Architecture Theory 1 - Semester 1

Architectural Theory I: Global Disciplinary Knowledge

Prof. Joseph Godlewski



Chapter 1

Overview

  • Architectural theory = systematic writing examining architecture's foundational principles, via treatises

    • Theory: discourse that describes architecture and identifies challenges

  • Many great monuments (Pyramids, Greek temples, Great Zimbabwe, Cahokia) left no written theory — intentions can only be speculated

  • Pre-modern treatises are rare; chapter covers four across different cultures

Vitruvius — De Architectura (c. 25 BCE)

  • Oldest surviving Western architectural text; presented to Augustus

  • Not the origin of theory — cites older, lost Greek theorists

  • Vitruvian triad

    • convenience, durability, beauty

      • Symmetry and proportion

  • Art of architecture requires knowledge from many branches of study

  • Influenced Renaissance and later classical revivals

  • Associated building: the Pantheon (c. 125 CE)

    • symbolism via dome/oculus, though not directly by Vitruvius

Yingzao Fashi (12th c. China)

  • Compiled by Li Jie under the Song Dynasty

  • systematized Chinese building methods

  • Standardized measurement and techniques

    • Cai-fen: modular system of carpentry measurements, 8 rank system

  • Goal: reduce waste, correct bad labor/material practices, strengthen state control

  • Like Vitruvius, glorifies its imperial patron

  • Unlike Vitruvius, was immediately put into practice

  • Bianjang City Gate

  • Chuxi Tulou group

Abbot Suger — Book of Suger (c. 1144)

  • Account of renovating the Basilica of Saint-Denis

    • Origin of Gothic architecture

  • Suger was patron, not architect (builder was an anonymous master mason)

  • Gothic traits: verticality, pointed arches, ribbed vaulting, stained glass, flying buttresses

  • Neoplatonic belief: contemplating beauty elevates one spiritually

    • Anagogical method

    • Architecture with spiritual affect

  • Basilica doubled as religious symbol and political emblem of French monarchy; became the Gothic archetype

Ibn Khaldūn — Muqaddimah (14th c.)

  • Tunisian historian, not an architect; theorized the rise/fall of civilizations

  • Theorized importance of architecture in history

    • Effects of buildings on people

  • Architecture tied to humans' natural instinct for shelter

  • Architecture necessary for rulers to sustain dynasties

  • Praised mosques (Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem) as most venerated buildings; visited the Dome of the Rock

Synthesis

  • Spread over vast regions at different times about similar topics

  • All four texts served ruling powers, glorifying a patron to some degree

  • Shared theme: architecture as more than construction — a means of order, beauty, power, or spiritual connection

  • Distinct emphases: Vitruvius (beauty/function), Li Jie (standardization), Suger (transcendence), Ibn Khaldūn (civilizational theory)



Chapter 2 - Early Modern

Overview

  • 15th–early 18th century: architecture becomes a formal discipline/profession (previously built by tradesmen, undocumented)

  • Age of Discovery → colonialism spreads architectural styles globally

  • Focus: two treatises — Alberti (Renaissance Italy) & Ca'fer Efendi (Ottoman Empire)

Leon Battista Alberti

  • Humanism

  • Did more to advance architecture as a field of study more than anyone else

  • De re aedificatoria

    • Built on Vitruvius

    • Architecture was a serious profession/discipline

  • Architects should have broad education

  • Concinnitas = musical sense of harmony

  • Lineaments = precise outline, lines and angles, conceived in the mind

  • Key works:

    • Santa Maria Novella: new classical façade over Gothic church; Pantheon-referencing doorway, temple-front pediment, whole composition fits a subdivided square, rose window on centerline

      • Musical sense of harmony: Concinnitas/lineaments

    • Basilica di Sant'Andrea

Ca'fer Efendi

  • Risâle-i Mi'māriyye (1614) — a tezkere (eulogistic biography) about architect Sedefkâr Mehmed Ağa

  • Fills gap in Islamic architectural theory documentation

  • Beauty = harmony = "agreeable to nature"

  • Mehmed Ağa trained under Sinan (Süleymaniye Mosque)

  • Key work: Sultan Ahmed (Blue) Mosque, Istanbul, 1616 — blends Islamic tradition + Byzantine influence (Hagia Sophia); 6 minarets/14 balconies symbolize Ottoman sultans; grand dome, colossal piers

  • Views architecture as divinely guided (closer to Abbot Suger/Ibn Khaldūn than to Alberti's humanism)

  • Both thinkers, though different worldviews, elevate the architect's status

Global Spread of Ideas

  • Became global practice

  • Alberti → tradition continued by Serlio (1537), Palladio (1570, Four Books of Architecture)

  • Gutenberg's press (1440) spread architectural knowledge widely





18th and 19th centuries

  • Gottfried Semper set forth the idea of the Vitruvius hut

    • Through anthropology

  • 4 primordial  elements

    • Hearth (ceramics)

    • Roof (carpentry)

    • Enclosure (weaving, walling)

    • Mound (terracing, masonry)







