New Arrival

Liam Kazimeras Bell Varnelis was born at 12.57am today. He is 7 lbs. 4oz and 19 inches long. Jennifer had a quick (2 hour) labor and everyone is fine. Our daughter Viltis loves her little brother already.

Flickr

The splash image on the left used to be served up by a javascript from a folder of about twenty jpegs. It added some aesthetic relief, but that was about it. As of today, the image is being served up by Flickr and points to my photostream on that site.

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One Thing After Another

For Log 3

Kazys Varnelis

Leaving the opening reception for the “Minimal Future” exhibition at Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art this past March, I was struck by the way the evening light, glancing off the steel of the Disney Concert Hall across the street, called to mind the dark skies and blood-red sunsets that marked the week of the building’s dedication. Suddenly, I was overcome by memories of that surreal event, when the glitterati and the public stood transfixed by Frank Gehry’s architecture, even as downtown L.A. was enveloped by the smoke from homes burning in the surrounding hills.

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Infrastructural City, Spring 1999

Southern California Institute of Architecture Spring 1999
Program in History and Theory of Architecture and Cities
Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.

Much like our internal organs, we take the infrastructure of the city for granted, expecting that it will be there for us when we need it. When we ignore infrastructure, we do so at our peril. Infrastructure enables but also limits our possibilities. If the form of the city determines its infrastructural network, the infrastructural network also determines the form of the city. And as with the body’s organs, infrastructural failure can be catastrophic.

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the various infrastructures from the most obvious to the most obscure that form a matrix underneath the urban landscape and to consider the roles of infrastructure in the social imaginary.

The course begins with a survey of the history of infrastructure in Western Europe and the United States, focussing primarily on Rome, Paris, and New York. Students will be exposed not only to the technological developments of infrastructure, but also to the formation of cultural attitudes regarding it. The second part of the course will investigate the various infrastructural networks from freeways to fiber optics that support Los Angeles.

Through a series of readings, combined with study in the field, we will come to an understanding of the dimensions of the infrastructural city. Not only is the infrastructural city all around us, it extends into the landscape far beyond the most distant suburb. To examine the impact of the infrastructural city on the supposedly non urban environment, a weekend field trip through the Mojave Desert to the Owens Valley is planned. Special attention will also be paid to the depiction of infrastructure in the cultural artifacts, particularly film, that help make up the urban mythology of Los Angeles.

Course Requirements

This course is aimed at the upper-level undergraduate and graduate student. Although a background in theory or history would be helpful, the readings that we will be doing do not in general demand such knowledge. Students do, however, have to be committed to reading substantial amounts of texts that can be difficult and challenging.

The intent of all the class assignments is to help students focus their personal interests in architecture. Although students are encouraged to experiment and investigate materials in areas they do not know about, students are also encouraged to think of class assignments as ways of exploring ideas for their undergraduate or graduate thesis.

Class participation 30%

Participation is essential for this class. Included under this heading is attendance in class and completion of the required readings.

SCI-Arc policy requires that you attend your classes. Missing more than three classes in a semester will result in a grade of No Credit.

Plan ahead: having demands in studio and other seminars is not an excuse for avoiding the requirements of this one.

In-Class Presentation 20%

Acquiring good oral presentation skills is a key part of your SCI-Arc education and can only be learned with practice. As part of this course, each student is required to give a 10-20 minute critical presentation on one of the assigned readings. Students will be asked to turn in a hardcopy version of their presentation no later than one week following the oral presentation.

Paper 30%

The final paper in this course will be a 8-15 page research essay on a topic relating to the material covered in this course. The paper will begin with a draft, due at approximately the half way point of the semester. Feedback from the draft will be incorporated into a carefully polished final revision. Both draft and final revision must be submitted on time.

Students interested in pursuing infrastructural topics for their thesis are encouraged to propose projects that will lead to a thesis topic.

SCI-Arc employs Vic Liptak to help all students with their writing assignments. Students are strongly urged to see her to discuss the mechanics of their paper. English as a Second Language students who have any difficulty with either reading or writing MUST see Vic Liptak.

Students are both encouraged and expected to take full advantage of the SCI-Arc library. Kevin McMahon is one of SCI-Arc’s great resources and is always glad to have students ask him for help.

In addition, Los Angeles contains good publicly accessible architecture libraries at USC and UCLA as well as the excellent Form Zero and Hennessey & Ingalls bookstores.

Web Work 20%

This course inaugurates a new strategy within SCI-Arc’s history-theory courses. Rather than remaining a private matter between student and instructor, the final paper will be disseminated via both SCI-Arc’s World Wide Web site and CD-ROM.

To this end, students will be taught how to use GoLive Cyberstudio 3.1, a simple yet powerful Web layout program for the Apple Macintosh operating system during a special class session early in the semester. Some basic computer literacy ”“ minimal page layout skills, the ability to scan images, a passing understanding of the Macintosh Finder and graphic user interface – will be necessary for this task.

Grades will be based on quality of presentation.

Reading
Purchase of the course reader and completion of all the readings on time is mandatory. The reader will be available in the campus store. Other handouts will be distributed in class.

1 Introduction

2 Methodology: What Animates History?

  • Merritt Roe Smith, “Technological Determinism in American Culture,” 1-35 and Thomas J. Misa, “Retrieving Sociotechnical Change from Technological Determinism,” 115-141 in Smith and Leo Marx, eds. Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995).
  • Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (New York: Swerve Editions, 1997), 1-70.
  • 4pm Demonstration of GoLive Cyberstudio in computer lab

3 The Technological Sublime
In class video: “Hoover Dam,” The American Experience, PBS, 1999.

  • David E. Nye, The American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994), 1-76.
  • Joan Didion, “At The Dam” in The White Album, (New York: Noonday, 1990), 198-201.

