Mark,
Bernard Tschumii once wrote, "the concept of a dog does not bark, therefore the concept of a dog is not a dog".
Do you think lifting patterns and structures from real-life processes and as you say 'metaphorically' (or analogically) imposing them on architecture is an end-in-itself? Or is it a limitation you think necessary? The metaphoric transfer has existed in architecture since the very beginning, the Aztec, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus-Valley and Chinese all had it, one cannot disagree with the notions that . . .
1. architects must operate with the prevailing sciences (be it Voodoo, Astrology, Astronomy or mathematics).
2. They should build with the current technologies.
These are homilies, they also don't say much about the meaning of the building.
~ * ~
To take your Rose window example, its mathemic structure is one thing, it gives it shape. Its meaning is quite another thing. It constructs propositions, as Panofsky, a recognised authority on that business showed, about nature, Man and divinity within a Scholastic paradigm. And this reliance on mathematics was dangerous even then. Panofsky ends his book by saying "Here Scholastic dialectics has driven architectural thinking to a point where it has almost ceased to be architectural". You may disagree, yet this is an argument worth contending (Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Erwin Panofsky. Meridian Books - 1957).
Is there an Architect's way of knowing? Why have academies stopped asking this question?
By relaying on analogies, we reduce architecture to a 'low level' system, a system with low explanatory powers. A system like somebody else's system. I do recognise the need for analogies, because they make possible the inter-subjective transfers of architectural meaning, but is that all? Why should architecture look 'like' language, or like biology or like a rat!
In other words, why should it look like some other discipline or branch of knowledge? Why should it mimic? Or as Catherine Ingram wrote, 'classifiable but dumb!
Why can't it look like architecture, or like god or like man or the shape of our emotion, hope and desire-what is the subject-matter of architecture?
Anand Bhatt.
http://anandbhatt.hypermart.net/sitemap.htm
Bernard Tschumii once wrote, "the concept of a dog does not bark, therefore the concept of a dog is not a dog".
Do you think lifting patterns and structures from real-life processes and as you say 'metaphorically' (or analogically) imposing them on architecture is an end-in-itself? Or is it a limitation you think necessary? The metaphoric transfer has existed in architecture since the very beginning, the Aztec, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indus-Valley and Chinese all had it, one cannot disagree with the notions that . . .
1. architects must operate with the prevailing sciences (be it Voodoo, Astrology, Astronomy or mathematics).
2. They should build with the current technologies.
These are homilies, they also don't say much about the meaning of the building.
~ * ~
To take your Rose window example, its mathemic structure is one thing, it gives it shape. Its meaning is quite another thing. It constructs propositions, as Panofsky, a recognised authority on that business showed, about nature, Man and divinity within a Scholastic paradigm. And this reliance on mathematics was dangerous even then. Panofsky ends his book by saying "Here Scholastic dialectics has driven architectural thinking to a point where it has almost ceased to be architectural". You may disagree, yet this is an argument worth contending (Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Erwin Panofsky. Meridian Books - 1957).
Is there an Architect's way of knowing? Why have academies stopped asking this question?
By relaying on analogies, we reduce architecture to a 'low level' system, a system with low explanatory powers. A system like somebody else's system. I do recognise the need for analogies, because they make possible the inter-subjective transfers of architectural meaning, but is that all? Why should architecture look 'like' language, or like biology or like a rat!
In other words, why should it look like some other discipline or branch of knowledge? Why should it mimic? Or as Catherine Ingram wrote, 'classifiable but dumb!
Why can't it look like architecture, or like god or like man or the shape of our emotion, hope and desire-what is the subject-matter of architecture?
Anand Bhatt.
http://anandbhatt.hypermart.net/sitemap.htm