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The 3rd International Meeting on the Research of Modern Architecture | Event Type: | Conferences & Expos | | | | Company: | Alvar Aalto Museum | | Dates: | Aug 30 2008 - Aug 31 2008 | | Location: | Helsinki, Finland | | Address: | Jyväskylä University,
Helsinki,
Finland, | | | | Industry: | DES | | Posted By: | UP world | | Reply: | Send Message | | | | Description: | The 3rd International Meeting on the Research of Modern Architecture, organised by the Alvar Aalto Academy, examines the points of contact, the influences and effects, the interactions and affiliations, the correlations and cross-fertilisations, the bonds and links between thinking, designing, and building.
Chaired by Kari Jormakka, the meeting takes place in August, 2008, in Helsinki and Jyväskylä, Finland, bringing together practicing architects and architectural pedagogues, philosophers and art historians, sociologists and cultural theorists.
The workshops of the meeting are following:
Workshop 1 | Translations from concepts to buildings
“He has built them a thought over there” – this is how Karl Kraus described Adolf Loos’ house on the Michaelerplatz in Vienna. Many critics take it for granted that there is a generating idea or a central concept at the core of an architectural project. But is this how the creative process really unfolds? Do the frequent references to deconstruction, Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty or pragmatism by recent architects and critics relegate architecture to the status of an illustration of something more fundamental? What about architecture that does not signify anything nameable but rather establishes an atmosphere? Was Le Corbusier right in asserting that the essence of architecture is ineffable?
Workshop 2 | Space for thought
Philosophical texts abound with architectural metaphors. To some observers this indicates that philosophy is premised on, if not conditioned by, architecture. Certainly, it can be argued that the conception of thought as something abstract has involved a basic misunderstanding of the body and space. But how does architecture with its techniques of spatial ordering contribute to the constitution of the thinking subject? How are the concepts that philosophers define dependent on the precepts and affects proposed by art and architecture? And how is space, in turn, produced and reproduced by various discourses and practices?
Workshop 3 | Understanding architecture
For Heinrich Wölffl in, explaining a style equals demonstrating that it says the same thing as all other organs of its time. Does understanding a building or a work of architecture likewise require that it be related to contemporaneous phenomena, such as social conditions, political ideologies, scientific theories, or other regimes and techniques of visuality and spatiality? Or should architecture be explained genealogically, reconstructing the intentions of the architect or positioning the work within the discourse or history of the discipline? Can we concentrate exclusively on the design itself and decipher its internal dynamics? Or can we recognize the work in the effects it generates?
Workshop 4 | Thought experiments in Muuratsalo
A test case for different interpretive approaches is provided by the Experimental House in Muuratsalo, Finland, designed by Alvar Aalto in 1953. In order to explain how he came up with the design that combines archetypal patterns with organic shapes and apparently random articulations of surface, the architect referred (without too much elaboration) to Yrjö Hirn’s theories on creative play as the origin of art. How could such an authorial reading be amended with critical insights drawn from current theories? How would the building appear from perspectives opened by phenomenology, psychoanalysis, gender studies, formalism or visual culture? A DVD with a set of drawings, photographs and a movie of the house is available for contributors interested in proposing a close reading of Muuratsalo.
Workshop 5 | Architectural expertise
Ever since Vitruvius, architects have claimed the ability to tap into expert knowledge from diverse fields and forge it into a culturally cogent synthesis. That special skill – some speak of “design intelligence” – is today in urgent need of further articulation, as architects face the danger of losing their leading position in the production of buildings. Does architectural expertise consist of tacit knowledge – or could it be explicated and formalised even to the extent that design could be carried out by computers alone? How is this expertise transferred through education and how should it be modified in the face of current technological and economic developments? Can a design project be equal to a traditional Ph.D. dissertation as a form of academic research and critical thinking?
Workshop 6 | Architecture and popular taste
The expertise of nuclear physicists or brain surgeons is seldom doubted even though few of us understand what they are doing or saying. By contrast, architects have to face constant criticism. Is this because truly challenging works of architecture require a period of time before they can be understood by a broader public? What about the Bilbao effect, then? Is there an architectural avant-garde that senses the future like a seismograph, to borrow Hans Hollein’s metaphor? Is broad acceptance proof of successful architecture – or can we ignore popular criticism because “all public opinion is manipulated opinion,” as Richard Serra used to maintain? Or would it be more effective to view architecture in Bourdieusian terms as a battlefield between social classes and examine taste as a distinction strategy?
http://www.alvaraalto.fi/conferences/2008/index.ht... | | |
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