On Avant-Garde and Unemployment

I keep reading about the people who are forming the negative thought, what poor bastards.  One must be an especially misguided architect to reinforce an idea they seek to destroy.  I suppose that this is the greatest slap in the face that one could give onesself.  It seems to me that if a project is directed and full in substance, when it draws appropriate relationships it ceases to be ambiguous and it starts to become a good project.  I really wonder if it is better to be absurd and become the negative thought rather than the avant-garde, or is it better to be sensible and on the better side of mediocre.  Is origional stuff good if its bad origional stuff?  Should we pioneer bad stuff as well as good stuff for the sake of the profession.  If we're supposed to, then I refuse.  Someone else can do it.  Will we ever come to a time when we have no avant-garde and no negative thought?  Or would this be counter-productive?  If we find a valid, perfected logic for designing inhabitats should we abandon this in favor of the avant-garde?

I don't want to contradict my professors sometimes, but I feel that sometimes I have to go a bad route to learn a good lesson, if a project is mine, and I don't feel the necessity to design a certain way, shouldn't I have the right to respectfully disagree with my professor. without penalization during grading.  If its a well-contrived solution and well-analysed shouldn't it stand even though I might have supplanted the professors steps with my own?  How are we supposed to be avant-garde in this environment?

The Why?

In architecture according to Kahn, Form is what, design is how.  But is it so?  I feel that the program and codes are the what.  That the form is how.  What I mean is this we are told what we are to make, but it is in the forming  of it that we realize how it is to be.  Lots of buildings can do the same thing, and could be designed the same way.  But the how of them is different because of the form. I will rethink and explore this more in depth later.

So, we were talking in class today and the question my professor asked was, " How much of the world does it take to make what I wear?" I thought this was an interesting question.  And this led me to the question of what kind of structure, both economic and financial, we would have to have to have to support our consumerist needs?  Just to have the basics, for cotton shirts, jackets and socks we would need enough cotton fields to support the population of ruston, we would need looms, the machinery or employees to sew all of it into those patterns. And if you picked machinery then we'd have to find steel or iron deposits somewhere in ruston, fat chance of that happening! So we'd have to do it by hand. If we wanted to dye it, we'd have to figure out what natural native ingrediants to use.  And then we'd buy it.  It would be soo expensive and consume such manpower that it is illogical to propose such a plan.  I think however we, in our move to a global economy and culture, are missing it.  Local and regional cultures are being overrun.  People in india know what grits are.  And "you're not from around here, are you?" has become an expired phrase.  I think that we are losing our local identity but to retain it we'd have to revert to club-wielding neanderthals.  Or would we?  Is there a happy medium that we could acheive.  Could grow the cotton locally and ship it 30 minutes away to we made into textile fabric, and ship it back to be dyed and sewn, by machines made from regionally mined and refined steel?  Should Mcdonalds be able to ship chicken in from God knows where to feed to us.  It isn't healthy, it makes us sick?  Should they be allowed to, but should we have the sense to say no? 

I think these big localized factories need to start spreading out, waaay out.  I think our cars should be made within 2 hours of where they are sold.  I think if we have to move our fuel more than 500 miles just to get it into our cars then it isn't a valid fuel source.  Why can't we as a people acknowledge that this import/export economy is bad for our health and bad for the environment?  I don't think that the government should give us what we want right now, it may sound socialist, but shouldn't they give us what we need?  I'll close on this, If 60% of America went and voted to legalize murder, shouldn't the government say no?

I think Architecture should not give us what we want, when it isn't what we need.

Halloween and the Jack-O-Nano

I said a couple weeks ago that I'd post pictures of my pumpkin carve so here they are. be forewarned, this year's isn't as good as last year's, although I still won 1st in scariest and overall at the City of Ruston Pumpkin Carving Contest and at RAW's contest. I'll post a pic of the one from last year after the pics from this year.

F*^# the apathy

Marshall McLuhan, 1967:“The city no longer exists, except as a cultural
ghost for tourists.”1
Yes, yes, I know; it’s a familiar trope—death of God, death of
the subject, death of the author, death of the drive-in, end of history,
exhaustion of science, whatever. But he turned out to be right—
though a few decades ahead of his time, as usual.

