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This article illustrates how architectural educator and historian Peter Collins's collection of 35-mm slides and his personal papers are useful windows on his work, life, and even his death. Parallax allowed Collins to constantly reinvent himself and his work, just as his books suggested that it had provided twentieth-century architects with a revolutionary way of making space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emil Lorch was a leading American architectural educator of the early twentieth century. Active in many national organizations, he also chaired the Department of Architecture at the University of Michigan from 1906 to 1937 and was a founding member of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Lorch championed new methods in architectural education — specifically, the Theory of Pure Design. With its emphasis on abstracted exercises rather than drilling in the historical styles, Lorch believed it would free students to develop a truly modern American architecture. This article traces Lorch's advocacy of Pure Design in his early career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the material collected in the Gordon Bunshaft Papers in the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Archives at Columbia University are seventeen audiocassette tapes documenting a series of interviews between Arthur Drexler (1925-1987), curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, and Gordon Bunshaft (1909-1990) of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). In these tapes, Bunshaft and Drexler proceed systematically through Bunshaft's work for SOM, with Drexler consistently probing for evidence of authorial intentionality, resisted by Bunshaft. This report considers the manner in which these tapes construct a complex "orality," in which Bunshaft's testimony refuses the intertextual mediation implied by Drexler's questions, which themselves rely on the authority of an oral testimony to guarantee the authenticity of the answers. In turn, Bunshaft's refusals to engage with architectural discourse in the name of a pseudotransparent pragmatics demonstrate the extent of his identification with the ethos of his clients, corporate executives whose "visionary" status in the postwar period was a function of their own-discursive-privileging of pragmatic action over reflective discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a version of architectural globalization that gives voice to other than the dominant order or perspective. Analyzing the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright as global in this way and considering how he incorporated Eastern as well as Western philosophies of building in his work, provides deeper insight into his Organic architecture. In addition, such an analysis makes available an alternative understanding of what global architecture can be. The analytic paradigm in use here considers other architecture as well as other aspects of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern schools of architecture, many students find it curiously difficult to relate their experiences in the lectures to their experiences in the studios. Although they are offered extensive information in the lectures about building technology, human behavior, culture, and so on, surprisingly little of this information actually seems to influence directly the forms they design in the studios. At the heart of the problem, this paper suggests, is a mistaken conception--built deep into the modem curricular structure--about how knowledge is acquired and applied. Alternative models of knowledge offered by Jean Piaget and Bill Hillier are examined, and they are found to explain more satisfactorily how the acquisition of design knowledge can be integrally related to its use. In the final section of this paper, the consequences of these alternative models for design education are discussed, and the outline of an alternative curricular structure is proposed; essentially a case will be made for abandoning lectures as they are commonly used, and for devolving to special studio projects the responsibility for transmitting essential architectural knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a critical reading of the "means" by which two important ideological architects, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier (especially in his early career), sustained and enlarged the domain of the New Objectivity in architectural discourse. I will argue that the notion of the New Objectivity unfolds an architectural language which does not tolerate figurative suggestions. Following Adolf Loos' thoughts on architecture and Martin Heidegger's discourse on technology, I find a "poetic" view of the New Objectivity in the concept of the "culture of building." The two components of the "culture of building," type and tectonic, are the themes of my concluding analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium sponsored by the Danish Doctoral Schools of Architecture & Design entitled "Paradoxes on Appearance" is presented. Topics include the relationship between appearance and withdrawal in architecture, paradoxes that exist in architecture, and that which withdraws in architectural work. The symposium featured several speakers including artist Olafur Eliasson, Andrew Benjamin, and Sanford Kwinter.

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium sponsored by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music entitled "Sacred Space: Architecture for Worship in the 21st Century," which examined sacred worship space in the era of globalization, is presented. Topics include the meaning of space to architects, the changing rules of religion and design, and the architecture of the "megachurch." The symposium featured several ministers including Robert Schuller, Richard Vosko, and Richard Giles.

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium sponsored by the Yale School of Architecture entitled "Constructing the Ineffable: Contemporary Sacred Architecture," which examined the design of sacred spaces, is presented. Topics include architect Le Corbusier's design of his Ronchamp chapel, how the architect describes the indescribable, and how buildings invoke the unutterable. The symposium featured several architects including Richard Meier, Steven Holl, and Hayden Salter.

Information about several papers discussed at a symposium sponsored by the School of Architecture, City College of New York entitled "Ineffable," which examined the inexpressible dimensions of architecture and claims of new instrumentalities produced by digital tools, is presented. Topics include how the themes pointed to the future, the limitations of digital tools, and the fluidity of the concept of human. The symposium featured several architects including Karl Chu, David Gersten, and Todd Gannon.

The article discusses alternative approaches to the structure of an architectural practice, examining whether the procedures used in firms have become too standardized to be effective to the needs of its clients and society. The global financial crisis has forced design firms to find creative uses for employees, the article indicates. Topics include preferences for stylistic flamboyance over fiscal prudence, computer technology that allows any conceivable structure to be delineated, and broadening the applications and definitions of green design.