Chapter 3 - Modernism

Overview & Context

  • 20th century architects adapted to rapidly changing social, political, and technological environments

  • Modernism was the cultural expression of modernization, embracing progress, freedom, and new space-time experiences

  • New materials (reinforced concrete, mass-produced glass, steel) changed architecture

  • To be modern meant to believe in progress

  • Modernization developed from emerging industrialization and transition from rural to urban life

Core Design Principles

  • Functionalism: practical use guides good design

  • Rationalism: problems solved through rational, logical means

  • Emphasized formal simplicity, abstraction, mass production, and efficiency

  • Zeitgeist: idea that there was a spirit of the age

    • Idea of progress and teleology (idea of reaching the end)

  • Modernism: ideas that celebrate modernization, growth of industrial society, faith in progress

  • Modernization: processes, technologies, transformation from rural to urban

  • Modernity: paradoxical experience of the modern idea

Le Corbusier's "Toward an Architecture" (1923)

  • Manifesto: public declaration

  • Proclaimed "The house is a machine for living"

  • Architecture must express the modern era and machine age

  • Five Points of a New Architecture:

    • Pilotis: first story columns free of walls

    • Free plan: separation of load-bearing columns that divide the space

    • Free façade: exterior walls are not load bearing

    • Strip windows: horizontal lengths as interrupted bands

    • Roof garden: sand, cement, seeded with grass

  • Villa Savoye (France, 1929) exemplifies these principles

    • Summation of 5 points of architecture

    • “Hovers”

    • “Build manifesto”

    • A “machine for living”

Metabolism (Japanese Modernism)

  • Post-WWII Japanese response to Western modernism (manifesto 1960)

  • Rejected machine metaphor as culturally inappropriate for Japan

  • Instead used organic/biological system metaphor: architecture as living, adapting organism

  • Incorporated Buddhist concepts of regeneration and continuity

  • Nakagin Capsule Tower (Tokyo, 1970-1972)

    • Living in a “pod” on a central core

    • The pods are movable/replaceable

      • Stresses importance of replaceability and interchangeable parts

    • The tower is demolished and represents a testament to bold ideas

Key Modernist Architects & Works

  • Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

    • Barcelona Pavilion (1929) 

      • Idea of “less is more”

      • Floating planes, cross-shaped columns, grids

  • Adolf Loos

    • rationalist approach; Raumplan method for dynamic interiors

    • “Ornament and Crime”

      • Removal of exterior ornament

        • Evolving, moving to an end

    • House for josephine baker

Dialectical Opposition

  • top-down/bottom-up

  • pure/degenerate

  • white/black

  • primitive/modern

  • forward/backward

Characteristics of the Modern

  • Progress, aimed at the future

  • New experience of space-time (speed, mobility)

  • Expression of the age: Zeitgeist

  • Engineer aesthetic (corb) and simplicity (Loos)

  • Universal space, total architecture

  • Efficiency, utopian planning

  • Hygienic, healthy planning

  • regularized planning

  • Self-conscious, self-reference



Urban Renewal: clearing out slums to create opportunities for high class





Chapter 4 - The Modern City and its Discontents

Critiques of Modernism

  • By the 1960s, critics challenged modernist planning.

  • Urban Dialects

    • Thesis: robert moses

      • Centralized, modernist, technocratic urbanism

      • Large scale infrastructure

      • Top down authority

        • Destroyed neighborhoods

    • Antithesis: jane jacobs

      • Localized, organic, community driven urbanism

      • “Grassroots”

    • Synthesis: debate

      • Balancing metropolitan infrastructure with neighborhood life

      • Integrating equity, social fabric, and democratic participation

      • Negotiating between large scale and small scale

    • Her activism led to the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission (1965) and stopped the Lower Manhattan Expressway.

  • Creative destruction: destruction of older neighborhoods for newer developments, planned obsolescence of cities

Modernity and Creative Destruction

  • Marshall Berman: modernity is a paradoxical experience of constant disintegration and renewal.

  • Haussmann's Paris: new boulevards beautified the city but displaced the poor.

  • Creative destruction (Schumpeter): destroying the old to create the new, as in slum clearances.

  • Other critics: Rossi (city as collective memory) and Koolhaas (culture of congestion).

Frantz Fanon

  • The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

    • Theorizes the dehumanizing effects of colonialism

    • Sees violence as a valid means of counteracting oppression

    • Describes the physical and psychological violence of colonial forms of segregation

    • The colonial world is “compartmentalized”

      • Divided between european towns and “native”



Le Corb

  • Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) 1924

  • Plan Obus

    • Top down

    • Represented worldview of what's right and of expert planners

    • Very segregated

James Holston: Brasília

  • Designed by Niemeyer and Costa (1960) on a tabula rasa, following Le Corbusier

    •  zoning

    • high-speed roads

    • superquadras on pilotis.

  • Intended to create "perfect social coexistence," but social processes destroyed the utopian vision.

  • “The modernist city” - James Holston

    • The project served as a national symbol and symbolize the transformation of Brazilian society