4 Diseased City / Hygienic City

  • David P. Jordan, “Organs of the Large City,” Transforming Paris: the Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann, (New York: Free Press, 1995), 267-296.
  • M. Christine Boyer, “I. Would America Produce A Civilization of Cities? 1890 1909” and “11. The Disciplinary Order of Planning, 1909 1916” Dreaming the rational city: the myth of American city planning, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), ix-136.

5 Strategies and Techniques of Land Use Interpretation
An introduction by Matthew Coolidge, Director The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Located at 9331 Venice Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232, Telephone: (310) 839 5722

  • Read material on the Center online
  • Robert Smithson and Jack D. Flam, Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, The Documents Of Twentieth Century Art, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Statement of Intent and Methodology due

6 Water and the Hinterlands, I

  • Office of Technology Assessment, “Water Supply: The Hydrologic Cycle,” and in David H. Speidel, Lon C. Ruedisili and Allen Francis Agnew, Perspectives On Water: Uses and Abuses, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 37-50.
  • Marc Reisner, “The Red Queen,” Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin Books, 1993), 52-103.
  • In Class Movie: Cadillac Desert
  • Optional:
  • John Hart, Storm over Mono: the Mono Lake Battle and the California Water Future, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

7 Self Guided Field Trip to Owens Valley

  • Kazys Varnelis, Owens Valley Sourcebook v. 1.0
  • Ginny Clark, Guide to Highway 395: Los Angeles to Reno, (Lake Havasu City, Az: Western Trails Publications, 1997).
  • Robert P. Sharp, Geology: A field guide to Southern California, 3rd, (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co., 1994).
  • Robert P. Sharp and Allen F. Glazner, Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley, (Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press Pub, 1997).

8 Water in the Hinterlands, II

  • John Walton, “Introduction,” and “State, Culture, and Collective Action,” in Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion In California, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 1-10 and 287-339.
  • Samuel P. Hays, “From Conservation to Environment: Environmental Politics in the United States Since World War II,” in Char Miller and Hal Rothman, Out of the Woods. Essays in Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 101-126.
  • Kenneth D. Frederick, “The Future of Irrigation,” and Peter P. Rogers, “The Future of Water,” in David H. Speidel, Lon C. Ruedisili and Allen Francis Agnew, Perspectives On Water: Uses and Abuses, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 127-135, 372-382.
  • Joan Didion, “Holy Water” in The white album, (New York: Noonday, 1990), 59-68.

Optional:

  • Walton, chapters 1-4 (on early Owens Valley)
  • Walton, chapters 5-6 (on Owens Valley LA and after)

8 Los Angeles Streets

  • John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “The Domestication of the Garage,” The Necessity For Ruins, And Other Topics, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 102-111.
  • Chester H. Liebs, “Space: From Main Street to Miracle Mile” and “Image: Architecture for Speed Reading” in Main Street to Miracle Mile: American roadside architecture, (Boston: Little Brown, 1985), 3-73.

Optional:

  • Richard W. Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, The Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920 1950, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

First Draft of Project Due

9 Freeways

  • Martin Wachs, “The Evolution of Transportation Policy in Los Angeles. Images of Past Policies and Future Prospects,” in Allen John Scott and Edward W. Soja , THe City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 106-159.
  • Cliff Ellis, “Professional Conflict over Urban Form: The Case of Urban Freeways, 1930 to 1970,” in Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, Planning the twentieth century) American City, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
  • Phil Patton, “Road to Nowhere” in Jeffrey T. Brouws, Bernd Polster and Phil Patton, Highway: America’s endless dream, (New York: Stewart Tabor! & Chang, 1997), 32-55.
  • Norman Klein, “Booster Myths, Urban Erasure,” The History of Forgetting (New York: Verso, 1997), 27-72.

10 Infrastructure and Paranoia: “Chinatown,” “Roger Rabbit,” “Three Days of the Condor.”

  • In Class Movie: “Chinatown”
  • Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984), 53-92.
  • Rosalyn Deutsche, “Chinatown, Part Four?” Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 245-253.

Optional:

  • Fredric Jameson, “Totality as Conspiracy,” The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 9-84.

11 Power

  • David E. Nye, “Electrifying the American West, 1880 1940” and “Energy Narratives,” Narratives and spaces: technology and the construction of American culture, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 25 44, 75 92.

12 Telecoms

  • Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, “Introduction,” “Telecommunications and the City,” “Social and Cultural Life of the City,” “Urban Physical Form,” “Conclusions” in Telecommunications and the City. Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. (New York: Routledge, 1996), 1-45, 76-122, 172-237, 312-336, 376-384.
  • Paul Virilio, “The Overexposed City,” K. Michael Hays, Architecture theory since 1968, (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998), 542-550.

Optional:

  • William J. Mitchell, City Of Bits: Space, Place, and The Infobahn, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). Available at https://mitpress.mit.edu/e books/City_of_Bits/
  • Manuel Castells, chapters 1-3, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and The Urban Regional Process, (Oxford, UK: Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell, 1989).
  • Castells, chapters 4-6.

Final Project Due

13 Soft Infrastructures, Forgotten Infrastructures

  • John A. McPhee, “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” The Control of Nature, (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), 183-272.

