Commentary on Modern Armenian Architecture
For the past 30 years, architectural discourse in Armenia seems to be trapped in a self-referential loop. This article will attempt to illustrate the core problems that plague architectural practice and discourse today. It will demonstrate why the architectural style that became widely celebrated during the past decade is as superficial as the old quasi-traditional architecture. Additionally, this article will try to materialise the elusive design method employed by many Armenian architects making it available for critique.
Fragmentation
The only architectural university (NUACA) is certainly at the heart of many problems that harm the field today. The primary shortcoming of the…
How Much Money Do Architectural Offices Make?
In this article, you can find a statistical cross-section of the Finnish architectural landscape. As the title suggests, this article is not going to look into the architectural qualities of different offices instead it’s going to use financial data and descriptive statistics to sense the architectural market in Finland.
What’s the point of using financial data? The economy as a social science is essentially concerned with how people interact with things of value. Knowing how much people are willing to pay for a particular service quite often (though not always) can give an approximate hint about the value it provides…
Part II
The previous reading list suggested that architecture is a body of knowledge concerned with the synthesis of orderly structures. The computational paradigm shift that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century vastly extended the boundaries of architectural knowledge. Today computational thinking offers a new perspective on the most critical aspects of architecture as a discipline. The fundamental concepts which underline computational theory expose form as a subsidiary component of the environment, and the environment as a complex web of energies in a dynamic exchange of both regeneration and degeneration (information). The emergence of this perspective has come at…
Architecture is not about buildings. Architecture is primarily a body of knowledge concerned with the synthesis of orderly structures. Considering the large time span over which this knowledge was accumulated, it is apparent that a single person can no longer have the mental capacity or the life span to familiarize himself with all the outstanding information. However, a brief selection of texts can give a very general outline and capture the significant ideas that shaped the history of architectural discourse. What follows is a reading list targeted at someone starting their studies in the field of architecture.
“Architectural Context” series is a collection of bite-sized excerpts from Architectural Context in the Age of Big Data. The work reflects on the developments in our understanding of architectural context throughout the 20th century and suggests that there is a need to employ the knowledge accumulated in the field of data science in architectural thinking.
Table of Contents
Architectural Context Part 1: Order
Architectural Context Part 2: Perception
Architectural Context Part 3: Camillo Sitte
Architectural Context Part 4: Aldo Rossi
Architectural Context Part 5: Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter
Architectural Context Part 6: Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown
Excerpt from: Architectural Context in the Age of Big Data
Architectural Context Part 9: Physical Context
The Digital Turn
There were several influences that collectively contributed to the emergence of the digital paradigm in architecture. One of those influences was the form of response to the fragmentation and fracture of postmodern collage systems and a movement towards continuity and the pursuit of fundamentally different part-to-whole relationships within architecture.
The conceptual basis for this continuity was found in Gilles Deleuze’s conceptual philosophy and in Rene Thom’s catastrophe diagrams (Figure Below).
Excerpt from: Architectural Context in the Age of Big Data
Architectural Context Part 8: Peter Eisenman
All case studies presented earlier although might seem distinct share a series of fundamental properties. These theories about the city are striving to discover or induce a category of order. They are intellectual constructs attempting to “measure” and describe the complex relationships occurring within the city, rendering the ambiguous relationships between architectural context and architectural form more precise. All mentioned theories employ the figure-ground principle with various degrees of abstraction, where ground and figure no longer refer to merely visual domain but rather imply…
Excerpt from: Architectural Context in the Age of Big Data
Architectural Context Part 7: Rem Koolhaas
In his work “The Formal Basis of Modern Architecture” Peter Eisenman attempted to create an alternative reading of architectural form.¹ He defined architecture as the giving of form to intent, function, structure, and technics and argued that the concept of architectural form had been commonly oscillating in the discipline without explicit attempts to define its precise conceptual meaning. Thus, he proposed a formal language where generic architectural form could be defined through its four essential properties volume, mass, surface, and movement.²
Eisenman argued that…
Excerpt from: Architectural Context in the Age of Big Data
Architectural Context Part 6: Robert Venturi
In 1853 New York’s world fair showcased the recent technological inventions. Among the exhibits was the elevator invention that would ultimately shape the face of the city for the following decades. In the age of staircases, all the floors above the second were considered unfit for any commercial activities and floors above the fifth to an extent uninhabitable.¹ The invention of the elevator allowed to reintroduce these floors to the urban setting creating the typology of a skyscraper. The influence that the technological invention…
Excerpt from: Architectural Context in the Age of Big Data
Architectural Context Part 5: Colin Rowe & Fred Koetter
In their book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture” Venturi and Scott Brown argue that the main role of an architect is the creation of orderly wholes through the use of conventional parts and with occasional introduction of new parts. Furthermore, similar to Picasso’s “Bulls Head” example he argues, that it is possible to create new meanings through an unconventional organization of parts within the whole.¹ Venturi writes:
Gestalt psychology maintains that context contributes meaning to a part and change in context…