This is the opinion of William J Mitchell in " Prologue: Urban Requiem"
He is proposing in this short but packed blurb that we are experiencing the death of the city (and by association architecture). But I'd have to disagree. See, I don't think we ever killed God or the subject, the author or history. I think what we've done is stopped caring. He talks about how all of these tiny intangible particles called bits are wrecking our society but I don't think that they are to blame. I can't describe my burning hatred for the non-chalant attitude that people have towards good design. It seems lately I'm lucky to get a "that's pretty cool" out of my professors and classmates when showing them some new awesome chair or speaker or building. The last of which we are supposed to be excited to see. It seems that we have slowly been exterminating not God, history, authors, drive-ins, or science, but enthusiasm. I can only assume that bits have acted as a catalyst in our endeavors to wipe excitement from our collective face. We killed the campfire and the water wells. We said they weren't important, and in a logistically driven but lazy and shallow approach dismissed them from our cities. Now we communicate with thousands of people who we term friends on our faceyspaces and tweetbooks. But like we don't really know the people on our friends lists, we also don't really know our world or buildings. I saw a new commercial for a phone that claims that we need a phone to rescue us from our phones. Frankly, it was one of the most depressing commercials I have ever seen. Hundreds of people who had fallen of thier bikes or wrecked thier cars into lightpoles, sitting, lying and shambling blindly about while thier eyes remained glued to thier phone screens.

What I'm trying to get at, is this. Either we have to give a shit, or suffer everyones apathy to our architecture. We have to make our building transformative, interfacable, technologic. We have to give people a reason to look up.

Objects Contained and Manifested

This I believe architecture should be not just an extension of site, but also an extension of the object contained. Where the house manifests itself based on what it houses, assuming some of the characteristics from the thing within. All good architecture does this, some people just call it adapting to client, and really it's just arguing semantics if I left it at that, but it's not just adapting to the client. Its adapting to the site, something that we are taught from our first year in architecture, Carol Burns addresses this well, she states:

In architectural design, the demands of relating a building to a physical location are necessary and inevitable; the site is initially construed and finally achieved in the architectural work. The problems attendant to siting have a pervasive and profound impact on buildings. Nontheless, architectural theory and criticism have tended to address siting issues with descriptive or analytic references to specific exemplary projects. This approach exclusively reveals through circumstantial strategies the lack of a clear conceptual basis for the notion of site within architecture. Because of its intrinsic importance and generative potential, the conceptual content for site must be made available for study and opened to question as a means to disclose and , ultimately, to challenge the motives and precepts of the discipline.

But what if we consider the future site too? The object-scape. The things that will be in the building after it is built. Sometimes we design things like libraries, museums, factories, and galleries, that store things other than people. So we need to consider the qualities intrinsic to the books, warships, turbines, and art that we are putting in these unbuilt structures, before we design them. When we design something, as architects we are taught to think about site, program, and concept. There are a host of other things we have to consider too: Light, structure, materiality, form, space, order, datum, hierarchy, context, history, and others. We get so caught up in all of these that I think we fail to remember what it is that inhabits this building that we're making. In the end, its really the object contained that informs the things like light and structure. When you are building something you should ask yourself what is the nature of this object, is it light or heavy, subtle or outspoken. If it is outspoken and light then you might take a different approach to structuring it than you would if it were subtle and heavy. What the thing is begins to effect how you design it.

Houses are the easiest, because often we deal with the object contained directly. They are our client. They can tell us what they want and how they want it. In a way I feel the client picks an architect to design his or her house because they can relate to them. They have some of the same characteristics and beliefs. So when designing a house for a person you can more easily ascertain what that person would be like if they were a house. How they'd manifest their character in its features, layout, and functions. But designing something large-scale is a bit more difficult, it could house numerous things from The Mona Lisa to a WWII submarine. You have to do your research, figure out the object's history, its present. You have to ask yourself as the designer: What would you experience walking into the object in action

When I designed a film center for Ruston in junior year, I thought about what the program called for and wondered what I should make my concept. I realized that my concept was kind of spelled out for me before I began. It was building as film. The first thing I did was to dissect what film was, and what a film was. I took examples from books on how plot was formed, how the introduction led to rising action and built up to a climactic event. I categorized all the program as active or latent, relating it to either the image or the frame on a film strip. After all this was done. I put all of it into a design for a building. It got rave reviews. Every time I personally look at what the characteristics are of the object contained I guarantee myself success.

