This course is taught by Isben Önen, Dr. phil., M.Arch, B.Arch, Architect and Music Journalist who will be a Guest Lecturer at ATTP in Wintersemester 2018. His PHD studies were at Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna.

Seminar WS 18-19

Dr. phil. Isben Önen, B.Arch, M.Arch

TU-Wien

Department of Architecture

Form: An Adventure of the Persistent Mind

Spatial and Audial Fieldtrips

What? A polycentric and interdisciplinary seminar which settles on the grounds of numerous disciplines, scrutinizing the correlation in between and seeking aspects of creativity within the fundamentals of creative act from ideas to the artifact. It aims to trace a thread through clusters and networks of theory and examples from music and architecture. What was Le Corbusier looking for in Athens? What made Bach walk 400 kilometers north to listen to Buxtehude?

Why? Discovering sideways to interdisciplinary approach, extending perspectives of creative thinking through the musical and architectural domain.

How? Allowing not only architecture students but also those who are by any means involved in creative act to read related texts in music, architecture, philosophy, and art history. Brain-and-earstorming sessions with guest musicians/composers.  Generating a discussion based on selected topics in depth which will be finalized with a paper submission.

The history of art could be seen as a history of how humanness transformed itself over time. To set creative act as the ambiguous generator of all this change and re-formation but also its expression would be equally valid. This seminar sets sail for the concept of form and its sprawling relation to idea, order, and beauty. The persistence of the creative mind to erect a beautifully ordered structure is worth taking the fascinating challenge for the transcendental and timeless. It is a confrontation with the boundaries of thinking, embracing its ingenuity and constraints. As the discussion stretches over centuries with examples of sonatas, temples, and an accompanying bulk of theory, the search is for change and its traceability. It is about understanding how concepts that defined the relation of form to order and beauty changed. In other words it is a proposal to look at the history of changing priorities.

Could a debate on formal relations between architecture and music lead to a perception of form-in the midst of a creative haze-with unified abstract and material connotations?

As the sprawling notion of “ambiguity” of form is as “persistent” as its presence, this tangled whole is the result of an intervening set of disciplines. Philosophy, like an archaic precious object, delivers messages from the past each time brought to the fore. Linguistics on the other hand, plays a significant role, through one of its innate properties: elasticity. Whereas art history and theory with its mighty and overriding presence, augmented with the powers of creativity and imagination and with a transcending in-betweenness of material and idea, artifact and its message, effectively contribute to this sprawling ambiguity. Having its roots in such fertile grounds, this crossover seminar aims to set sail for a “unified form” embracing its abstractness and tangibility in the search for unconventional approaches on creativity.

General Information

First meeting: Monday, October 8th, 2018 at 16:00
Place: Seminarraum der Architekturtheorie, Wiedner Hauptstr. 7, Stiege 2, 1. Stock; Mondays, from 16:00 to 18:00 

Written Seminar Paper. 

The Course will be taught in English.