Right. Okay. Hello, everyone.
Today we are going to think about architecture and architectural theory and one particularly important strand of architectural theory,
namely space and thinking about architecture space.
But I was going to start the lecture by sort of think making some more general remarks about architecture.
And I'm particularly thinking about where architecture might belong in in the history of art,
because I think for those of you in your second year, we've done a little bit of architecture.
We did a bit like you did a bit last year with me, but not very much.
And I think it's sort of we don't often sink about as art historians, whether architecture might be a little bit different,
something that we might have to study in different ways and think about in different ways to others what we might call art objects.
And I think architecture occupies a slightly strange position in the history of art, teaching and history of art degrees.
Architecture students such as myself often can be found in our history departments.
But as I said, there are certain things that we might do differently.
I think architecture also has a complicated relationship with the other visual arts,
and it's a relationship that has the potential to put architecture in, rather in a rather powerful and important position.
If you think about it, most of the visual arts have to exist. Other visual arts have to exist in architecture.
And to some extent, architecture might be seen as a master discipline as the as the one sort of art forms.
That's all the others, in theory, have to comply to. This is certainly what a great many sort of writers on architecture have seen.
One writer on architecture, not necessarily an architect. He's trained as an architect.
He wasn't very good, very good architect or better designer wallpaper.
William Morris, who in eighteen eighty eight and a very famous tax revived architecture,
which is mainly a tax concerned with with with the Gothic revival and theory behind the Gothic revival,
noted at the very start that in fact architecture was a master art, that the old ornament.
The other ornament lost a largely dependent on it. And what William Morris means here, I think we can see if we if we go and have a look at his house.
Here is his house. The Red House, a very, very famous house of a house.
It was famous, as famous, if not more famous for its decoration than for its design.
I don't mean we don't we're not going to go into this in very much detail. As you probably know, this is a very,
very famous furniture and and decorative features read I saw designed by a combination of Morris and Resources and Van Jones and et cetera, et cetera.
That's actually the point that Morris is making in that quote.
Is that as important as all these art and some of them have gone on to become very famous and important pieces of art in their own right?
As important as they are,
they think they will also have to obey the logic of the design of the House of Web design that has been by the architect Philip Webb, not by Morris.
They will belong. They were all designed to belong somewhere within within Webbs overall design.
Okay, this might be an extreme case, but I think it's but I think it's an important one that because of architectural spatial properties,
it has the potential to be to be very, very the dominant art form in this respect.
The early 20th century German architect burnetii takes us even further. And in a sort of artistic manifesto from 1918,
actually just calls for the scrapping of boundaries across the visual arts and just lumping them all in one architecture.
He says there will be an in the future. There will be no boundaries between the crafts, sculpture and painting.
All will be one architecture. We don't know yet, but fingers crossed.
So tight, like Morris sees the potential for architecture to encompass everything,
for the potential for arts to actually just be one architectural or architectural decoration.
I'm like Morris Toutes is sort of interested in buildings in which decorative arts obey the laws of the buildings.
He didn't design very much, but one of the things he does designs is this the Glass Pavilion for an exhibition in Cologne in 1914.
And like the Red House is, it's a sort of example of what we might call Stamkos work.
So everything, you know, everything's being the same principle. It is a total work of art.
But if you think about the general principle, of course, Stamps.com Square, particularly when it comes to this sort of stuff, it's architecture.
Architecture is where the buck stops. All these other decorative arts in this case,
lots and lots of mosaics ultimately have to end with architecture, architecture, as well as housing them.
And I suppose that's the sort of this sort of pro architecture around that.
I've just been on the concluding remarks. Is that what this tells us about architecture?
Why architecture has this position is because of its inherently spatial properties,
because of its three dimensional properties, but also because it is space in which humans live in the interactive or existing.
If you think about it, the paintings and sculpture are, we can see as products of human society and culture,
architecture is where human society and culture takes place on the whole.
Here is a famous architectural story, Nicholas patterned on this subject.
It says that what distinguishes architecture from paintings and sculpture is its spatial quality in this and only in this.
No other artist can emulate the architect. Thus, the history of architecture is primarily a history of man and woman.
Man shaping space and a historian must keep spatial problems always in the foreground.
Which is fine, which is all well and good, and I think that, you know, that's that's quite an apparent point.
That's quite an obvious point that architecture has.
Has spatial properties, other art forms that perhaps lack. The problem, I think is, though, how as a historian of architectural,
as somebody that studies or writes about architecture, how then do we write a history of humans shaping space?
How do you go about that process? How do we deal with this with this property of architecture?
The spatial properties of such a height, in perhaps his words? Do we keep spatial problems always in the foreground?
Well, I think if you actually look at the history of architectural writing and the development of architectural history,
potentially most historians have written about architecture, have not obeyed peasant.
They have not kept spatial problems always in the foreground. As an example of this, as a as a historian that I think we probably all know,
though Flynn's treatment of architecture is too low is largely contrary to what Pavano is calling for.
He would say it isn't it doesn't mean he isn't very interested in Morrison type.
We're talking about earlier earlier the idea that that the other art forms might have to obey the laws of architecture.
The principle is art history, which I am, which I think you probably all know, treats architecture in a way.
It just it just treats it as firstly just one of numerous art forms.
But secondly, as an art form in which the laws of the others can just be applied.
It here is a wolf in talking about architecture. And I think this is a really interesting question.
It reveals quite a lot about where Western thinking in the early 20th century got to when it came to architecture.
So often says the examining examination of painterly and painterly poses is one of the big things in a tectonic arts.