This article analyzes the politics of visual representations of the city in the postwar Turkish context. In this period, marked by rapid urbanization, urban problems entered into the realm of daily politics and the city turned into a terrain of struggle. A major component of this struggle was the representations of the city. Particular interest is given to the role played by Turkish architects and urban planners in producing visual representations of the city that became components of a counterhegemonic urban politics during the 1960s and 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Heidegger’s work, the immaterial structures of human existence link our “everyday” activities to those moments that are extraordinary. Architectural design activates these relationships when a designer welcomes the uncertainty, contingency, and vulnerability that are fundamental to one’s being. A designer’s understanding of and involvement in these immaterial structures may foster achievements that are often obstructed by a narrower, goal-driven focus and point the way toward a richer built environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Architecture that is hard to describe by being immaterial, irrelevant, and unintended may engage us in a narrative rather than a visual sense. Three examples of anonymous architecture are presented where stories regarding interfaces between existence and nonexistence emerge. They are all places where people can vanish and taken together tell stories of death, hell, and heaven. In these unexpected places, the deeper issues of life may be obliquely and ironically experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the interplay between scale models and intellectual paradigms, architectural models construct immaterial ideas. This confluence of material and immaterial in architectural modeling is explored through an examination of Gerrit Rietveld’s design for the Rietveld Schröder house (1924). His first wood massing model of the project is often considered to have been created before the idea of flowing space and as an instance of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift. Instead, through Gaston Bachelard’s concept of paradigm nesting, the model is shown to be integral to Rietveld’s design process that used three mutually exclusive notions of mass across different conceptual terrains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with deconstructivist architect, writer and educator Bernard Tschumi is presented. He offered insights about the history of architecture and its relevance to performance art. Tschumi discussed the pedagogical objective when an architect engages in the actual staging of scripts in existing architecture. He also gave his interpretation of embodiment in terms of architecture advertisements.

This essay explores the premise that thinking by drawing—thinking through the crafting of the disegno—is the primary way that architects extend their understandings of architecture. It suggests that drawing is an architect’s unique mode of research, inquiry, and is the site for his/her most crucial speculations and constructions. Douglas Darden’s drawings are speculative architectural fantasies that demonstrate this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the beginnings of professionalization in the nineteenth century, architects have struggled to find ways to reach a broad public. Leopold Eidlitz, one of the founding members of the American Institute of Architects, published a series of essays in The Crayon in 1858 that attempted, through the use of popular literary forms, to do just that. Eidlitz addressed the “Discourses Between Two T-Squares” to a general audience and hoped that their humor and scathing caricatures would educate non-professionals about the practical and theoretical intricacies of architecture. Eidlitz’s attempt at advocacy sheds light on the long-standing difficulty that architects have creating a resonant public image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates an important, yet unexplored aspect of Hassan Fathy’s work, namely his 1957–1961 collaboration with the prolific international firm, Doxiadis Associates. Focusing on Fathy’s proposals for mass housing in Iraq and Pakistan, the article examines how the Egyptian architect recast his famous 1945 project of New Gourna in a new perspective, to calibrate his social and formal sensibilities according to Doxiadis’s scientific and developmentalist ethos. The goal is to demonstrate that Fathy’s thought was complexly intertwined with larger mid-twentieth century architectural debates on culture and modernity, and as such, it transcended any essentialist discourses of identity that often appropriated his notion of vernacular architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There can be little argument that the design jury features as a key symbolic event in the education of the architect. 1 However, while the centrality of the design jury as a site for learning disciplinary skills, beliefs, and values is now widely acknowledged, there continues to be considerable disagreement about what is learnt and how. While critical pedagogues argue that the design jury is a critic-centered ritual that coerces students into conforming to hegemonic notions of professional identity, the more commonly held conception is that the jury is a student-centered event that supports students in the construction of their own architectural identities. 2 This article, inspired by Michel Foucault’s studies of relationship between power and the formation of the modern self, reports on the findings of a year-long ethnographic study carried out in one British school of architecture. 3 The research sought to unravel the complexities of the design jury as a site of dichotomous power relations, and the findings bring into question the efficacy of the design jury as a ritual that supports useful learning. The article concludes by proposing that the design jury be replaced by a new set of pedagogic events that are carefully constructed to support student learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the gradual evolution of the idea of installation in three experimental exhibition pavilions designed before World War I by the German architect Bruno Taut. In collaboration with the critic Adolf Behne, Taut gradually transferred ideas from Expressionist painting to architecture and helped move his designs, and with it modern architecture more generally, from a focus on visual “objects,” to multisensory “experiences,” an idea that continues to resonate in modern installations today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1943, the government of Free France assigned the architect Bernard Zehrfuss the mission of estimating and repairing the devastation caused by the Second World War in Tunisia. Surrounded by a team of young architects, Zehrfuss set up a Department of Architecture and Urbanism, labeled the perchoir, which carried out a distinctive design philosophy. As a unique research laboratory, this Department was to become, for a little over four years, the arena of an architectural creation without precedent. The early colonial fascination with exotic and orientalist themes was substituted by an architecture that incorporated the local know-how in the expression of an abstract modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of architectural education in facilitating the international flow of ideas and developing the local profession during the interwar period is relatively underexplored. In Australia, the Melbourne University Architectural Atelier (1919–1947) was instrumental in introducing foreign methodologies while promoting a locally inflected paradigm of modern architecture. Based initially on the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the atelier's emphasis on composition and form, rather than a single accepted architectural style, fostered a culture of experimentation among Australian architects. But its focus on scholarship instead of professional qualification led to its eventual demise, highlighting the complex relationship between global design culture and local architectural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses some thoughts on the relationship of academia and practice in architecture. Institutional function of accredited architectural schools; Intellectual mandate of architectural schools; Function of professional training in universities; Architecture from a production perspective.

