Positions |
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Issue 1, November 2001 | |
Wael Houssein Kharkov |
Style and Vigour Contemporary problems of Arab architectural aesthetics> In the Arab region one can see with the naked eye the key intellectual problem for formation of a dynamic professional
community, authoritative in the world architecture. This is an interpretation of Arab architectural heritage in the
system of means and methods of architecture on the boundary of the XXI-st century - in creative paradigms of
conceptualism, contextualism, "environmental approach", "critical regionalism". In professional conscience there has
formed a dramatic gap between a high level of theoretical assimilation of principles of traditional Arab architecture
and real inclusion of the heritage into architectural-urbanistic practice. |
Natalya Khoroyan Kharkov |
Kharkov at the Frontier of XIX - XX Centuries: Noncritical Regionalism. Architectural School without Vernakular. In 1805 the Emperor's University was opened in Kharkov - the second one in Russia. At the end of 1870-ies the
railway line from Moscow to Crimea and Caucasia passed through Kharkov, thus connecting the economical and political
center of Russia with the South. This was followed by the impetuous socio-economic growth of the town. |
Yelena Remizova Kharkov |
Architecture as Theatre or Theatre of "Classical" Architecture by Ricardo Bofill
Architecture and dramatic art, as two spheres of creativity, exist independently and irrespectively from each other. In article is undertaking the attempt to investigate how the theatrical and architectural ideas interact, penetrate from one area into another, mutually complement and develop each other. There are no precise borders and distinctions in rising their sense. Creativity of Bofill and his studio "Talier de Architecture" it confirms. The work of the foreman builds on a principle polyphonic music, on the attraction and collision different logics, frequently ancient alongside with modern. On the example of French living complexes by R. Bofill we see, that Post-Modernism in it's aspiration to develop it's art language addresses to idea of dialogue with the historical past, which was born long before, and uses for this the means of stage producing and dramatic art. |
Issue 2, February 2000 | |
Kirsten Wagner Oldenburg |
The Spatial Data-Management System of the Architecture Machine Group
The Spatial Data-Management System was developed from 1976-1978 in MIT's Architecture Machine Group and has been viewed as one of the first spatial data management systems. This system is based on the concept of an interface between user and computer which allows different media forms such as text, graphic, photography and film to be inputted and outputted - communicating with the human senses. The system seeks to establish a clear and functional extension of the computer. One of the central ideas of this system is the visualisation of information in the form of graphical and image representations, a concept which eventually replaces the alpha-numeric command systems of the first generation of computers in the 70's. Furthermore, the Spatial Data-Management System represents a spatial, topological ordering paradigm which can be used for the organisation and access of archived information. Cognitive psychological studies of the 60's in which the natural spatial orientation of human memory and traditional mnemonics gain new attention, served as inspiration for the Architecture Machine Group. |
Sophie Wolfrum (Stuttgart/ Karlsruhe) |
Landschaft als Element des Urbanen |
Issue 1, May 1999 | |
Andrzej Piotrowski Minneapolis |
Architectural Structures of Memory
This essay outlines the theoretical premises and the methodology of my research aimed at integrating photography
and computer graphics in architecture. I developed what I call photographic mapping to represent how a building
creates the sequences of interrelated experiences that structure our perception of this building's symbolic reality.