And by tectonic arts, he means architecture is especially interesting in that the concept here for the first time,
liberated from confusion with the demands of imitation, can be appreciated as a pure concept of decoration.
Of course, a painting and architecture, the position is not quite the same.
Architecture of its very nature cannot become as the art of semblence to the same degree as painting.
Yet the difference is only one degree, and the essential elements of the definition of the painterly can be applied as they stand.
So what Buffett is saying here is that architecture, because architecture is,
does not deal with the demands of imitation, as he calls it, which paintings and sculpture do what they do.
And in 1915, anyway, it can be appreciated as a pure, pure concept of decoration.
In other words, Wolfram just treats architecture as sort of very abstract art.
It's not limited, is not representational. It's pure decoration.
And then he goes on to say, you know, it's not an art of semblence to the same degree as painting.
But the difference is only one degree and the essential elements of the definition painting can be applied as they stand.
So architecture is a sort of it's less representational.
It's more abstract. I mean, in that respect, it can be sort of treated as almost an extreme form of painting,
just one that we can we can apply all our usual rules of painterly on painterly, um, painterly to.
But potentially you can see them in their most sort of pure form in architecture, which, you know, Phil Flynn does to great effect.
And here are two famous examples. These don't come from the principles of art history.
These come from Wilfred's renaissance and Baroque.
This is one of potent vote for in comparison to buildings that the Woelfel in some of his famous transition from Línea to painterly preventives,
Renaissance building,
the Tempesta 16th century, 16th century church in Rome and Borromeo needs versus Enza from proceeding from the Earth in the following century,
the painting of the Baroque. But if we go back to that peasant, quote,
peasants demand for us to to to engage with the spatial properties of art such as it is to
think about how people shape space will often is not in the slightest bit concerned with that.
He's treating these as extreme decoration, as pure forms of decoration.
Wilson is in no way writes about the function of these buildings, what takes place in these buildings, but it happens in churches.
But that's not really of great concern to both. And he doesn't really think about it.
He didn't think about the three dimensional volume within them to any great degree or only when it when it plays a role in the decorative scheme.
He certainly doesn't think about what it might be like as a user of these buildings.
What was the experience of these buildings might be like?
He treats them essentially as as as almost two dimensional art objects, as art objects that will obey the same rules as paintings and sculpture.
But as we've seen, as I think we'll go on to see. That they're potentially not.
They've they've got things in them that that might make them different. So we've seen since we get to this position in early 20th century art history,
where architecture has just been lumped in with everything else or has or even is
seen as a sort of more extreme example of the visual arts than anything else.
I wonder how this happened.
And I'm not going to sort of go back to the history of art, of architectural theory and try to work out how we got to this point,
how we got to a point in which the spatial properties of architecture can be so spectacularly ignored.
And I just think the roots of this problem lie in the very period that Wolf in
was so obsessed with and so interested in the Renaissance and the 17th century.
The Renaissance architecture in the Renaissance is, of course, as you as you will know, it goes for years.
Is this the sort of stylistic change from the Gothic to the classical?
But there's lots and lots going on in architecture, an architectural theory at the same time.
Is that anything you could you could see, you can see in Renaissance thinking about architecture.
Is a shift, perhaps, from thinking about architecture as something related to the human body and something related to sort of three
dimensional space into something that can be represented on paper into something that is two dimensional?
He's a very, very famous and probably the most famous image of them all from the Renaissance.
You know, these Vitruvian Man was often forgotten about this very famous image is actually about architecture.
It comes from the page. Well, it is a depiction of a theory that comes from the pages of the Romell, from architectural Vitruvius.
And it comes from Vitruvius ism,
which is a discussion of the proportions of the human body and how they might relate to perfect geometrical proportions,
which in turn relate to architecture, how we should be designing architecture.
So much for Vitruvius and for early Renaissance theory, the human body proportions,
its human body work were integral to to how architecture was and had had geometry and architectural work that they're intrinsically linked.
But at the same time as this. I think there was a sort of there was almost two movements away from that, Leonardo.
It's sort of implicates it means to a certain extent,
because whilst Renaissance architectural theorists were interested in the relationship between architecture and the human body,
which you think the basis isn't inherently spatial relationships,
they were also interested in ways in which architecture could be depicted in two dimensions.
Here I'm talking about perspective. Of course, another is actually an earlier image, but equally, almost equally famous.
One shows what is a building building on such a wall fresco.
But it's a building depicted in perspective. The Soccio and and his sort of fellow 15th century painters have come up with a way to
come up with a technique of representing Three-Dimensional Space in two dimensions.
In this case, on the real plane, but also on paper. And this obviously is a very important moment in the history of paintings.
We know. We know, we'll know it all. We know and it's very familiar, but it has important implications for architecture as well,
because now architecture doesn't necessarily need to only exist in three dimensions.
It can be rendered on a flat surface. So in the Saatchi's Holy Trinity, we see a Roman barrel vault surrounded by wall,
signed by Ionic Arch and current and former Corinthian columns, plus as either side receding into the distance.
And the Saatchi has mastered the art perspective. So what we might call covering on the on the vault recedes, get smaller.
It's a it's it's a perfect representation of of of of classical space in two dimensions.
So if the 15th and 16th century had had come up with a way of in paintings representing space in pictures, at the same time,
people writing about architecture and thinking about architecture and designing architecture are on guard,
coming up with similar ways of putting built space onto paper, which hadn't meant to any great degree been really done before.
There are there are some mediaeval precedents, but but not to any great degree.