There are about three good examples that I can think of right now. The first being Snohetta's Opera House in Oslo. Craig Dykers did an excellent job with it. The opera center is a great example of exemplary architecture and also exemplifies my beliefs and theories on architecture. When looking at the opera house you ask yourself what does it house, people, instruments, but while we design them to be acoustically sound, it seems we forget that they house music. According to what I believe architecture should do I would first look at musics personality and its character. This could be hard considering there are so many kinds. But since its an opera house we assume that opera will be played. When you look at an opera, it is similar to a play in that it has acts, and the excitement increases as the opera plays out. If its a good opera it takes the audience with it, into its crescendo. I feel that Snohetta not only acknowledged the site well, taking some cues from the mountains in the background and color and material cues from the waterway in the foreground, but the also shaped the building to have a crescendo feeling and experience that takes the people with it. I believe that his is better architecture than say, I. M. Pei's Symphony Hall. They both house music and both take a visually sweeping approach to it, But Pei is content to leave the audience on the ground. He is also content to keep the mass of the building heavy both in form and material, neither of which are personified in good music. Craig Dykers made a light flowing building (which is hard to do because of its hard and pronounced angles), and it really captures the personality of the object it contains, music.

My second example is Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. I feel that, after looking through some of the sculptures and paintings that are in it, he designed it around the spirit of the sculpture and painting. Since most of the works in it are fairly abstract he took an abstract approach to the making of it. He obviously the use of light not only in its architectural vocabulary but also as it pertains to sculpture and painting. The building itself is a sculpture which is reminiscent of the days when ships filled the waterway in front of it. It is an abstraction of their sails. I feel that he (even though he's a sculptor) took a more valid approach than Louis Kahn did when he made the Kimbell. Although, I could argue that since the art in the Kimbell is more classical, the building itself makes a large nod to the classical forms and styles of architecture. I feel Gehry does it better, because he is dealing with not only the architectural issue of how light gets in the building, which is something Kahn does too. Gehry is also dealing with how light reflects off of the building, and how it displays itself when there is no natural light to be had; something Kahn failed to consider when he built his museum. This is truly an acknowledgment by Gehry of the objects the Guggenheim contains. This could be why more famous architects picked it than any other building for the most important building since 1980 (it was the top pick for Tadao Ando, Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Micheal Holzer, Daniel Libeskind, and 23 other top architects, deans, and critics out of 52 people).

The third case that I'm going to make is for Zaha Hadid's Performing Art Center. When the normal everyday Joe thinks of a performing art center he thinks of a place where you go to watch people. In other words the thing being housed is people. The architect might have a bit more to say about it but it is nothing more substantial and if it is, then not by much. What I realize, and what I think Zaha Hadid realized, is that the object in this case is a performance. Performance is a noun but it doesn't really fall into the person, place, or thing categories. Its an idea, and most people overlook ideas when architecting things. They deal with mainly tangible items, site, context, etc. But performance is something to be acknowledged, and to assess its character you have to ask what it is to perform and why one performs. Performance is something everything does,It is natural. Birds and apes do it for mate selection, humans have evolved to do it for entertainment. It is both ancient and modern, necessity and luxury. It is organic, and I think Zaha realized this when she was making the center. The center shed light, has presence and is organic, I feel all of these exemplify my theory.

I really think these are some of the best examples, the first two more than the last. A few more examples that I know of are a couple chapels by Tadao Ando begin to really speak about God and what he is and his characteristics (as Ando sees them of course). He is firmly rooted, rigid and luminescent, and this perception of God's character begins to inform how he structures it, the atmosphere of it, the experience, the sequence, the materiality. It informs the whole of the building. And I think that he really hit the nail on the head with that one. I won't go into much more detail than that but I think It is grand.

I know Frank Lloyd Wright would agree with me when I take my stance on building as an extension of site, as he is probably the best example of this that most architects can think of. I think he'd agree with me when I said the future object-scape becomes the site too. When used together they can become really useful dictates for what the building really is. I use them a great deal and if you're looking at great architecture the right way you'll see other people using this theory too.

How to own a view.

This was the required reading that I'll write about.