The relationships between form, performance, and construction are uniquely demonstrated in the long-span works of Pier Luigi Nervi. The balance of these forces led in Nervi's case to a series of works that take the form of the equiangular spiral, a bizarre geometrical phenomenon that appears regularly in the natural world. The affinities between Nervi's work and the spiral's natural occurrences can be explained via D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form, suggesting that this familiar book on biological morphology be seen by architects in a new and more thorough light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Streamlining becomes here an organic force as it relates to the dynamic equilibrium of the motion of the body within encompassed space. Frederick Kiesler [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of sound to inform and broaden architectural design criteria is examined both historically and in the context of current education and practice. Historically, periods of sophisticated aural design have often been coupled with the oral traditions of preliterate societies whereas literate cultures have produced architecture organized primarily according to visual logic. At present, acoustical engineering is typically applied to architecture in remedial fashion: either to completed buildings or to designs already conceived along different sensory lines. A recent experimental studio intended to explore the generative potential of aural design is documented as a possible prototype for soundinclusive curricula in schools of architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conveying an image of anonymous modernity to the public, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe focused on the exterior surface of his own apartment block for the 1927 Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart. Privileging external imagery over internal innovation, Mies' main facade advertised standardization and rationalization versus flexibility and creativity within the apartment units. Rather than display a new type of housing, Mies relied on a traditional Berlin apartment template, recycling it beneath a new thin skin. In relation to his previous glass skyscraper projects, Mies exhibited what Theo van Doesburg termed "the ultimate surface." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the public image of women architects in Wilhelmine Germany, examining the tension between cultural conceptions of femininity and the social construction of the architect as a masculine figure. Writings published between 1908 and 1920 concerning women architects are analyzed according to five prominent themes: the architect's body, the negotiation of the building site, the architect's mind and the female brain, the persona of the architect, and the woman architect as mistress of the domestic realm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what ways can architectural design define identity, or alternatively, challenge received identity? Based on a design pedagogy that experiments with both defamiliarization and dance, we distinguish two ways: (1) in the readymade space of the eye, as meanings other than the received ones can emerge, or (2) in the space-in-the-making of the body, as the reading of meaning in ready-made space alone is challenged, and meaning also emerges in the order of our mutual movement with one another. Our pedagogy represents a collaboration between an architect and a philosopher, both actively engaged in interdisciplinary education within and between their respective schools as well as with the School of Engineering. From the outset, we saw "design in movement" as a potential framework to foster side-by-side collaboration between disciplines (interdisciplinarity) rather than merely among disciplines (multidisciplinarity). Design in movement is a complement to traditional architectural design in space. Design in movement allows us to experience, through our bodies, in a way that challenges our deeply ingrained visual culture. If we design in this visual culture without being able to call the culture into question, we do not take advantage of the full range of design's liberative potential: it is one thing to design so as to refuse any single authoritative reading in space, but another to discover an alternative to reading itself. We are investigating how design in movement can motivate new ways of liberative building and inhabiting that challenge the hegemony of design in space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No doubt law and the American legal system are mysterious to those not routinely associated with it. The law and the American legal system are a process—process whereby the law is debated and tested by different courts, eventually being hammered out after much trial and error, no pun intended. Perhaps therein lies the mystery: that law is a continually changing process, not some type of “truth” or “rule” or even some concrete thing. Like all processes, it is alive and continues to grow and develop and become more complex. It does not often stand very still for us to study. What we study today may not exist tomorrow. Law has most of the characteristics of a living system. That is, it grows, develops, and gives birth to new law. The process needed to develop a particular law may span decades, even hundreds of years. People who try to “learn” the law to use it to their advantage or to gain an understanding of the regulatory environment of business, are doomed to failure. Only people who learn the legal process can succeed in understanding the law and putting it to work for them. This article explains in basic terms the legal system in operation in the United States and provides an interactive project designed to facilitate an understanding of the American legal system and the process by which law is developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]