In the 16th century or perhaps slightly earlier. Architects come up with ways of represent other ways of representing buildings on paper,
although they also used perspective for perspective drawings used extensively in this period.
But the principal way that Renaissance architects come up with to represent space
on paper is this system represented here by Palladio as illustrations for 15 56.
Talion translation of Vitruvius here. Here, Palladio uses three ways of sharing a building on paper.
And in doing so, sort of flattens a building, puts it, puts it into two dimensions. His first way is, of course, the plan.
This is a Roman temple that the maturity's is writing about.
The Palladio is illustrating a thousand years later. So he comes up with a plan in this case.
Columns represented by little round circles and then only the walls of the temple,
the centre of the temple, the body of the temple is shown in plan instead of one place here,
then moves on to what we call a section is the second way of representing architecture, which is at play here.
Just cuts down the middle of the building, all the blank spaces where the masonry has been sliced and through.
So we can see how the construction of the building works. And also we can see how the interior decoration might relate to the exterior decoration.
So the section is a very useful way of showing how decorative elements in the building work, but also her structure elements work in radio.
A third way or the Renaissance is third way of showing a building on paper is in elevation.
So there's three plans. Section elevation elevation is just the front of it shown normally or suddenly here.
In this case, we can see an idea showing us, again, decorative elements.
So this is our Portico Temple. That's Palladio.
We'll play you. Just gives us a straightforward front view of it. I'm actually in the section with the columns back the other way round.
We're looking looking through the building from there, from the middle of it.
And although this is an interesting perspective, like the previous image, it again is interesting.
It's doing the same thing. It's putting architectural space onto paper, rendering it flat and rendering understandable.
I think that's that's what. I was trying to do here. He wasn't what he and his fellow Renaissance architectural theorists realised is that it's quite,
quite it's quite difficult to think about architecture.
When you think about it spatially, thinking about volume and thinking about how we experience and use that volume is a difficult thing.
And therefore, you need to come up with ways of representing us and making it easy to comprehend.
In this case, Palladio and the editor of this Vitruvius Dan Farber, are interested in communicating ideas about ancient architecture to their readers.
So this is a company by dense text, both both the translation opportunities and Barbaras commentary,
which explains the readers how this temple worked, what the principles of Roman temple architecture were.
Well, the columns go. What's it for? Blah, blah, blah. Had a decorative scheme.
Works how the structure works. And the video's illustrations show how this works in a straightforward way.
This is what we've laid the building flat here. Here it is, in fact.
Here it is, Inception. Here it is in elevation. So it's a way of of making architecture easier to understand.
What it also does is it makes architecture easy to see.
It makes it visible previously. If you think, you know, architecture, space, it's quite difficult to to to comprehend just visually.
But here it is made easy. It's made flat. And this is an architecture that we that we sort of experience only through vision.
We look at it on paper. There's nothing more we can do with it. Even the space, even the volume is depicted in a way that we can just see it.
We don't we don't need to use any of our other senses to deal with it.
This is architectural vision. And at the same time as well.
Shortly after Palladio is doing this. Other writers are becoming interested in vision and then how vision works and how
potentially important vision might be in thinking and understanding the world.
I think there's a sort of there's a two pronged attack.
In the 16th and 17th centuries on architecture, one from the kind of sort of perspective drawing and planning section elevation representation.
The other part of the attack on architecture is from scientific thinking,
particularly in the 17th century, is a very famous 17th century scientist, a philosopher Descartes,
who never really writes Fetcher doesn't seem to be particularly interested in architecture,
but he's somebody whose writings end up end up becoming very, very important.
I think in the history of architecture, with one particular aspect to decors writings that have profound influence on architectural theories,
his writings on optics and his writings on vision of which I was obsessed with.
There's loads of those attacks by day common vision.
The is one of the most famous ones, which is which is partly a sort of anatomical investigation of the eye in the Iwerks,
but also a lengthy investigation of how vision works or how vision works in relation to the
other senses and in relation to how we think and and how we perceive the world around us.
They call conclusions very, very, very roughly mapped out.
All that vision is the principal sense, the principal sense which we understand the world.
The sense that dictates all others. And to which the other senses are largely subservient to.
So in this famous book, quite complicated diagram. Take our constant contemplates how we have in how we understand and look at an object,
in this case, an arrow with his arrows to prove his point that sentences and what.
But this this this image shows Descartes thinking about how the image before us
enters ah ah ah brain through the eyes and goes into the gland in the brain,
which is then lengthy the nerves to the rest of the senses.
So then we might read it and touch the arrows and unexperienced it to the other senses.
But we've all already comprehended it through vision and through sites.
Descartes sort of obsession with optics and with how the Iwerks creates a way of
feeling a movement in Western thought that largely prioritises vision over all others.
It's called to the various philosophers that come up with fancy names for ocular.
Eurocentrism is one of the hegemony of vision is another.
And this, combined with what we saw in the previous century with Palladio, has important implications for architecture,
because now if Western thought is in this position where vision is so important and architecture has already been reduced on paper in two dimensions,
architecture then becomes something that is inherently visual.
So architects can represent buildings on paper, which they. Then when they build them, they're building them, too.
They're building them with what they looked like in mind, first and foremost. They're thinking of what their users will see.
They can do this through innovation plan sections and they can work out. They can work out what their innovations are going to look like on paper.
Then they build them and then they can predict what people are going to. When people look at them, what they've what they're going to look like.
And actually, the history of sort of architecture on the raisons on is is obsessed with the idea of what buildings are going to look like,
pass over and above what buildings might be like to experience.