Presentation of Student Projects

14 Concluding Class Discussion

Presentation of Student Projects

Bibliography

  • Brouws, Jeffrey T., Bernd Polster, and Phil Patton. Highway: America’s endless dream. New York: Stewart Tabori & Chang, 1997.
  • Castells, Manuel. The informational city: information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban regional process. Cambridge, Mass: B. Blackwell, 1989.
  • Clark, Ginny. Guide to Highway 395: Los Angeles to Reno. Lake Havasu City, Az: Western Trails Publications, 1997.
  • Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: art and spatial politics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
  • Didion, Joan. The white album. New York: Noonday, 1990.
  • Hart, John. Storm over Mono: the Mono Lake battle and the California water future. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
  • Hays, K. Michael. Architecture theory since 1968. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1998.
  • Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. The necessity for ruins, and other topics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.
  • Jameson, Fredric. The geopolitical aesthetic: cinema and space in the world system. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.
  • Jordan, David P. Transforming Paris: the life and labors of Baron Haussmann. New York: Free Press, 1995.
  • Kahrl, William L. Water and power: the conflict over Los Angeles’ water supply in the Owens Valley. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
  • Kahrl, William L. and Fnglish. The California water atlas. Sacramento Los Altos, Calif.: The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research distributed by William Kaufmann, 1979.
  • Klein, Norman M. The history of forgetting: Los Angeles and the erasure of memory. New York: Verso, 1997.
  • Liebs, Chester H. Main Street to Miracle Mile: American roadside architecture. Boston: Little Brown, 1985.
  • Longstreth, Richard W. City center to regional mall: architecture, the automobile, and retailing in Los Angeles, 1920 1950. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.
  • Marx, Leo. The machine in the garden; technology and the pastoral ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
  • McPhee, John A. The control of nature. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989.
  • Mitchell, William J. City of bits: space, place, and the infobahn. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.
  • Nye, David E. Electrifying America: social meanings of a new technology, IBBO 1940. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.
  • Nye, David E. American technological sublime. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1994.
  • Nye, David E. Narratives and spaces: technology and the construction of Amerlcan culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.
  • Nye, David E. Consuming power: a social history of American energies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.
  • Reisner, Marc. Cadillac desert: the American West and its disappearing water. Rev. and updated ed., New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
  • Scott, Allen John and Edward W. Soja. The city: Los Angeles and urban theory at the end of the twentieth century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
  • Sharp, Rotert P. Geology: A field guide to Southern California. 3rd ed., Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Pub. Co., 1994.
  • Sharp, Robert P. and Allen F. Glazner. Geology underfoot in Death Valley and Owens Valley. Missoula, Mont.: Mountain Press Pub., 1997.
  • Sies, Mary Corbin and Christopher Silver. Planning the twentieth century American city. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
  • Smith, Genny and Paul Charles Bateman. Deepest valley: a guide to Owens Valley, its roadsides and mountain trails. Rev. ed., Los Altos, Calif.: G. Smith Books: distributed by William Kaufmann, 1978.
  • Smith, Merritt Roe and Leo Marx. Does technology drive history?: the dilemma of technological determinism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.
  • Smithson, Robert and Jack D. Flam. Robert Smithson, the collected writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
  • Speidel, David H., Lon C. Ruedisili, and Allen Francis Agnew. Perspectives on water: uses and abuses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
  • Walton, John. Western times and water wars: state, culture, and rebellion in California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

History and Theory, II

University of Pennsylvania Spring 2004
School of Design
Department of Architecture
Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.

Architecture 512: History and Theory, II

Description

This course traces the emergence of contemporary issues in the field by exploring architecture since the start of the twentieth century. Although it proceeds roughly in chronological order, it is not a survey. Incoming students should already have a familiarity with the major monuments, figures, and movements of the time. Rather, this course constitutes an advanced theoretical introduction to the key ideas that shape architectural thinking today, introducing topics as overlaying strata, with each new issue adding greater complexity even as previous layers continue to influence the present. Every class addresses specific themes through close readings of pertinent projects within the historical constellation of ideas, values, and technologies that inform them.

Of particular focus for the course is the relationship between architecture and modernity. Modernity is a new form of life, in which Karl Marx aptly wrote, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” If the nineteenth century marks the emergence of a modern civilization, judged by many to be bereft of purpose apart from profit and loss and unceasing growth and change, the twentieth century is defined by attempts to resist that modernity, organize it, and turn it to the advantage of mankind. To this end, this course will trace architecture’s relationship to organizational regimes of modernity such as Fordism, Taylorism, and Post-Fordism, the rise and fall of the machine as an object not to represent but rather to emulate, and the increasing focus on architecture as a matter of process, not product. Throughout, the course will highlight the tension between a drive towards rationalization and an urge to form.

The course has two components: a lecture surveying critical issues through close readings of buildings and a seminar component, led by the teaching assistants, reviewing the week’s lecture and reading while focusing on close readings undertaken by students. Readings will focus on writings by architects while critical texts from both architecture history and outside the discipline establish a context.

Requirements

  • Students will be evaluated on the basis of their seminar presentation and participation (30%) and on a term paper (70%).
  • A course reader will be available. Students are also asked to purchase two key texts that should be part of any architect’s library if they do not own them already.
  • Ulrich Conrads, ed. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
  • Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells, (New York: Dover, 1985).

1 Introduction: Toward Modernity [Wagner and Taylor]

  • Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, The Blackwell City Reader, (New York: Blackwell, 2002), 11-19.
  • Marshall Berman, “Introduction. Modernity ”“ Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 15-36.
  • Otto Wagner, “Style,” “Construction,” and “Concluding Remark,” Modern Architecture, trans. Harry F. Mallgrave (Santa Monica: Getty Center Publications, 1988), 73-80, 91-99, 124-125.
  • Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, (New York: Norton, 1967), 5-29.

2 Norm and Form, Culture and Civilization [Loos, Muthesius, Behrens, Van de Velde]

  • Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” 19-24; Hermann Muthesius, “Aims of the Werkbund,” 26-27; Hermann Muthesius and Henry Van de Velde, “Werkbund Theses and Antitheses,” 26-31; Paul Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture,” 32-33 in Ulrich Conrads, ed. Programs and Manifestoes on 20th Century Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970).
  • Adolf Loos, “Architecture,” Adolf and Daniel Opel, eds., On Architecture / Adolf Loos (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2002), 73-85.
  • Stanford Anderson, “5 Modern Architecture and Industry, A Cultural Policy of Historical Determinism: Berlin I,” “6 Industrial Design, a Strategy for Unity Technology and Art: Berlin II,” and “7 Architecture for Industry, the AEG Factories: Berlin III,” Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000), 95-164.