In this essay, I will use two particular images as the backdrop for the discussion of their compositions and the
ideas embodied in them. |
Nana Pernod Zürich |
Theory
and Methodology of an Open System. How to Look at Philip Johnson's Architectural Work: A Learning Process for a
General Renewing/ Constructing of a Methodology and Theory of Contemporary Architectural Criticism
The following text shows that Sokal's and Bricmont's Fashionalble Nonsense (Picador 1998) is of value in reference to contemporary architectural criticism too, where nowadays someone finds a kind of discussion comparable to a tropic jungle. The example of architectural criticism dealing with the work of the american architect phj shows this fact very clearly. There would be a good medicin herfore: a theoretical and methodological framework to be established especially for architectural criticism as a starting point to have a valuable professional discussion in this area. The following text offers a suggestion for an establishing of such a framework taking the architectural work of Philip Johnson as a showing example. |
Issue 2, June 1998 | |
Angeli Janhsen- Vukicevic Bochum |
Gottfried Böhm's Pilgrimage Church in Neviges
Gottfried Böhm projected his pilgrimage church in Neviges (consecrated 1968) starting from the buildings he found
in the small city. For example he repeated the inclination of the roofs of the surrounding houses with parallel lines
in the roof of the church. The outer shape of the church then determinates ist inner space. The church building orders
binds ans crystallizes the assemblation of houses that was grown accidentally with repetations of this kind. |
Anette Sommer Cottbus |
Mega Malls on Their Way! Democracy as Burden or Chance? Shopping Malls, increasingly in combination with Amusement Parks, are not only a North American phenomenon anymore,
but recently became part of the everyday life in Germany as well. |
Tom Hanchett Cornell |
Talking Shopping Center
Most Americans assume that their nation's glut of suburban shopping centers results from "what consumers want". In fact, a considerable amount of construction came as the result of tax breaks offered by the United States government beginning in 1954 and peaking in the early 1980s. That construction has had profound effects on the quality of life for all Americans. |
Elizabeth Birmingham Ames (Iowa) |
Reframing the Ruins: Pruitt-Igoe, Structural Racism, and African American Rhetoric as a Space for Cultural Critique Charles Jencks dates the death of high-modernism to the moment in July 1972 when the first three buildings of St. Louis's infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex were dynamited. Pruitt-Igoe's failure is since then noted and remembered as an architectural failure - a design flaw, wrought upon the unsophisticated poor by well-meaning intellectuals. What issues are not discussed in this myth are issues of race - the over 10.000 residents of Pruitt- Igoe were 98% African American - and issues of poverty - these residents wetre the poorest of the poor. Though Pruitt-Igoe was a physical structure, in this paper it acts as a metaphor for structural racism - a structure that deepened pre-existing chasms standing between African-Americans and cultural identity, political power and education/economic opportunity because its premises and 'encoded' messages were inscribed with the unquestioned assumptions of structural racism. I will examine Pruitt-Igoe not as a symbol of the failure of modernism, but as a possibility for re-reading and writing urban texts in ways that can provide a critique of structural racism and the ways in which architectural systems (like other social systems) can reinforce it. |
Anders Linde- Laursen Lund |
Solvang: A Historical Anthropological Illumination of an Ethnicized Space In this paper, I discuss relations between place and access to identity formation. I do so from research carried out in Solvang, California (called "The Danish Capital of America"). In 1911, the founders of Solvang deliberately tried to insert Danish social institutions into an American context. While Danish language and institutions after the Second World War faded, public space was completely re-organized. Today, Solvang is a tourist town, which center consists of presumed architectural signifiers of Denmark. I discuss how social relations form space in Solvang and how space form social relations for three groups: white town-dwellers, visitors from the region, and local "Mexicans". In particular, I discuss the last group. While a growing local population of "Mexicans" working on the backstage is crucial to the local tourist economy, it is, at the same time, excluded twofold from local place. "Mexicans" are not allowed any representation in the dominating narrative about the town's history, nor do they possess any visibility in public space. |
Issue 1, May 1998 | |
Jurij Nikitin St.-Petersburg |
From Leningrad to St. Petersburg. 30 Years of City Development. This article mainly deals with the reconstruction of the historically valuable city ensemble of St. Petersburg and its important buildings as well
as with the construction of modern architecture. |
Michael Haerdter Berlin |
The Myth of the Centre