I don't think architects in the in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries on the whole,
don't tend to be that interested in what people's feelings might be about buildings, how they might experience them.
They're obsess over overly obsessed with what they actually look like.
Of course, I'm generalising here and I'll show some examples where that isn't the case later.
But it is, I think, a prominent strain in thinking about architecture across across the three three centuries.
If we sort of fast forward and deep into the 18th century, we can I think we can see this in action.
This is a conceptual design by the French architect, Boulay,
most of whose designs were conceptual and those anything because most of his designs are unbuildable.
And Brunei's perhaps an extreme case in this. But bood, I think, is one of those architects,
one of these architects that's been sort of influenced by Descartes under the Renaissance theory, is obsessed with what buildings look like.
And in particular, he's obsessed with the idea that buildings should be geometric, they should look geometric, perfect.
Here's a plan, something that doesn't get built as a plan for a for a palace today, which is geometrically perfect.
It's it's perfectly symmetrical and it's a complicated piece of geometry.
This as a plan. It's a plan, of course.
It's sort of building up and part parkland seeing from the.
But we get no sense from this what this building might actually be, what it might be like to be in this building.
But then it's not very interesting. Boy, well, it really is interested in is making three dimensional space geometrically perfect on paper?
In a way, this is sort of when it is almost that a principal can write this.
This is an extreme Demeritt pure decoration.
It's building reduced to pure, simple geometric form just because it looks nice, because it looks impressive.
And even in the elevations of Boulez buildings, you can get Bill.
We can see this here in his famous conceptual design for Cenotaph in Newton.
Again, the building is. It's a building that's just made as a pure, simple geometry, very big, monumental geometry.
But from this elevation, we get very little sense of of.
We get a little sense of what this building might actually be like to experience. And again, I think there is perfect interest in that.
What he's interested in is is making a perfect geometrical building.
It's just a series of huge geometrical shapes. This and again, I am dealing in I'm dealing in general extreme cases.
But but I think they I think they prudent they they they make an important point.
If you go forward to the 20th century, this idea of architecture is something that is experienced first and foremost through the visual.
And something that can be rendered on paper in the visual reach reaches its apogee, I think,
and its apogee comes about through the work of the famous high priest of modernist architecture propitiate.
Might very well be the villain of this lecture, I'm afraid. Here he is sitting at his desk with his famous glasses, OVC Capezio.
He's always wearing his famous glasses, which sort of goes with his with his sort of ocular centric mindset.
I think Koby's Yates, perhaps about any other architect,
was obsessed with visions and about what buildings look like, but also what the user sees in a building.
He writes on this and the book. But but but the best place to see.
So all architects to the funding refer to him as called SAVAK.
They see corpse obsession with vision in his drawings.
This is a remarkable series of Visio drawings that in which we see Corbusier
working at how architectural space works in terms of vision and vision alone.
This figure appears in a number of Capezio during this stick figure with an enormous, disembodied eye floating above their heads.
This is Corbusier's user of architecture. Who is he who uses architecture only through the eye and Capezio.
This drawing below shows Capezio plotting the route of a person through a building.
But it is the person with with him who only sees the building through their eyes.
Capezio doing here is working at views. What?
Whether what the building will look like, it looked like at any moment, the viewer is experiencing it in a way.
And this is this is treating this the the space this is treating the building spatially.
But it's saying the space only through the eye there.
No interest in the other senses or in anything in any any of the other ways in which we might experience architecture.
I think two things like memory loss or fear or the emotions.
In one of cabooses writings towards a new architecture in 1959, Capezio spells this out.
The principal way in which we experience architecture, Busia says, is through our eyes.
So he says, the man looks at the creation of architecture with his eyes, which are five feet, six inches from the ground.
He wasn't very tall, but so he's thinking about cool Capezio saying here is that the architecture must
be built with with with with with the height of the eyes of the floor in mind.
So that is where we are coming from when we go into building. That is how extensive from this level.
So they should be designed with that level in mind.
In a way, this is sort of oddly reminiscent of of of of Vitruvian Man and that it posits a relationship with an architectural space in the human body.
We experience architecture through the body. That's what graffiti is saying. But for Capezio, the body is the eyes.
We experience architecture through the eyes and therefore the proportions of the height of the eyes of the Freud.
If there's any relationship, it's an architectural portion and the proportions of human body. They relate to the height of the eyes of the floor.
Five foot six inches in appreciates. Case here. And this is the bullet.
This is the body that experiences Capezio as architecture of the human body that exists in architecture.
It is this small, badly drawn stick figure and a huge disembodied eye.
And it's amazing how this idea sort of not floats of art and modernism particularly.
And obviously, years follow us is a drawing by one of these days.
Disciple's Austin name a famous Brazilian modernist who designed the Brazilian capital, Brasilia.
I think to an even more extreme and Capezio is the stick figures gone?
It's just eyes, eyes looking at. What will the building look like?
What will the view be like? Half of the window? What will the I see and what will be I see in any particular point in the architectural space.
And if you think about it, that that's sort of the history of of of of architectural theory up to this point,
starting in the Renaissance has been sort of building towards this.
The minute you start putting built space down onto paper in three dimensions, you end up in this sort of mindset.
Suddenly, architecture becomes a series of two dimensional views. Just what does it look like at any particular point in your experience of.
And if we sort of move away from the. Well, the theory now and look, look, look at some specific designs.
I think we can see this work and passage of Extreme Case again.
