History, Criticism and Theory in Architecture: Architecture Beyond the Visual

Abstract

Combining readings in architectural history and critique with analyses of designs, this seminar addresses how the visual emphasis has manifested itself and become predominant in architectural discourse and practice, and analyzes attempts to overcome it by turning attention to other sensory modalities in architectural experience in the context of materiality, technology, and culture.

Objective

1) Advancing the students' competence in accounting for, analyzing, understanding non-visual aspects of architecture. 2) Understanding the visual mode of understanding architecture, its lineage and consequences (how it has become primary; how its ubiquity has been manifested).

Content

Architecture has been conceptualized to a large extent in visual terms. Due to its long alliance with art history and visual mediums, architectural history has significantly contributed to the persistence of the notion of architecture as the domain of sight, and its own proclivity for centering on the visual, especially understood as the pictorial, has made it omit a whole range of other realms in which buildings partake. This ocular-centrism has had a profound impact on the notion of the subject/user both architecture and architectural history has crafted. This seminar will scrutinize how the visual emphasis has been articulated in architectural discourse and practice, and analyze attempts to overcome it by focusing on other sensory modalities in architectural experience, as well as their synesthetic way of manifesting themselves. The course will also engage in analyses of inherently non-visual spaces, whose understanding invites parting with the primarily visual mode of conceptualizing architecture. Themes to be covered include: 1) The Visual Mode of Understanding Architecture and its Lineage; 2) Critique of the Primacy of the Visual in Architecture; "The Architectural Experience" 3) Extensions, Expansions, Alternatives: Non-visual Approaches to the Experience of Architecture and Space 4) Clandestine Architecture, Space, and Experience 5) Overcoming the Visual Emphasis in Architectural Practice, e.g. Accounting for the Disabled and the Elderly

Resources