.
The principles of rhetoric and poetics revolve (albeit in different ways) around how a ‘unity of place, time and action’ (poetics) can be established or how a ‘demonstration of a case’ can be achieved by means of ‘common topics’ and ‘common places’, involving ‘kairos’ (seizing the moment) and how ‘stasis’ can be countered (stasis originally means that things are utterly unsettled, thus how stasis can be stabilized into a state of stability, the balancing of a force field).
Our interest will be in how these terms are treated (in the traditions of rhetoric and poetics) as separate ‘magnitudes’ that play together in ‘a plot’ of which we can think architectonically. The principled treatment of these magnitudes (place, time, and action) are not only central to every text, but also to architecture across all scales (e.g. place making through identification of site, task and context of a project, or time with regard to identifying a style, or a building’s classicality or modernity, and action with regard to the great interest in ‘agency’ at work in the planning and building of our environments).
This semester’s VU “SUBSTITUTE” will focus on how the principles of rhetoric and poetics are at work in architecture theory texts – we are going to regard texts as ‘treaties’ (literally “a matter capable of being treated in a great variety of ways and manners”). We are going to ask how a particular architecture theory text is made, what common topics and common places are being displayed in it, how this commonality is being established, who a text is talking to, and against whom or what it is providing pro and con arguments. In short, we are going to look at the situations these texts engender.
Looking at theory texts as ‘treaties’ helps us to develop the skill of better understanding what they stake, what their overall concerns are. The students will acquire critical skills in how texts treat their subject matters, as well as practical skills in how to be articulate and express their ideas with interest, reason, rationality, and argument.
The course will consist of two kinds of lectures, as well as exercises: (1) Lectures on the principles of rhetoric and poetics – the students will be provided with a basic vocabulary of concepts. (2) Lectures that teach how to read contemporary architecture theory texts as ‘treaties’; as well as (3) exercises to acquire proficiency in articulation, which all students will be expected to participate in, in every session.
This course will be co-taught by Sebastian Michael, a professional writer of plays, novels, poetry, as well as popular science prose, and Vera Bühlmann, professor for architecture theory and philosophy of technics.
The semester will be structured in eleven meetings, ending before the Christmas break. Attending the sessions and participating in the exercises is mandatory. The EXAM will be after Christmas: the students will choose an iconic architecture project and write a text on it that articulates this project’s proper persuasiveness – whether from a stance of appreciation and praise, or one of dislike, or simply one of critique: what will count is not the nature of your judgement, but the articulacy with which you can make your case.
John Hejduk, Diamond HouseJames Stirling, Neue Staatsgalerie Leon Krier, School at Quentin-en-Yvelines Daniel Libeskind, Chamber Works
First meeting: Wednesday October 10, 09:00 - 12:00 am.
Location: Seminar space at ATTP, Wiedner Hauptstrasse 7, Stiege 2, 1. Stock.
The students are expected to be present and to actively participate in the weekly meetings.
At the end of the course, each student is expected to deliver one carefully articulated text (form and format are to be decided during the course).
Aristotle, The Art of Rhetorics
Aristotle, Poetics
Sharon Crawlee & Debra Hawhee, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, 3rd edition (Pearson: New York 2004).
Paul Virilio “The Overexposed City,” in The Blackwell City Reader, ed. by G. Bridge and S. Watson (Blackwell Publishing, 2002)
Marc Augé, “From Places to Non-Places” in Non-Places, Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity (Verso, 2009 [1992])
Mark Wigley, “The Translation of Architecture, the Production of Babel,” paper presented 1988; published in Assemblage 8 (February 1989)
Charles A. Jencks, “Post-Modern Architecture,” from The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (ISJAH, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, University of California Press, Vol. 38 No. 4, Dec., 1979).
Reyner Banham, “Building inside out” in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham (University of California Press, 1996)
Maurice Culot and Leon Krier “The Only Path for Architecture,” Archives d’Architecture Moderne 14 (2d trimester 1978); translated in Oppositions 14 (Fall 1978)
Peter Eisenman, “Written into the Void,” in Written into the Void, Selected Writings 1990-2004 (Yale University Press: Yale, 1990)
Peter Eisenman, “Post-Functionalism,” Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976)
Bernard Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox,” Studio International, September-October 1975; revised in Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (MIT Press: Massachusetts, 1996)
Manfredo Tafuri, “Form as regressive Utopia,” in Capitalism and Utopia, Design and Capitalist Development (MIT Press: Massachusetts 1976)
LeCorbusier, “When the Cathedrals were White,” in When the Cathedrals Were White (McGraw-Hili Book Company: New York 1947).