But an interesting case, one of Capezio zone designs of a famous design and a software in France with Capezio built at the end of the 1920s.
These buildings are famous for lots of other things. Lots of Capezio design principles are embedded into this design.
But one thing I thought was one thing I think is really interesting about it
is that you can see this building as a series of views that have been very,
very carefully constructed by the architects at every point in this building.
Capezio is thinking about what you're going to look at and what the building is going to look like,
but also what the world around the building is going to look like from within the building.
So these are the windows in this building, I think are really interesting.
They they they they don't have as big as you might expect for an architect to see.
So obsessed with vision. But what they do is they train the vision of the user onto particular things on the particular views.
And if we go inside the villas by the windows frame, the rest of the architecture is very controlled and close way.
So we always give them specific views out into this courtyard, rise onto the world around us.
This is not an architecture that seems to be very interested in the other senses or in emotions or anything like that.
It's an architecture that does, as I said,
is only really interested in what what the building might look like or what you can see out of the building.
And there's that sort of that that does that window. You're just looking at all into it from the outside.
And you can see the other windows to controlling where the eye might go.
We can imagine this space. I think I can imagine this space being negotiated by Koby's a stick figure, massive I person.
And again, if you've got the staircase, it's just a series of other sort of cold and rigid views more outside.
Okay, so perhaps an extreme example, but a building that's it seems to embody what Polizia is doing, his drawings and his theory at the same time.
And actually, this building is designed not long after Phil Flynn has written his principles about the art history.
I'm not saying that both in academia have that much in common,
but but they do seem to be basic treating architecture in a very similar way as something inherently visual,
something that you can just look upon, look at and think about in terms of.
In terms of decoration involved in this case or in terms of the view and propitiate at the same time,
is this though this these ideas are beginning to be challenged and the challenge doesn't come from architectural or architectural theory initially.
The challenge comes from philosophy and it comes in the form of a challenge on takeoff.
It doesn't hate architecture until about a bit later, perhaps in the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century.
A group of philosophers decided decided they'd had enough of decor's theories on vision in the world and decided to attack him.
These are group of philosophers that we might call phenomenologists. They were interested in other things as well.
It's a complicated it's a complicated branch of philosophy.
But one of the things that the early phenomenologists do is they go for Descartes in a big way.
And what they one of the things that they they dislike most about Descartes is this obsession with vision.
Perhaps the two the two biggest Descartes bashes are hetman.
So I think at the end of the 19th century and the 20th century, philosopher Maurice Money Pontac,
who I think is is a sort of ceaseless in his attack on day casting and vision.
Both of these philosophers write extensively about the other senses, about how important they are,
but they also write about some of the other things that that might that might dictate our experience of space,
things like memory, things like experience and how we exist in the world.
What what what the world means to us, not just in terms of vision.
And actually, one of the texts that I've set, the second is here, Bashardost, poetics of space is informed by by this particular branch of philosophy.
And once, once, once, once for all,
phenomenological philosophy takes hold in Western thought and begins to challenge some of the principles of Cartesian ism.
It is only a matter of time before it creeps into architecture and people writing about architecture begin to think of its implications.
And suddenly, in architectural theorists, writers on architecture suddenly begin to think,
well, maybe, maybe we've been saying maybe we're too obsessed with vision.
Maybe we've been thinking about this one way, maybe we ignored another. But a bunch of other stuff.
Well, that's right. Writer on a very important writer on it.
In this respect, is the rise of God only the father who isn't necessarily phenomenologists where he's not actually he's a he's actually a Marxist.
But a lot of his theory, I think, is influenced by phenomenology, or at least it's doing the same things.
In particular, the first critique of of how Western thought is come to understand space is is particularly important here.
Lefèvre is a whole book on space, one of the earliest books to be written on the on on the subject of space as an idea.
Most of most of this text is not necessarily that relates to talk or texture.
It's more general than that. But there are moments in which the Fed does address architecture.
And he says, I think really interesting things, in fact, critiques much of what I've just been talking about.
Okay, so here is a lengthy quote from from from the introduction to the text in which the Fab Five let the five turns.
Thinking about space into thinking about architectural space. And what he does is critique contemporary architectural practise.
So Faff says, as for the eye of the architect, it is no more innocent look than the lot.
He given to build on the blank sheet of paper on which he makes his first sketch.
His subjective space is freighted with all too objective meanings.
It is a visual space, a space which is to blueprints, to mirror images to that, quote, world of the image which is the enemy of the imagination.
These reductions are accentuated and justified by the rule of linear perspective within the spatial practise of modern society.
The architect discusses himself in his own space. He has a representation of this space, one which is bound to graphic elements.
Sheets of paper, plans, innovations, sections, perspective, views of facades, modules, and so on.
This conceived space is thought by those who make use of it to be true.
Its distant ancestor is the linear perspective developed as early as the Renaissance, a fixed observer and a mobile perceptual field.
A stable visual world. What that does here is he critiques architecture,
but he turns that on the whole history of architecture from Renaissance and just brings it all together.
He says, well, the Renaissance came up with linear perspective.
It came up with plans, elevation's and sections of perspective views.
What that's created is what he calls an immobile perceptual field, a stable visual world.
And it's very, very easy to see Capezio as disembodied eye drawings lurking behind much of what Lefebvre is critiquing here.
We haven't got sort of the world would be the world of the image, the mobile perceptual field.
What? Well, involve the eye of the architect where he opens and he and he pulls out, he doesn't see that as an innocent thing.
He sings, this is a very option and sort through thing that's been given off consideration.
But what the Fed also does and I think this is a really important point.