3 Systems, Systematic and Anti-Systematic Thought [de Stijl, Bauhaus, Suprematism and Productivism]

  • De Stijl, “Manifesto I,” 39-40; ‘Work Council for Art’ [Arbeitsrat f?ɬºr Kunst], “Under the Wing of A Great Architecture,” 44-45; De Stijl, “Manifesto V: -?جø¬?+=R4”, 65-66; Theo van Doesburg, “Towards a Plastic Architecture,” 78-80. Walter Gropius, “Principles of Bauhaus Production [Dessau],” 95-97 in Conrads.
  • Thomas Parke Hughes, “The System Must be First,” American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970, (New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking, 1989), 184-248.
  • Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Critical Inquiry Summer 1990: 709-752.

4 Objet Type, Object Primitives, Complex Forms [Le Corbusier]

  • Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells, (New York: Dover, 1985).

5 Form Against Function [Meyer, Taut, Mies, Corbusier, Hitchcock and Johnson]

  • Hannes Meyer, “Building,” Conrads, 117-120.
  • Karel Teige, “Foreword” and “Introductory Remarks: Toward a Dialectic of Architecture and a Sociology of Dwelling,” The Minimum Dwelling (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 1-8 and 9-31.
  • Le Corbusier, “In Defense of Architecture,” The Oppositions Reader (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 598-614.
  • Bruno Taut, “The New Dwelling: Woman as Creator,” and Grete Shutte Lihotzky, Rationalization in the Household,” in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds. The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, (University of California, 1994), 461-465.
  • Alfred H. Barr, jr. “Preface” in Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: Norton, 1995), 27-32.

6 Grounding the Building [Asplund, Aalto]

  • Val K. Warke, “Asplund’s Villa Snellman: An Appreciation,” Cornell Journal of Architecture 3, (Fall 1987), 88-94.
  • Stanford Anderson, “Aalto and ‘Methodical Accommodation to Circumstance,” in Timo Tuomi, ed. Alvar Aalto in Seven Buildings: Interpretations of an Architect’s Work (Helsinki: Museum of Finnish Architecture, 1998), 143-149.

7 The Plan and the Monument [Gropius, Kahn, Mies]

  • David Harvey, “Fordism” in The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), 125-140.
  • Walter Gropius, “Is There a Science of Design?” Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Collier, 1962), 30-43.
  • Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture. The Growth of A New Tradition, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982), 2-28.
  • K. Michael Hays, “Abstraction’s Appearance (Seagram Building),” in Robert Somol, ed. Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997) , 276-291.

8 The World as Found [Team X, late Corbusier, Stirling]

  • Nadir Lahiji, “The Gift of the Open Hand: Le Corbusier Reading Georges Bataille’s La Part Maudite.” Journal of Architectural Education (September 1996), 50-67.
  • I. de Wolfe [Hugh de Cronin Hastings], “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy,” in Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943-1968. A Documentary Anthology (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture/Rizzoli, 1993), 114-119.
  • Alison and Peter Smithson, “The New Brutalism,” in Ockman, 240.; various, “Grouping of Dwellings,” in Alison Smithson, ed. Team 10 Primer, (The MIT Press: Cambridge: 1968), 74-95.

9 [Spring Break]

10 Complexity and its Virtues [Venturi, Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom]

  • Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Harrison and Wood, 754-760.
  • Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1977 second edition; first published 1966), 13-33.
  • Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, “Ugly and Ordinary Architecture or the Decorated Shed,” Architectural Forum, November 1971, 64-67 and December 1971, 48-53.
  • David Harvey, “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation,” The Condition of Postmodernity, 141-172.
  • Archizoom Associates, “No-Stop City. Residential Parkings. Climatic Universal Sistem” [sic] Domus 496, March 1971, 49-55.

11 The Recovery of Form, the Object and its Autonomy [Eisenman, Graves, Rossi, Hejduk]

  • Colin Rowe, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” in The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, 159-183.
  • Alan Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method,” in Essays in Architectural Criticism, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981), 43-50.
  • John Hejduk, “Introduction to the Diamond Catalog,” “Diamond House A,” Mask of Medusa. Works 1947-1983, (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 48-49, 50-51, 242-245.
  • Peter Eisenman, “House I,” Five Architects (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 15-23.
  • Kazys Varnelis, “The Education of the Innocent Eye,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 51. No. 4 (May 1998), 212-223.
  • Manfredo Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” Contropiano 1 (January-April 1969), reprinted in Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 2-35.

12 The Radicality of Experience, the Right to the City [Situationists, Rossi, Rowe, Tschumi]

  • Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 5-8 and Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman, “Methods of Détournement,” 8-14 in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981).
  • Aldo Rossi, “The Urban Artifact as a Work of Art,” from Architecture of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982), 32-41.
  • Rafael Moneo, “Aldo Rossi: The Idea of Architecture and the Modena Cemetery,” Oppositions 5, reprinted in ed., Oppositions Reader, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 105-135.
  • Colin Rowe, “Collage City,” Architectural Review 158, no 942 (August 1975) reprinted in Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: an Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965-1995, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 266-293.
  • Bernard Tschumi, “Spaces and Events,” Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 141-150.

13 From the Critique of Architecture to An Architecture of Criticism [Silvetti, Graves, Eisenman, Libeskind]

  • Jorge Silvetti, “The Beauty of Shadows,” Oppositions 9, reprinted in Hays, ed., Oppositions Reader, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 365-389.
  • Robin Evans, “In Front of Lines That Leave Nothing Behind,” AA Files no. 6 (May 1984), pp. 89-96.
  • Bernard Tschumi, “Madness and the Combinative” and “Abstract Mediation and Strategy,” Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996), 173-205.
  • Peter Eisenman. “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End,” Perspecta 21 (1984) in K. Michael Hays, Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 524-538.

