling up of identical units”(pg. 24). Frampton says “Semper’s emphasis of the joint implies that fundamental syntactical transition may be expressed as one passes from the stereotomic base to the tectonic frame, and that such transitions constitute the very essence of architecture. They are the dominant constituents whereby one culture of building differentiates itself from the next” (pg. 24). Why does Frampton place an emphasis on the idea of the joint and how does it support his beliefs? How is it that this object allows for a transition and unity between opposing elements in architecture?
0 comments