So this is an attack on an architectural practise, an attack on architectural practise over the last 300 years.
But it's not just the architect that's to blame. It's not just the architect that is complicit in this.
The federal so at the end of the quote thinks about that users of architecture.
He calls the architecture conceived space and see by the architect as conceived on paper.
But then he says that this conceived space is thought by those who make use of it to be true.
And he puts true in italics, is on my italics, isn't here. Well,
he's saying here is that we've become so accustomed to thinking about architecture and Spain in
graphically on paper and in terms of perspective and in terms of very mobile perceptual field,
that it's not how the architects and I are thinking. This is how we actually experience buildings.
People use us in the mid 20th century are experiencing buildings through vision, through through mobile perceptual fields,
and almost in terms of a plan section elevation, we managed to convince ourselves that this is what architecture,
what the experience of architecture should be like. Although for the feminine, the goes on to say, well, it's not like that.
There's lots and lots of other things going on here as well. But for some reason, we've ignored enough.
We've let a bunch of architects and Renaissance philosophers shape make us think about architecture in a particular way,
which I think is a really important point, a really interesting point. The idea that we to complain Capezio is as busy as much as we like.
So maybe we will actually following him, maybe involve in his following him and his lot.
Maybe when we go around buildings, we just look at them and we look at them through our eyes.
Only we believe we see them in terms of sections, renovations and plans.
This, I think, is a really important moment. It's really important.
And again, the second is in the way in the three texts that we're going to look at in class later.
Bachelard, both. To some extent are engaging with this problem.
Some of them as well, to some extent, trying to find ways out of it to explain how we might experience architecture in ways
that aren't just about about about a mobile perceptual field in a stable visual world,
as Lefevre puts it.
So this, I think, is the sort of the pivot in this lecture at the moment in which in which that history of architectural theory is challenged.
And then a challenge is then made for us and for architectural theorists and writers to come
up with way other ways of saying architecture and other ways of experiencing architecture.
Quite how we do that is very, very difficult, perhaps because we've got ourselves.
So we we're we're in in that such as sort of defined modern mindset that has represented thing about architecture.
I think one of the reasons that those three steps are rather complicated is because they're dealing with a complicated thing,
dealing with the experience of space in a way that isn't necessarily visual or even if
it is visual in the case of one of their text is visual at a much more complicated way.
Them architectural theorists often have conceived of it.
What I'm gonna do, though, is I'm going to for the rest of this lecture,
look at the work of three architects who were contemporaries of the Karbasi 8th in whose work we might potentially see ways out of the first problems.
These are the three architects that I think treat space in a very different way to look VCA
and in a way that that that opens up questions and other questions about how space works.
In doing so, I'll introduce some of the ideas that I think are in the three texts that some of you've been reading.
First, architects, I want to talk about as it can to open group of architects,
perhaps are contemporaries in the Capezio architects working in the steel movement and in Holland and the end of the 1910s, beginning in the 1920s.
There is still movement is is is always seen as part of modernism.
Many of you will probably know it for its for its most famous protagonist, Pete Mondrian.
Easel paintings and wall paintings. I'm sure you are aware of. But still movement also had architects working in it.
And these were a group of architects to particular TIV and Ostberg and and get me out.
But we were completely obsessed with the idea of space in buildings and their thinkings on space.
I think are very different from Rakove. Easier.
Even though the shell and the crazy are often grouped together as part of a sort of international modernist movement,
rebuilding vendors like a very, very different in how you can see space.
One of the things that there's still architects think about in space is how space
might be a much more complicated phenomenon than most architects conceived of it has.
What are the general principles of distil art and architecture is a sense of universality.
In the modern world, as has been just letting people see it, the individual is far less important than the universal.
And as a result, they they in their architecture,
they try to sort of break down the boundary between private and public space, but also between exterior and interior space.
And does work here is playing around at some conceptual designs. The idea that space,
the architectural space can be something homogenous that you can cut can flow between interior and exterior space and between individual planes,
they same I this is unbuildable. But architecture here is reduced to just a series of geometrical planes floating in space.
This is a rather complicated conception of space, a space that flows in and around objects in a way that's unlike sort of Koby's in his and his eye.
We don't we don't just see space as something flat. That's a series of flat images.
Air space is much more dynamic and fluid than just back in the image.
Still, Manifesto talks about this. He says that the new architecture is the architecture that is spacings antique.
KUBIC That is to say, it doesn't try to freeze the different functional space cells in one closed cube.
Rather, it throws the functional space cells as well as the overhanging plains balcony volumes centrifugal from the core of the cube.
And this means height, width, depth and time,
i.e. an imaginary four dimensional entity approaches a totally new plastic expression and other open spaces.
In this way, architecture that acquires more or less floating aspect that's so to speak,
works against the gravitational forces nature, which is all very well and good in theory, but that you think you have to build it,
then you have to try and build an architecture that throws the functional space cells centrifugal from the core of the cube,
which is quite hard in only one building that did the rebound and then come up with a way of doing this.
Really. And this is the Shrader House.
And you tracked the most famous steel building, which looks like many of those fantastic drawings I was showing you minutes ago here.
Do you have any sense of the difference between an exterior?
Interior space is broken down because Rietveld just complicates the wall plan that will play into such a great degree.
He places a series of rectangles in rather complicated positions on the war plane to break it down to
to make it unclear where the building begins and ends when it reveals ideas behind this building.
All the windows can be open to 90 degrees and the opening of the windows can complicate the space further if we go to Windows open mode.