Carol Burns, "On Site: Architectural Preoccupations" Drawing Building Text, ed. A. Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991) 147-165

He writes, Emerson points out that aesthetic and mathematical conceptions are fundamentally different but intimately bound to one another: The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.  But none of them owns the landscape.  There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can intergrate all the parts, that is , the poet.  This is the best part of these men's farms, yet this their warranty deeds give no title.

Basically he says that you can own land but not the landscape.  I'm on the fence about this one, I feel that you can own a landscape, you just have to be rich enough to buy all the land in visible range.  But I do agree that landscape is the conglomeration of numerous plots of land and the buildings on them, Combined with the environment of course.  I think that its one thing we forget about.  We concern ourselves with how people view the building itself and view landscape from the building.  We think about these because we're taught to identify the best spot on the site and then NOT build on it.  But I think we often forget about how our building fits into the landscape, or the sillouhette.  I think once we concern ourselves with that then we will be able to make the building tie into the surroundings better than we already do.

Subjectivity and The Gale

well, the results are in and I couldn't post it before now, but I didn't win. However I'm really happy with the end result and think that it could have won given a different set of judges.  Here's the link

tsplines.com/contest

and here's my entry.

like I said, I'm really happy with it and proud of it.  Maybe next time.  Check in a couple weeks when I post pictures of my entry for the local pumpkin carving contest.  At RAW.

Handwork, Craft, and the Animus

This week the readings were these:

Bruce Metcalf, "The Hand at the Heart of Craft" from American Craft, Aug./Sept. 00, Vol. 60,
No. 4 (New York: American Craft Council, 2000) 54-61, 66
Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, "1.2 The Hand and the Machine" and
"4.0 Processes We Do Not See," Refabricating Architecture (New York: McGraw Hill, 2004) 4-7, 68-101
David Pye, "The Workmanship of Risk and the Workmanship of Certainty"
The Nature of Art and Workmanship, Chapters 1,2, and 4 (London: Studio Vista, 1968) 5-10, 13-24


but I only intend to write about the first one as the two others failed to hold my attention as I was reviewing them.

As a kind of background for Bruce Metcalf, I feel I need to let you know that this excerpt was taken from a speech he made to a group of goldsmiths at a big conference where I assume he received an award. So he is presumably a jeweler. He decided on this occupation while he was trying college for the last time and took a jewelry class on a whim.  But basically he outlines the need for craft and handworks and the difference between the two of them. His first paragraph says it pretty well.


It's tough to figure out what "craft" really is.  Some argue that the core of craft lies in utility -- that craft is distinguished by usefulness.  But that efficient definition has the unfortunate effect of  insisting that many kinds of objects, from silver centerpieces to comtemporary sculpture in clay and glass, are not craft, As an alternative, one could propose that craft is identified by the traditional mediums of metal, clay, fiber, wood, glass, except that plastics, found objects and dozens of other materials have been used to make craft objects. So this definition is incomplete, too.  Nonetheless, there remains one absolutely necessary component of any craft object - - it must be made substantially by hand.


Like I said before, he says it pretty well.  But just because he's eloquent doesn't mean that he's right.  Now I'm not the agreeable sort, and I'm not going to agree with him.  Because, I think he contradicts himself.  Not directly, but mainly in the implications that makes later when he starts to get past the miraculous inter-workings of the hands.  He starts to talk on page 56 of an awakening and the apprenticeship that follows. He says





The excitement of awakening to one's gifts is no more than an introduction, the first chapter to a long book.  All students of craft undergo years of training.  There's so much to learn, So many skills to perfect. It turns out that becoming skillful actually changers the brain. . . All crafts demand exceptional motor control, from the rapid dexterity required by glassblowing to the subtle coordination required in weaving.  Bodily intelligence can thus be seen as a biological and cognitive foundation to all craft practice.