15 New Realism and the Diagram [Ito, FOA, Koolhaas]

  • Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 53-92.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Capitalist Sovereignty, Or Administering the Global Society of Control,” Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 325-350.
  • R. E. Somol “Dummy Text, or the Diagrammatic Basis of Contemporary Architecture,” in Peter Eisenman, Diagram Diaries (New York: Universe Publishing, 1999), 6-25.
  • Jeffrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics,” El Croquis 60 + 84, Herzog and De Meuron 1981-2000: Between the Face and the Landscape and the Cunning of Cosmetics, (Madrid: El Croquis, 2000), 404-411.
  • Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace,” A+U Special Issue: OMA @ Work (May 2000), 16-24.

Materiality of the Text 2005

University of Pennsylvania Spring 2004
School of Design
Doctoral Program
Department of Architecture
Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.

Architecture 812: Theory, II / Materiality of the Text

Lectures/Seminars Wednesdays 10-1, Rare Book Room, Furness Library
Description

The purpose of this seminar is to introduce students to the methods of scholarly inquiry and research through the analysis of a selection of writings by architects. These key documents will be considered within their disciplinary and cultural context and situated with regard to the built objects that surround them.

To give order to this broad undertaking, the semester is organized by the question of the “Materiality of the Text.” More than any other epoch preceding it, our era is marked by radical changes in the way we produce, transmit, and store textual and graphic information. In an attempt to understand la longue durée of the transmission of knowledge and thereby come to a better sense of the present transformations, this course investigates texts from Vitruvius to the contemporary as material objects that inform, and are informed by, architectural thinking. We will look to the texts not only for the arguments they contain, but also as technologies organizing and structuring knowledge and production. Our understanding of the emergence of the treatise, the manual, and architectural theory will be shaped by an investigation of how discourse forms within particular forms of media, e. g. the hand-copied codex, the printed book, the periodical, as well as present-day forms of new media. Throughout, we will consider the role of ordering, visuality, and image and the dialectic between the need to understand documents and objects on their own terms versus the historiographic drive for broader frameworks. Authors read will include architects Vitruvius, Andrea Palladio, Sebastiano Serlio, Claude Perrault, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Louis Sullivan, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, El Lissitzky, Walter Gropius, Robert Venturi, and Rem Koolhaas as well as cultural theorists and philosophers such as Roger Chartier, Marshall McLuhan, Mario Carpo, Fredrick Jackson Turner, T. J. Clark, and Giorgio Agamben.

Requirements

Class will be structured around presentations and discussions. Each week, a student will present the day’s topic and the instructor will respond, situating the text under study in its context. Students are expected to prepare all readings in order to facilitate a discussion during the second half of class in which all students participate.

Students will produce final papers on topics approved by the professor. These may be, but do not have to be, based on the topics students present. Students will be asked to submit abstracts and outlines of their papers during the second third of the semester for comment by the instructor. Student grades will be based on seminar presentation, participation, and the paper. The paper is due on April 30.

1 Introduction
Required

  • Roger Chartier, “Preface” and “Communities of Readers,” The Order of Books, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), vii-24.

Recommended

  • Sarah McPhee, “The Architect as Reader,” The Journal of Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 58, No. 3, Architectural History 1999/2000 (September 1999), 454-461.

2 Vitruvius: Writing and Orality, I
Required

  • Pollio Vitruvius, Ingrid D. Rowland, Thomas Noble Howe and Michael Dewar, Ten Books on Architecture, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Recommended

  • Brian Vickers, “An Outline of Classical Rhetoric,” In Defence of Rhetoric, (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1988), 1-83.

3 Vitruvius: Writing and Orality, II
Required

  • Pollio Vitruvius, Ingrid D. Rowland, Thomas Noble Howe and Michael Dewar, Ten Books on Architecture, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
  • Joseph Rykwert, “On the Oral Transmission of Architectural Theory,” AA Files 6, May 1984,1-27.
  • Jacques Derrida, “The Pharmakon” and “The Pharmakos” in Dissemination, trans Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 95-117 and 128-134.
  • Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man, ([Toronto]: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 40-176.

Recommended

  • Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
  • Mario Carpo, “Vitruvius, Text and Image” and “Architectural Knowledge in the Middle Ages: Orality and memory versus Script and Image,” Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 16-41.
  • Frances Amelia Yates, The Art of Memory, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
  • Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1991).

4 Serlio: Typography and Classification
Required

  • Sebastiano Serlio, Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books I-V of Tutte L’opere D’architettura Et Prospetiva’, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) and Sebastiano Serlio, Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books VI-VII of Tutte L’opere D’architettura Et Prospetiva’, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
  • Carpo, “Architectural Drawing in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction,” Architecture in the Age of Printing, 42-78.

Recommended

  • Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1991), 117-138.
  • Lucien Febvre and Henri Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, (London; New York: Verso, 1990), especially “The Book as a Force for Change,” 248-332.
  • Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Canto ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
  • Lucien Paul Victor Febvre and Henri Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800, (London ; New York: Verso, 1990).
  • Anthony T. Grafton, “The Importance of Being Printed,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History vol. 11 no. 2 (Autumn 1980): 265-286.
  • Anthony Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader,” in Guglielmo Cavallo, Roger Chartier and Lydia G. Cochrane, A History of Reading in the West, Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 179-212.

5 Palladio: Codification and Dissemination
Required

  • Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), including introduction by Robert Travenor.
  • M. H. Abrams, “Art-As-Such: The Sociology of Modern Aesthetics” and “From Addison to Kant: Modern Aesthetics and the Exemplary Art,” Doing Things With Texts: Essays in Criticism and Critical Theory, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 135-158 and 159-187.

Recommended

  • Martin Kubelik, “Palladio’s Villas in the Tradition of the Veneto Farm,” Assemblage 1, 1986, 90-105.
  • Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, (New York: Random House, 1965).
  • Rudolf Wittkower, Palladio and Palladianism, (New York: G. Braziller, 1974).
  • Martin Kubelik, “Andrea Palladio’s Vicenza, Urban Architecture and the Continuity of Change,” Cornell Journal of Architecture 4, (1990), 40-55, 206-208.