Wouldn't the whole building begins to break down. It always looks like a sort of frozen explosion and it begins to look like those windows.
Drawings like this is a very flexible space.
This is a very free flowing space in a building, and it's one that breaks down boundaries between interior and exterior.
But in what ways does it go beyond thinking about the building in terms of vision?
Well, if we go inside again, this is the interior. Again, there's a sense of planes floating in free space here.
The furniture colludes that the furniture is impressive.
Famous Ritvo chair looks like just bits of rectangles, floating coloured rectangles floating in space.
But it's in the plan of this building that we felt takes us to the most extreme and the plan revo designs to be flexible and up to the user.
So this is the plan of the upper floor in closed mode and open mode,
enclosed by a series of screens can be pulled across to separate areas according to what the user wants to do with them.
I notice that that rebound leaves it quite open to the other work or sleeping like the sleeping,
sleeping, living or dining, all these three screens and we move the way to create open plan.
This is, you know, this is architect thinking about how it how people use buildings,
how the function of buildings might change and alter depending on the user or
depending on the time of day or depending on on on what's going on in the house.
So this again, there's a sense of flexibility and space that's reflected on the exterior, that's mirrored in the plan.
There's building change. It can shift, the planes can move space, can flow in and around them and function to flow in and around.
And function is part of it.
You can do different things in different spaces depending on what you do with the hands and the walls in a way that this, I think,
reflects some of the ideas in the text that make you read the idea that space
is a complicated thing and how we interact with space is a complicated thing.
Even when spaces can be demarcated as having particular functions, they can be quite complicated.
You can do what you like in here. You can work or you can sleep depending on on what you want to do or how you arrange the walls.
And again, this was something else.
This house does is it complicates the boundaries between the interior and the exterior and within individual bank individual.
Injuries in the house, fragments of it.
It complicates them in a way, I think perhaps that in a way that I think that perhaps the board you attacks me, we read is interesting.
And as well, I mean, it's interesting, the complexities of states and it's interested in the boundaries between different spaces and how
those boundaries might be contested or complicated or or inscribed in particular ways of thinking,
in particular ways of doing.
And also, I'm not saying it's a direct analogy between both you and me here, but I think that this bill introduces some of these ideas.
Plus, it's an interesting building. It's an interesting way of thinking about space,
and it represents a different way of being an architect who's thought very carefully about how space works.
And it's come up with something, a new way in which a building might might work with space.
Another architect who I want to I want to talk about and an architect is very unique in that in the early 20th century is Frank Lloyd Wright,
one of Cabezas enemies. They hated each other. Frank Lloyd Wright famously called the subway a box on stilts.
Right. In his architecture, particularly Zahedi architecture, not his Lytro architecture.
That's rubbish, really. So that the unstuff today in his early architecture.
Right. Is particularly interested in spatial and spatial properties of buildings as well.
And what he and he does something rather unique for this period with the spatial properties is that he's been particularly as Ali Prarie has,
as he's interested in firstly the house as sort of protective warming, nurturing space and how it might protect the household and the family.
He's also interested in the symbolic properties of space in all of the early prarie houses.
Right. Always puts the hearth in the middle. This is the plan of the Moors. Well, it has.
And the whole plan of the house, all the rooms, the house sort of rotates around a central space, which is the hearth which which.
Right. Sees the symbol of the family. The hearth is the most sacred, warm protective space in the house and it's in the centre of the house.
All other spaces revolve around it and are largely subservient to it.
If we go in the high, well, that's that's there.
That's the hearth there in the centre of the series of spaces that seem to sort of move around it here.
Right. Is saying something about the symbolic properties of space, which goes it goes much further.
It means that in some ways it goes goes to addresses some of the fans concerns here.
Space represents I think it means something.
It means something symbolically, but it also could mean something in terms of memory, in terms of experiences.
In other White Houses, he he he creates spaces within spaces, and that seems to sort of protect the user,
create spaces around the user spaces with interior spaces within interior spaces in the Robie House in Chicago.
This famous example of this is the dining table where famous Wright's famous
tool back chest create in little separate interior spaces within the interiors.
The reform includes enough. I think there's a sense that this this space wants to protect its use.
It wants to protect the family within it.
And again, there's a sort of sense of space having meaning here, having meaning and memory and meaning and experience.
Accorsi. Another classic example of this is his Wright's obsession with play playrooms.
Lots of these Wright houses have playrooms for children to play in. And they're always these warming kleiss sort of nurturing spaces.
And in Wright's architecture, we can see some of the ideas that Bojo talks about,
the idea that the architectural space might have symbolic properties.
But we can also see some of the ideas that Bachelard is talking about, ideas about how memory experience,
particularly childhood experience, might shape our interactions with spaces.
I think you can you can just you can go and write is reading Bachelard and they just they just work with each other perfectly.
These these houses are the sort of almost sacred, dreamlike spaces of childhood passion talks about.
And again, it's a way of thinking about the building, the way of thinking about architecture. This is very, very different from the Capezio.
Right. Right. He's interested in experience and how and how his users might experience these spaces, how they might be protected by them.
In what way might they remind them of their own childhood? Natural, right.
Had a very, very unhappy childhood, we're told is always moaning about his writing.
You could sort of argue that what he's doing here is making up for his for his unhappy childhood.
He's protecting others. This incredible nurturing playgrounds are all making up for what he lacked.
And he was a child. If you're into sort of like biography and architectural less than then that might work.
The final architects I want to talk about again, I'm sort of movement in architecture.
