midterm | arc251 readings

week two + three + four + five + seven

“Now, since making and action are different, an art (technē) is necessarily concerned with making but not with action … An art (technē), then, as was stated, is a certain characteristic bound up with making that is accompanied by true reason; and artlessness or [lack of skill], to the contrary, is a characteristic bound up with making, accompanied by false reason, and concerned with what admits to being otherwise.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (c. 335-322 BCE), Book VI, Chapter 4

Art or skill is about making things, not about doing actions in general. True skill happens when you make something guided by good reasoning, while someone unskilled makes things but with poor reasoning.

“This expertise is born of both practice and of reasoning. Practice is the constant, repeated exercise of the hands by which the work is brought to completion in whatever medium is required for the proposed design. Reasoning, however, is what can demonstrate and explain the proportions of completed works skillfully and successfully.” Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture (c. 30-20 BCE), Book I, Chapter 1

Being truly skilled means having both hands-on experience and thoughtful understanding.

“Let us therefore begin thus: the whole matter of building is composed of lineaments and structure. All the intent and purpose of lineaments lies in finding the correct, infallible way of joining and fitting together those lines and angles which define and enclose the surfaces of the building. It is the function and duty of lineaments, then, to prescribe an appropriate place, exact number, a proper scale, and a graceful order for whole buildings and for each of their constituent parts, so that the whole form and appearance of the building may depend on the lineaments alone.” Alberti, On the Art of Building (written 1443-1452, published in 1485), Book I, Chapter 1

A building’s beauty and harmony come from the careful design of its shapes and proportions.

“It is quite possible to project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to the material, by designating and determining a fixed orientation and conjunction for the various lines and angles. Since this is the case, let lineaments be the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.” Alberti, On the Art of Building (written 1443-1452, published in 1485), Book I, Chapter 1

Architect should imagine the entire building in their mind before touching any materials. The lineaments (the building’s lines and angles) are first planned in the mind, using reason and imagination, to make an apt design.

“Beauty is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse. It is a great and holy matter, all our resources of skill and ingenuity will be taxed in achieving it; and rarely is it granted, even to Nature herself, to produce anything that is entirely complete and perfect in every respect.” Alberti, On the Art of Building (written 1443-1452, published in 1485), Book VI, Chapter 2

Beauty happens when all the parts of something fit together perfectly (harmony), so that changing anything would make it worse. Achieving this kind of perfection is very difficult, so much so that nature rarely does it.

“Such was man in his primitive state: hardy, strong, agile, and courageous, content with the fruits of the earth, and not knowing what it is to obey or to command, to be master or to be slave. He did not have the knowledge of good and evil; he did not fear death, nor did he know the value of life. This period of the development of the human faculties, keeping a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the restless activity of our vanity, must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to revolutions, the best for man…” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755)

Primitive life as the happiest and most stable time for humans. Idea that humans were freer, simpler, and happier before society and inequality existed.

“They learned to unite their forces in order to resist dangers and obtain advantages; they formed bands; they settled; they built huts. The first revolutions arose. Families began to form, and there arose a first revolution, which established and distinguished domestic and public relations. Every family became a little society, all the more closely united because mutual attachment and freedom were its only bonds … “As soon as men had acquired some idea of property, each laid claim to the hut he had built … The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755)

Stating that society began when humans settled, formed families, and started claiming property.

“He wants to make himself a dwelling that protects but does not bury him. Some branches in the forest are the right material for his purpose; he chooses four of the strongest, raises them upright and arranges them in a square; across their top he lays four other branches; on these he hoists from two sides yet another row of branches which, inclining towards each other, meet at their highest point. He then covers this kind of roof with leaves so closely packed that neither sun nor rain can penetrate. Thus, man is housed.” Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture (1753)

Laugier is describing the first human shelter, humans want a house that protects them but lets them live freely, they use strong branches to make a simple structure (a square base with a roof), the roof is covered with leaves to keep out sun and rain.

The first architecture was simple, functional, and made from natural materials.

“Such is the course of simple nature; by imitating the natural process, art was born. All the splendors of architecture ever conceived have been modeled on the little rustic hut I have just been described. It is by approaching the simplicity of this first model that fundamental mistakes are avoided and true perfection is achieved.” Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture (1753)

Architecture comes from nature. All great buildings are inspired by the simple, functional huts humans first made. By keeping designs simple like these huts, architects avoid mistakes and create true beauty

“As we consider these instructions, it is also good to recall that, when Skywoman arrived here, she did not come alone. She was pregnant. Knowing her grandchildren would inherit the world she left behind, she did work for flourishing in her time only. It was through her actions of reciprocity, the give and take with the land, that the original immigrant became Indigenous.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Skywoman acted for future generations. She worked with the land so the world would thrive and this reciprocal relationship is how she became part of the Indigenous world.

“Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world … One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banishment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a co-creator of the good green world that would be the home of her decedents. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.”Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Saying how creation stories emphasize how we relate to the world. One shows connection and care while the other shows disconnection and exile.

“If, instead of pursuing such a course, we were to return to the first principles of the art—that is to say, to the pursuit of certain ideas that are few in number but general in application, and from which all the particular ideas would necessarily derive; [T]hen the labour would not only be very much curtailed but rendered more fruitful; for we should have a safe and rapid way to compose and execute buildings of all kinds, in all places, and at all times.” 

Durand, Précis (1802-1805)

Architecture should return to a few general, rational principles from which all designs can be derived. By systematizing design, architectural labor becomes more efficient, productive, and universally applicable.

“Public and private utility, the happiness and the protection of individuals and of society: such is the aim of architecture… Thus, fitness and economy are the means that architecture must naturally employ, and are the sources from which it must derive its principles: the only principles that can guide us in the study and exercise of the art.” Durand, Précis (1802-1805)

Architecture’s true aim is public and private utility, grounded in fitness and economy rather than artistic excess. Architecture becomes a civic, rational discipline serving society.

“The Bauhaus wants to educate architects, painters, and sculptors of all levels to become competent craftsmen or independent creative artists and to form a working community of leading and future artist-craftsmen. Art cannot be taught, but the crafts certainly can be. Hence a thorough training in the crafts, acquired in workshops on experimental and practical sites, is required of all students as the indispensable basis for all artistic production.” Gropius, Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (1919)

Gropius asserts that while art itself cannot be directly taught, craftsmanship can form its foundation. The Bauhaus prioritizes workshop training as the foundational for creative production.

“The school is the servant of the workshop and will one day be absorbed in it. Therefore, there will be no teachers or pupils in the Bauhaus but masters, journeymen, and apprentices. Mutual planning of extensive structural designs — public buildings — aimed at the future.” Gropius, Programme of the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar (1919)

He proposes eliminating the hierarchy of teacher and student in favour of masters and apprentices working collaboratively.

“It had become clear to me that if architectural education was going to play any socially-engaged role, it would be necessary to work with the segment of the profession that would one day be in a position to make decisions: the student. The main purpose of the Rural Studio is to enable each student to step across the threshold of misconceived opinions and to  design/build with a ‘moral sense’ of service to a community. It is my hope that the experience will help the student of architecture to be more sensitive to the power and promise of what they do, to be more concerned with the good effects of architecture than with ‘good intentions’.” Mockbee, Rural Studio (1998)

Mockbee argues that students must be trained to design with moral responsibility and real social awareness. Education should prioritize the tangible effects of architecture over abstract intentions.

“Physical poverty is not an abstraction, but we almost never think of impoverishment as evidence of a world that exists. Much less do we imagine that it’s a condition from which we may draw enlightenment in a very practical way. What is required is the replacement of abstract opinions with knowledge based on real human contact and personal realization applied to the work and place.” 

Mockbee, Rural Studio (1998)

He emphasizes that poverty is a lived reality, not an abstraction, and architects must engage directly with communities. Knowledge must come from human contact and lived experience, not detached opinion.

“If we set aside the use-value belonging to the physical bodies of commodities, just one quality remains: they are products of labour …“When the useful character of labour products disappears, so, too, does the useful character of the instances of labour represented in them; what happens, in effect, is that the different concrete forms of those instances of labour vanish as well. They can no longer be distinguished from one another and have all been reduced to the same human labour, abstract human labour.” Marx, Capital (1867), from Chapter 1

Marx argues that when we ignore a commodity’s use (its practical function), what remains is that it is a product of human labour. In capitalism, different kinds of concrete work are reduced to abstract human labour, making commodities interchangeable and erasing the individuality of workers.

“Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. “He opposes himself to Nature as one of her own forces, setting in motion arms and legs, head and hands, the natural forces of his body, in order to appropriate Nature’s productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. “He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway. We are not now dealing with those primitive instinctive forms of labour that remind us of the mere animal. An immeasurable interval of time separates the state of things in which a man brings his labour-power to market for sale as a commodity, from that state in which human labour was still in its first instinctive stage. We pre-suppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. “At the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement. He not only effects a change of form in the material on which he works, but he also realises a purpose of his own that gives the law to his modus operandi, and to which he must subordinate his will. And this subordination is no mere momentary act. Besides the exertion of the bodily organs, the process demands that, during the whole operation, the workman’s will be steadily in consonance with his purpose. This means close attention. “The less he is attracted by the nature of the work, and the mode in which it is carried on, and the less, therefore, he enjoys it as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers, the more close his attention is forced to be.” Marx, Capital (1867), from Chapter 7, Section 1

Marx defines labour as a uniquely human process in which people consciously transform nature according to a purpose imagined in advance, unlike animals, humans plan before they build. He also shows that when work becomes monotonous and alienating, workers must force attention and will into the task, showing how industrial labour suppresses creativity and human fulfillment.

“It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail … “And the great city that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages.” Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1851), from Chapter VI, §XVI 

Ruskin argues that industrial division of labour does not just divide tasks, it fragments human beings into mechanical parts, reducing their intelligence and spirit. Industrial cities may manufacture goods efficiently, but they fail to cultivate fully developed, morally enriched human lives.

“The vital principle is not the love of Knowledge, but the love of Change. “It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied nor shall be satisfied.” Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1851), from Chapter VI, §XL

Ruskin claims the greatness of Gothic architecture lies in its restless creativity and love of change rather than rigid perfection. This “disquietude” reflects living, imaginative labour, where workers are free to experiment, vary, and express themselves rather than repeat mechanical forms.

“It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth, that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect. …“He must either make slaves of his workmen, and level his work to a slave’s capacities, which is to degrade it; or else he must take his workmen as he finds them, and let them show their weaknesses together with their strength, which will involve the Gothic imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as the intellect of the age can make it.” Ruskin, Stones of Venice (1853)

Aesthetic roughness signals moral health, a building’s form reflects whether its labour system is emancipated or dehumanized.

“The introduction of iron into architecture signifies the change from craftsmanship to industrial building production. The beginnings of the new architecture can be dated to the day when the old production methods were abandoned, and mechanically manufactured rolled iron replaced handwrought iron. “STONE can only resist compression. It allows inert masses to be layered into piles, but only the most extreme inventiveness allows it to achieve a certain hollowing out (Gothic). Stone signifies compact mass. Stone massive closes off spaces. The entire width of a wall is load-bearing. Broad horizontal openings contradict its structure. “IRON can be stretched and drawn together. It resists extension and pressure and hence bending. The significance of iron is: to condense high potential stress into the most minimal dimensions. If a comparison is permitted, iron suggests both muscular tissue and skeletons in a building. Iron opens the spaces. The wall can become a transparent glass skin. To design a load-bearing wall becomes an intolerable farce. This leads to new laws of design.” Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (1928)

Argues that iron marks a decisive break from craft to industrial production, transforming architecture from massive, load-bearing stone walls to light skeletal frames. Because iron resists tension and enables minimal structural members, it opens space, allows for glass, and establishes new laws of design.

“The essence of construction is found not in the isolated study of the mason’s or locksmith’s handcrafted details but in the interpenetration of every part of the building.” Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (1928) 

Giedion argues that modern construction is not about isolated handcrafted details but about the total integration of structural systems. Architecture’s essence lies in the dynamic relationship between all parts working together as one coherent system.

“But the peasant built his house out of mud, or mud bricks, which he dug out of the ground and dried in the sun. And here, in every hovel and tumbledown hut in Egypt, was the answer to my problem. “Here, for years, for centuries, the peasant had been wisely and quietly exploiting the obvious building material, while we, with our modern school-learned ideas, never dreamed of using such a ludicrous substance as mud for so serious a creation as a house.  “But why not?” Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor (1973)

Realizes that vernacular mud construction, long used by Egyptian peasants, offers a rational and locally grounded solution overlooked by modern architectural education. The passage challenges the assumption that industrial materials are inherently superior, seeing mud as practical and culturally intelligent.

“Besides being cheap, it is also beautiful. It cannot help being beautiful, for the structure dictates the shapes and the material imposes the scale, every line respects the distribution of stresses, and the building takes on a satisfying and natural shape. “Within the limits imposed by the resistance of materials—mud—and by the laws of statics, the architect finds himself suddenly free to shape space with his building, to enclose a volume of chaotic air and to bring it down to order and meaning to the scale of man, so that in his house at last there is no need of decoration put on afterward. The structural elements themselves provide unending interest for the eye.” Hassan Fathy, Architecture for the Poor (1973)

Argues that mud architecture is inherently beautiful because structural necessity shapes form directly, eliminating the need for ornamentation. By working within material limits, the architect gains creative freedom and produces buildings fit for human life.