A retrospective on 200 years of Modernism, documented by the example of one of its capital cities: Berlin. Modern times start off with the Enlightenment toward the end of the eighteenth century, meaning a radical rupture with the past. In a conservative view it stands for "a gigantic inner catastrophe" (Hans Sedlmayr). This provokes numerous countermovements. The modern trend toward permanent change is opposed by holding on to conventinal values. The dissolving of genuine traditions is answered by artificial reconstructions. The real loss of the centre, of a binding measure, is countered by its invention: the legend, the myth of the centre. This essay analyzes and documents Modernism torn by inner and outer conflicts by a number of examples, not least by the ups and downs of the unusual german capital city. Will Berlin find its way out of the dead-end of the modern "either-or" into a new humane, urban dimension of the "and", of openness and synthesis? |
Ilse Helbrecht München |
The Creative Metropolis Services, Symbols and Spaces Creative services (i.e. graphic design, advertising, interior design) are a specific subsegment of producer services. They operate at the center of the symbolic economy and take on the role of cultural mediators and tastemakers for trends, lifestyles, and identities of the new middle class. Thus, creative services play a crucial role in the construction and transmission of messages about the meaning of consumption. The geography of creative services is clearly linked to metropolitan areas and herein concentrated in inner city locations. This paper looks at the relationship between the cultural/economic production of images and signs, and the urban imaginary of the image-producers. The meaning of an inner city location for creative service firms is often constructed around the myth of the inner city as a cradle of creativity. Based on in-depth interviews in Vancouver I would like to discuss how the focus on images, signs, and creativity at the workplace intermingles with the production of a distinct urban imaginary: the "creative metropolis". |
Petra Stojanik Stuttgart |
Eileen Gray or Unconstrained Living
Eileen Gray is one of the few women representatives of classical Modernism. Above all she caused a sensation with her extravagant furniture and interior
designs. Despite apparant affinities to "new spirit" furniture and fittings, originality characterizes her designs. What makes Gray's concepts for living
different from those of her avant-garde colleagues? What was the role of the user of her spaces? |
Issue 2, November 1997 | |
Hans Friesen Cottbus |
From Modernity to Postmodernity A Genealogic Approach to 20th Century Architecture This article is based on a talk, given in October 1997 at the State University for Architecture and Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg. The focus is on the development of architecture during the 20th century with the primarily aim to explain the terms of Modernity and Postmodernity. Postmodernity is described as a relational term, being related to Modernity, although defining itself by demarcation. Thus there exist many references between Modernity and Postmodernity, which lead to a critical discussion based on a genealogic view. |
Pavel I. Loshakov St.-Petersburg |
Pulsating Architectural Environment - Philosophy and Form
We can discover the presence of pulsating components - objects and associations of objects, that are changeing their functional and spatial parameters
(e.g. according to the season, etc.) - in the architectural environment of different historical ages. Such kind of changes are reversible: pulsating objects are
returning cyclically to the initial state after a range of phases of transformation. It compels us to elaborate adequate means (medias) of their formal
expression - a scenario of mutable composition, that signifies an expansion of our conception of the language of architecture. |
Alexander Bouryak Charkow |
Thinking against Tradition
From 20th Century thought emerged the central ideology in all modernist architectural schools. Thought was taken in its scientized (e.g. naturalistic,
experimental and engineering orientated) forms. Thus, just the Soviet innovators - Dokuchayev with Ladovsky, as well as Ginzburg, - were inclined to go up to
the Pillars of Hercules, subordinating all creative processes to science-like methods and driving back the odd corners of creative intuition and professional
tradition, with all their art experience and cultural symbols. |
Thomas Y. Levin Princeton |
Geopolitics of Hibernation Urbanism and the Situationistic Internationale. |
Issue 1, May 1997 | |
Klaus Kornwachs Cottbus |
Building Programming
This contribution can be seen as an offer to put forward discussions with my fellow colleagues in the field of architecture. Having suffered myself from certain buildings and from carrying out reconstructions on my own house, I consider myself one of the ideal naive users of architectural space. |
Issue 1, October 1996 | |
Hans Friesen Cottbus |
Autonomy and Public in Fine Arts
The artist of modernity has freed himself from tradition, which expresses itself in the picture of the world. Visual representation serves no longer as representative goals, but reaches autonomous significance. Thus the artist of modernity has become increasingly isolated. The artist of the 1980s though turns once more to the traditions. Text available in Russian) |
Achim Hahn Bernburg |
On Pragmatics of Dwelling
This essay follows the thesis, that the reality of dwelling is captured in concepts of language, that refer to actual social situations. Since the wall no longer exists, people experience changes in their lives from the familiar to the unfamiliar. This can be revealed in the use of familiar words in an unfamiliar manner. This unfamiliar use also indicates changes in the organization of life, in the sense that social routine relationships are being replaced by non-routine relationships. (Text available in German) |