And again, as I said, the contemporary with the BCA and and write and and still is in Russian and Russian constructivism,
some other modernist movement. That, again, I think does things with space in a different way to to other other architects working in this period.
And then again, it opens up questions of how we might think about space more generally and constructivist architecture, much like steel.
Actually, they're interested in making new spaces, unfamiliar spaces, spaces that break down and change traditional forms of making space.
And architecture is a very famous constructivist building. One of the anyone's ever got better.
This is Malakoff Soviet Pavilion from 1925, which in fact I think is this is quite close.
Still project here in the building itself. We don't really get much sense about to begin building begins.
Iran's space is a very complicated one because it has a staircase running through the middle of it.
These these what we call imagining these these roof elements, complicated, fragmented as well.
This seems like the shell architecture, fragmented space, the sense of of of geometrical planes moving in free-floating space.
But the plan is totally bonkers. And there's this there's never been a plan like this in the history of architecture.
It looks nothing like any of Palladio plans or any of the eight million miles away.
It delays geometrically. Perfect plan palace. It's totally insane.
And the planning, you can't be sort of built on principles of diagonals, I suppose.
But again, there's no sense of how where this space begins and ends.
What's going on here, of course, for Malakoff on this this read the reasons behind this,
a different Rietveld Malakoff is less interested in in complicating sort of interior next Syria.
He's more interested in articulating the newness and modernity of his world in space.
This is immediately after the Russian Revolution.
These architects are wanting to express their new political system and their new life way of life in space.
And to do that, they're rejecting the whole of the Western canon of architecture.
They're coming up with new, different forms of space that reflect how societies become a different space.
In 1920s Russia, but they're doing something else as well.
And that's sort of linked to that because that suggests the architectural space can have a political meaning.
It can embody political values. And it could also potentially do things for politics.
It could. It could be political itself. This jolly looking building is one of the only other examples of constructivism that actually gets built.
This is the Northampton Apartments in Moscow in the late 1920s built.
So, Ginzberg, this is a big apartment block that was built in the middle of Moscow for civil servants work party workers.
He worked for the government to live in and on the outside.
That shows, as you can see now, it's falling down. What if it wasn't happy days on the outside?
It looks like sort of kupelian modernism.
It looks like such a kind of architecture that's being built in lots of places across across Europe in this period,
although it's got quite, quite a funky plant.
If we if we go inside and look at the plan, we can perhaps see some elements of the construct of this idea of creating new and dynamic spaces.
There aren't many buildings in the Western world in this period that have a plan like that.
But we'll make this. What makes this plan so extraordinary is the way that the space works in terms of private and communal, in fact.
So these are all individual element. These are individual flats or apartments that the workers live in.
But they are sleeping spaces only. These spaces here are the communal spaces which contain the kitchens and the living areas.
This is communism in space. Okay, so everyone goes home and sleeps.
But then the rest of the day is spent communally. They cook together. They live together, which is good.
You know, if you're if you if you're sort of diehard communist, that's greater than others.
But potentially what the building does is also make people think like that.
Okay. So if you if you live in this building and suddenly your flat doesn't have a kitchen,
well, you're going to be forced to have to cook these communal kitchen. Right. It sounds a bit like Ch'ien accommodation.
I know. But like I said, that in this case, these are sort of these are the workers work,
the private individuals that are working for the state and also renting out the state.
And the building, in a way, is trying to make them behave in a certain way.
It's trying to make them is trying to make them adhere to a political system.
But as I said, actually changing their behaviour and making them live in a particular way according to the principles of the state.
And actually, Ginsberg makes us give it says this. And in his writings, it's saying that when he's designing this see,
Ginzberg says 1924 that we can no longer compel the occupants of a particular building to live collectively,
collectively, as we have attempted to do in the past. A Yes, we have tried to make people alter their behaviour through art, through the spaces.
We've done it. But he may a generally with negative results.
We must provide for the possibility of a gradual transition to communal utilisation in a number of different ways.
We considered it absolutely necessary to incorporate certain features that would stimulate the transition to a socially superior mode of life.
Stimulate but not dictate. I gradually coerce people into behaving in certain ways, not just telling them outright.
The space here I think is taking on an acceptable space takes on a really interesting role that space is playing here is really interesting.
Space is is. It is a tool. It's an apple is the apparatus by which Ginsberg and state could could change people's ways.
Could they. The gradual transition to utilisation is being carried through is being is being the work is being done by the space in the building.
Space is being thought of as something that can fundamentally affect the user's behaviour.
This gives a lot of power to the architect and more power to the state. But but it.
But but but. But but it's not. But it goes beyond Capezio sort of controlling the user's vision here.
The user's behaviour, the way the user thinks, the way the user lives,
the way the user lives, their day to day life is being shaped and dictated by the building.
And of course, it's ideas like that that that Ficco is talking about.
And Panopto CISM and full of Ginzberg sort of fall for Ginsburg's hopes that the knock on effect doesn't seem very, very far removed from prison.
This is a space that suddenly is not just it's not just there to be sort of experienced fidei.
This is a few vision. This is a space that is now fundamentally Tavia.
So we've gone from a position where where architecture is sort of rendered on paper as it is, is made visual by the architects,
is something that the architect can largely dictate in terms of two dimensions to a three dimensional space that is now fighting back.
It's now it's not controlling people and altering behaviour.
So can we start outside of this actually suggesting that architecture is a sort of master art that has mastery over all the other decorative arts?
I'm concluding it by saying that perhaps it's even more powerful. And that's actually it has it has the potential to be the master of us as well.
Thank you.