"Theory is something one does not see" (Hans Blumenberg) - this sounds mystic and irritating: is not theory what affords us a concsious, rational (reasonable and reflected) and communicable manner of thinking and seeing? The important architects all have more or less clear ideas about what they are doing. They are masters of what is happening in their time. This course provides an introduction in architectural theory. Thereby, we will be concerned also with the question of what theory is capable of, how it is often an impertinence, what it is being accused of, and what is being expected from it. There is perhaps nothing that better foregrounds the confusing status of theory today than Donald Trump s key move, in his campaign last year, by declaring: "I love all the poorly educated!"
We will depart from a selection of texts that have proved to be imporant for architectural theory throughout the 20th century. We will read them as stage plays, in which concepts that are central to architectonic thinking - like structure, system, element, form, style, metrics, magnitude, proportion, module, partition, generalization, specification, criterium - are being dramatized in various manners. We will be thinking about the stakes of such stage plays: Where is the action and what is happening? With such questioning we can get familiar with different articulations and organizations of these powerful concepts, without commiting ourselves to any one school in particular (as for example analytics, cybernetics, pragmatism, constructivism). Any of those render graspable, in particular manners, the technical capacities that characterize a particular a time (by rationalizing the power of what counts as possible). They all formulate thereby, inevitably, also a particular stance towards what counts as irrational and impossible in a particular time (by symbolizing, and constraining, these capacities). We will learn how to place key texts in their historical context - this is how we can exercise ourselves in learning how to think architectonically.
The aim of this course is to help the students in developing and relating vivid ideas with words such as "structuralism" or "poststructuralism", "modern" or "postmodern", "historical", "classical" or "original" - words that often come along in today s discourses as rather empty (jargon) or clumsy (dogmatic). What are words, such as "epoch", "canon", "program", "type", "grammar", "rule sets", capable of? Why are we inclined to like certain ones better than others? What are the preassumptions when speaking of "systems theory", "technology" or "ontology", or "authority", "expertise", or "authorship"? What are the promises of words such as "dispositiv", "facticity" or "paradigm" ?
Program (provisional):
March 17 Theory, Sophistics, and Populism
March 24 Europe and Humanism
April 7 Architecture - "Baukunst" or "Profession"?
April 28 Science and Globalisation
May 5 Mathemata. Structure and Discernability
May 12 The Gnomon (Sun Clock) and the Articulation. Form and Poetics
May 26 Argument and Mapping, Function and Norm
June 2 The Rectangle and the Circle (Rationality and Irrationality)
June 16 The Parallelogram: System and Program
June 23 Code: Discretion and Continuity