6 Perrault: Measure and History
Required

  • Claude Perrault and Indra Kagis McEwen, Ordonnance for the Five Kinds of Columns after the Method of the Ancients, (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1993)
  • Alberto Pérez-G?ɬ?mez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983), especially “Introduction: Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science and Claude Perrault and the Instrumentalization of Proportion.” 3-48.
  • Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980) , 23-53, 84-93, 139-53.

Recommended

  • Dalia Judovitz, “Vision, Representation, and Technology in Descartes,” David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 63-87.
  • Wolfgang Herrmann, The Theory of Claude Perrault, (London: A. Zwemmer, 1973), especially 1-69.
  • Indra Kagis McEwan, “On Claude Perrault: Modernising Vitruvius,” Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 321-337.
  • Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 326-32.
  • Robert W. Berger, A Royal Passion : Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture, (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1994).

7 Laugier: Origins and Reason
Required

  • Marc-Antoine Laugier, An Essay on Architecture, (Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977).
  • “Rebuilding the Primitive Hut,” in Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment, (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 7-22.

Recommended

  • Wolfgang Herrmann, Laugier and Eighteenth Century French Theory, (London: A. Zwemmer, 1985).
  • James McQuillan. “From Blondel to Blondel: On the Decline of the Vitruvian Treatise,” in Hart and Hicks, Paper Palaces, 338-357.
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ?É”?mile, (New York: Dutton, 1974).

8 Sullivan: Mass Literacy, Empire, and Excess
Required

  • Louis H. Sullivan and Isabella Athey, Kindergarten Chats (Revised 1918) and Other Writings, The Documents of Modern Art (New York,: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1947).
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” and “Self-Reliance,” Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960). 21-56 and 147-68.
  • Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893)” in History, Frontier, and Section: Three Essays (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press), 59-92.

Recommended

  • Mary Woods, “The First American Architectural Journals: The Profession’s Voice,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. (June1989) v.48, no.2, 117-138.
  • T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, ([New York]: BasicBooks, 1994).
  • Louis H. Sullivan, The Autobiography of an Idea, (New York,: Dover Publications, 1956).

9 [Spring Break]
10 Loos: Silence, Texts, and the Metropolis
Required

  • Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897-1900, Oppositions Books (Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press, 1982), including introduction by Aldo Rossi.
  • Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” On Individuality and Social Forms, Selected Writings, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 324-339.
  • Victor Hugo, excerpt from “Book V. Chapter I. Abbas Beati Martini,” and “Book VI. Chapter II. This Will Kill That,” Notre-Dame de Paris (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 186-202.

Recommended

  • Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York: Scribner’s, 1976).

11 El Lissitzky: Propaganda
Required

  • El Lissitzky, Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution, (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970).
  • El Lissitzky and Patricia Railing, About Two Squares: In 6 Constructions: A Suprematist Tale, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
  • ABC: Beitr?ɬ§ge zum Bauen, (Baden: Lars M?ɬºller, 1993).
  • Veshch’: mezhdunarodnoe obozrenie sovremennogo iskusstva = Objet: revue internationale de l’art moderne = Gegenstand: internationale Rundschau der Kunst der Gegenwart (Baden: Lars M?ɬºller, 1994).
  • T. J. Clark, “God is Not Cast Down,” Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 225-298.

Recommended

  • Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999)

12 Le Corbusier: Mass Media, Geometry, and Organization

  • Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, (New York: Payson & Clarke, 1927).
  • Le Corbusier, “In Defense of Architecture,” The Oppositions Reader (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998), 598-614.
  • Karel Teige, The Minimum Dwelling (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 1-8 and 9-31.
  • David Harvey, “Fordism” in The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 125-140.

Recommended

  • Antonio Gramsci, “Taylorism and the Mechanisation of the Worker,” in “Americanism and Fordism,” Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, (New York: International Publishers, 1980), 306-307.
  • Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
  • Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style: Architecture since 1922, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932).
  • Mary McLeod, “’Architecture or Revolution’: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change,” Art Journal vol. 43, no. 2 (Summer 1983), 133-147.
  • Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994).
  • Carol S. Eliel, ed., L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1918-1925, (Los Angeles, Calif.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art in association with Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
  • Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987).

13 Venturi vs. Five Architects: Vision and Context
Required

  • Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).
  • Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972).
  • Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, Richard Meier, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton, Five Architects, (New York: Wittenborn & Company, 1972)
  • Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 754-760.

Recommended

  • Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, A View from the Campidoglio : Selected Essays, 1953-1984, (New York: Harper & Row, 1984).
  • Robert Venturi, Iconography and Electronics Upon a Generic Architecture: A View from the Drafting Room, (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 1996).
  • Cleanth Brooks, “The Language of Paradox,” The Well-Wrought Urn. Studies in the Structure of Poetry, (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1947), 3-21.
  • Kazys Varnelis, “The Education of the Innocent Eye,” Journal of Architectural Education, May 1998.
  • David Harvey, “The Political-Economic Transformation of Late Twentieth Century Capitalism” in The Condition of Postmodernity, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 141-188.

14 Gropius: Regulation
Required

  • Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, World Perspectives, ed. Ruth Nanda Anshen (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1955, originally published 1943).
  • Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941).
  • Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 177-182.

Recommended

  • L?ɬ°zsl?ɬ? Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, (Chicago: Paul Theobald for i.d. (Institute of Design) Books, 1947).

15 Postscript: Text in Contemporary Culture, Architectural and Otherwise

  • Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York. A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
  • Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, (New York: Monacelli, 1995).
  • Rem Koolhaas and Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Content, (K?ɬ?ln: Taschen, 2004).
  • Manuel Gausa and Instituto Met?ɬ°polis de Arquitectura Avanzada,The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced Architecture: City, Technology and Society in the Information Age, (Barcelona: Actar, 2003) .
  • Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 53-92.
  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
  • Ted H. Nelson, ”Complex Information Processing: A File Structure For The Complex, The Changing And The Indeterminate,” Proceedings of the 1965 20th National Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, (New York: ACM Press, 1965), 84-100.

Recommended

  • Roger Chartier, “Languages, Books, and Reading from the Printed Word to the Digital Text,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 31 no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 133-152.
  • Friedrich Kittler, “Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 31 no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 244-255.
  • George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
  • Michael Sorkin, Local Code: The Constitution of a City at 42 N Latitude, (New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993).
  • Neil M. Denari, Gyroscopic Horizons, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).

Public Art, Public Space, and the Public Realm, 2004

University of Southern California Fall 2004
School of Fine Arts
Graduate Public Art Studies Program
Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.
6-8:50pm, Harris 102

This course explores competing ideas of the public sphere. The class is multidisciplinary in nature, with a wide variety of subtopics, ranging from the role of the media in defining the public sphere, the role of the contemporary American built environment vis-à-vis public art, contemporary ideas of audience and public, the use of art and architecture in contemporary cities, and the role of telecommunications in reshaping public life. The class is about the context of public art and some of the social and political issues involved, but is not a class about public art in and of itself.

Students will be graded as follows:

30% course participation

70% term project

The term project will be a ten-fifteen page research paper written during the semester and presented in a ten minute long presentation on the last day of class.

1. Introduction

2. Toward an Understanding of the Public Sphere

  • Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989), xv-xix, 1-26; 89-140.
  • Craig J. Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere, Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 1-51.

3. The Public Sphere and Urban Modernism

  • Carl E. Schorske, “The Ringstrasse, Its Critics, and the Birth of Urban Modernism,” Fin-De-Si?ɬ®cle Vienna : Politics and Culture, (New York: Knopf : distributed by Random House, 1979), 24-115.
  • Raymond Williams, “Ideology” from Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 153-157.
  • Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 130-135.
  • Michel Foucault, “Panopticism,” in Michel Foucault and Paul Rabinow, The Foucault Reader, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 207-213.

4. From Fordism to the Lonely Crowd

  • David Harvey, “Fordism” in The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), 125-140. Chapter I and II.
  • David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, Abridged and rev. ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 3-65.

5. The Spectacle and the Right to the City

  • Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 11-24.
  • Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” 1-4, Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 5-8, Attila Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem: “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism.” and Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman, “Methods of Détournement,” 8-14 in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981).

6. The Post-Fordist Subject and the Decline of the Public Realm

  • David Harvey, “From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation” in The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), 171-172.
  • Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” Rosalind E. Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloch, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier and Silvia Kolbowski, October : The Second Decade, 1986-1996, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 443-447.

7. Non-Places

  • Marc Augé, “Prologue” and “From Places to Non-Places,” in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London; New York: Verso, 1995), 1-6. 75-115.
  • Rem Koolhaas, “The Generic City” in Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large, (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 1248-1264.
  • Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 15-28.

8. Public / Counter Public

  • Nancy Fraser. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Bruce Robbins, ed., The Phantom Public Sphere. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 1-32.
  • Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer”, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge: the MIT Press, 1995), 170-203.
  • Grant H. Kester, “Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public,” Grant H. Kester, ed., Art, Activism, and Oppositionality. Essays from Afterimage (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 103-135.

9. Monument and Counter-Monument

  • James Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267-296.
  • William Gass, “Monumentality-Mentality,” Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982): 126-144.
  • Guest: Aris Janigian, philosopher and novelist

10. Postmodern Demographics and the Creative City

  • Michael J. Weiss, The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What it All Means About Who We Are (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999), selections.
  • Bert Mulder, “The Creative City or Redesigning Society,” and Justin O’Connor, “Popular Culture, Reflexivity and Urban Change in Jan Verwijnen and Panu Lehtovuori, eds, Creative Cities. Cultural Industries, Urban Development and the Information Society, (Helsinki: UIAH Publications, 1999), 60-75, 76-100.
  • Guests: Tom Marble and Pae White

11. Empty Spaces and Negotiations

  • Michel de Certeau “General Introduction” and “Making Do: Uses and Tactics” in The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xi-xxiv, 29-42.
  • Sze Tsung Leong, “Readings of the Attenuated Landscape,” Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong, eds., Slow Space, (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), 186-213.

12. Telecommunications and the Public Realm

  • Mitchell L. Moss and Anthony M. Townsend. “How Telecommunications Systems are Transforming Urban Spaces.” James O. Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama and Barney Warf, Cities in the Telecommunications Age : The Fracturing of Geographies, (New York: Routledge, 2000).
  • Gloria Goodale, “Only in L.A.: Parking Lot as Art Exhibit,” The Christian Science Monitor, April 4, 2003.
  • Guest: Jeremy Hight and Jeff Knowlton, presentation on 34 North 118 West: A GPS Controlled Interactive Narrative

13. Conclusion. Students Present Semester Work

Network City: Architecture and the Contemporary Urban Condition, Spring 2003

Southern California Institute of Architecture
Spring 2003
Program in History and Theory of Architecture and Cities
Kazys Varnelis, Ph.D.

Network City is an advanced survey of the contemporary city and the role of buildings within it. The urban environment of our time is shaped by pressure from an increasingly global economy, advances in telecommunications, economic restructuring and radical sociodemographic changes. The resulting city increasingly abandons a centered, fixed, place-bound, and hard entity for a fluid field condition organized by competing networks of technology and individuals. Recent changes have blurred the distinctions between city, suburb, and rural into a broader urban (or post-suburban) condition.

If the physical fabric of the city is marked by liquification of sorts, so is its political coherency: the polis is replaced by a micro-political landscape of competing interest groups and bureaucracies that effectively undermine most large urban interventions. In response, and also in reaction to a postmodern epistemology, the construction of hard infrastructures purporting to fix the city has given way to implementation of soft systems of high-speed fiber networks and “smart” technologies augmenting what exists. Failure itself now becomes an inescapable and integral part of urban planning strategy.

A major component of Network City is an investigation into the relationship of these urban changes to architecture. The city’s demands on program, envelope, and plan, particularly in terms of the office building and the individual dwelling unit, be it apartment, loft, or single-family house are topics of investigation as are the reciprocal influences of changes in these typologies on the urban context.

The course also investigates the changed role of art architecture in the city. The thorough permeation of culture by capital and the corresponding permeation of capital by culture ”“ marketing through design, for example – under late capitalism impacts the societal function of art and architecture. To trace this, the course looks at the construction of an idea of “authentic urbanism” based in art practices in the 1960s onwards and the descent of this idea from the avant-garde to marketing strategies. Likewise, the course traces, and questions, the transformation of the avant-garde strategy of shock into the “Bilbao-Effect” and the subsequent marketing of cities based on monuments. The conflicted relationship of architecture to the city is highlighted throughout.
1 Introduction: Towards Network City

2 Metropolis as Body/Machine/Ecosystem

  • Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” LeGates and Stout, The City Reader, 97-105.

3 The Growth of the City [New York, Chicago]

  • Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project,” Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout, The City Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 97-105.

4 Field Trip to Quartzsite, Arizona
5 Boulevards and Lines [Los Angeles]
6 Office Buildings, Corporate Machines

  • Spiro Kostof, “The American Workplace,” America by Design (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 69-134.
  • Michelle Murphy, “The Corporate Machine,” Sick Buildings and Sick Bodies: The Materialization of an Occupational Illness in Late Capitalism, Ph.D History of Science, Harvard University, May 1998, 49-68.
  • Peter Rowe, “Corporate Estates,” Making a Middle Landscape (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 149-181.

7 Polynucleated City, City Core, + Urbanity

  • Victor Gruen, “Cityscape and Landscape,” in Ockman, Architecture Culture 1943-1968, 194-199.
  • Mario Gandelsonas, “Scene 6. The Suburban City,” and “Scene X. The Development of the X-Urban City,” X-Urbanism: Architecture and the American City (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 30-43.

8 Suburban Mall, Downtown Mall, House, Loft

  • Witold Rybczynski, “The New Downtown,” LeGates and Stout, 170-179.
  • Sharon Zukin, “Living Lofts as Terrain and Market” and “The Creation of a ‘Loft Lifestyle” in Loft Living (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 1-22, 58-81.

9 Postsuburban Culture

  • In Class Video: Office Space

10 City Core as Model

  • Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” 1-4, and Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” 5-8 in Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981).
  • Jane Jacobs, “Introduction,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 2-25.
  • Malcolm Gladwell, “Designs for Working,” The New Yorker, December 11, 2000, 60-70.
  • “Office Landscape,” Progressive Architecture, (September 1964), 201-203.
  • “B?ɬºrolandschaft, U.S.A.,” Progressive Architecture, (May 1968), 174-177.

11 Telecommunications, The Network Enterprise and the Global City

  • Mitchell L. Moss and Anthony M. Townsend, “How Telecommunications Systems are Transforming Urban Spaces,” James O. Wheeler, Yuko Aoyama, and Barney Warf, eds., Cities in the Telecommunications Age: The Fracturing of Geographies (New York: Routledge, 2000), 31-41.
  • Manuel Castells “The Space of Flows,” in The Rise of the Network Society, second edition, (New York: Blackwell, 2001), 406-459.
  • Saskia Sassen, “A New Geography of Centers and Margins: Summary and Implications,” LeGates and Stout, The City Reader, 208-214.

12 Postsuburbia and the Landscape of Non-Place

  • Robert Fishman, “Beyond Suburbia: The Rise of the Technoburb,” LeGates and Stout, The City Reader, 77-86.
  • Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, “Beyond the Edge: The Dynamism of Postsuburban Regions,” and “The Emergence of Postsuburbia: An Introduction,” Rob Kling, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster, eds. Postsuburban California: The Transformation of Orange County (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), vii-xx, 1-30.
  • Alan Ehrenhalt, “The Empty Square,” Preservation, April 2000, 42-51.
  • J?ɬºrgen Habermas, “From a Culture-Debating (kulturr?ɬ§sonierend) Public to a Culture-Consuming Public,” The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 159-175.
  • Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Basic Writings, (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 343-363.
  • Marc Augé, “Prologue” and “From Places to Non-Places,” in Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, (London; New York: Verso, 1995), 1-6. 75-115.

13 Posturbia and the Terrain of Discontinuity

  • Selections from Michael J. Weiss, The Clustered World: How We Live, What We Buy, and What it All Means About Who We Are (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1999).
  • Bert Mulder, “The Creative City or Redesigning Society,” and Justin O’Connor, “Popular Culture, Reflexivity and Urban Change in Jan Verwijnen and Panu Lehtovuori, eds, Creative Cities. Cultural Industries, Urban Development and the Information Society, (Helsinki: UIAH Publications, 1999), 60-75, 76-100.
  • Sze Tsung Leong, “Readings of the Attenuated Landscape,” Michael Bell and Sze Tsung Leong, eds., Slow Space (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), 186-213.
  • Mike Davis, “Fortress L.A.,” LeGates and Stout, The City Reader, 193-198.
  • Martin Pawley, “From Postmodernism to Terrorism,” Terminal Architecture, 132-154.
  • Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” Negotiations: 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 177-182.

14 Conclusion; Case Studies and Strategies

  • Kazys Varnelis “Hallucination in Seattle. Frank Gehry’s Experience Music Project,” Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica, June 2001 and “Cathedrals of the Culture Industry,” Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica, August/September 2002.
  • Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” 234-249. James Corner, ed. Recovering Landscape, Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 233-249.
  • Sanford Kwinter, “The Politics of Pastoralism,” Assemblage 27, (August 1995), 25-32.
  • Kazys Varnelis, “Los Angeles at the Limits. Practice in a Late Capitalist City,” Praxis 5, Spring-Summer 2003.