So, here's where I make my qualm.  I think digital modeling can be craft,  And not according to a new description,  but in accordance with the one he just gave.  First I'll start by saying that in the school of architecture they introduce you to a program called rhino, and rhino is fairly useful for making boxes and things with minimal curvature, but to make things that really are organic you have to use plug-ins.  Specifically one called T-splines,  alot of people use it.  Zaha and HOK are the two that occur to me the quickest.  But the first time I used it, something just clicked, and I was overwhelmed by the fact that I had found my niche.  But even though I was naturally talented I still had to work on it.  The software isn't easy to operate.  There is alot of view adjustment, and alot of new people just end up looking off into space because they can't control what they are doing, that become like a digital coordination.  Past that, there is alot of fine tuning that goes on,  The processes are repeated and you say in your mind, " ok, self, to do this action, and to get this result, you have to run through these processes."  And you do them, and the more you do them the less you think about it and more quickly and precisely you can do all of this.  You can essentially get to a place Metcalf refers to as a flow-state.  Where you are 100% engaged and are making very complex actions and judgments which look to be as easy as breathing.  So in accordance with his description I think you can see where digital modeling becomes craft.  Also I wanted to give an example, Assassin's Creed 1 & 2.  Here's a video link
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/x06-onstage-assassins-creed/13511
but you can start to see where the designing of each individual brick and iron grating, each stone and stick starts to affect the game and impact how you move around.  They are doing a third one which means they will be building Rome during the Renaissance brick by brick.  INSANE!!!  But I feel that this is digital craft.  They even craft the movements and reactions of the people in certain instances.



What this means for architecture is that we can progress forward into the digital world as long as we maintain a standard of good work.  When doing something requires little or no effort that is when we have abandoned craft.

The Anti-Proportion of the future.

The readings this week were:

Rudolf Wittkower, "The Changing Concept of Proportion" Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978) 108-123
Dom. Hans van der Laan, "Strumenti di Ordine: Instruments of Order" Casabella: Monthly Magazine Number 633, April 1996 (Milano: Elemond Spa, 1996) 70-77
David Pye, “Chapter 10: Architecture. Inventing the objects,” from The Nature of Design (London: Studio Vista, 1969) 90-91.

I'm not going to call anyone out this week but instead I'm going to talk about what I was thinking about in class regarding ratios and proportions in buildings. These thoughts mainly regarded the article by Wittkower but were highlighted by all 3 and reinforced the previous few weeks'.  The readings this week were pretty straightforward and while they were all a little dry, excluding the one by David Pye (eesh, that rhymed, didn't it. : p yuck.) But I guess I wanted to, instead of debating the topic, carry the theory on.  Because it was a valid one.

Basically in his writings he outlines the basic need for proportion and ratios to a rational human architect.  He states that

"Modern psychology supports the contention that the quest for a basic order and harmony lies deep in human nature."

He then goes on to question what the general basis for it is.

"Is it then an instinct like hunger and thirst, or is it due to an intellectual urge?"


So basically he's asking do we do this (establish proportions and ratios) because its instinct, or because we get bored?  Its a good question and I think the answer is both.  I think we are curious and that is embedded in our nature.  But I think when the first man discovered stacking stones and enclosure, when architecture was first invented, we tried to discover an easy way out.  That is to say, an easy way, a formula, to make things look good. 

He then asks if we've succeeded if we've made " one system of proportion that is true, right, and satisfactory." Then he makes the comparison to food, that we all evolved different culinary instincts and recipes based on surrounding climates and ingredients.

So from here I want to ask several questions to the reader.  Is proportion timeless?
What proportion(s) if any do we have/use today?
How long have we been in our current state of proportion/anti-proportion?
And, finally, what will our next proportion be?

Is it timeless?  I believe that in a sense yes, it is.  We still utilize the golden section in our buildings and especially in our partis.  I contend that they aren't as deeply embedded as they used to be.  However, the square, the triangle, the section are all ratios which are still around and used by modern and well-known architects.  So in a way I think this is kind of an answer to my second question.  But I also think that, as we did with religion, we have also preached proportioning and ratio tolerance.  Which isn't really a bad thing.  We still have our preferences.  But I think alot of architects today non-chalantly create these extravagant forms that disregard all classic sense of proportion.  And this is going on as I see it since post-modernism fell as a practiced architecture style and it gave rise to a more deconstructivist approach.  I feel that what we have is knowledge of the classic systems but a dissregard for them.  This is exemplified in Ghery, Hadid, Big, Koolhaas, and Himmelblau.  So how long will this anti-proportion last?  Will we get tired or curvy, sleek, but non-regulated forms and abandon them in favor of a more traditional approach?  I hope not.  Nature isn't regulated.  I feel that ever since man first took refuge in the first cave and conceived of an idea of an enclosure elsewhere we've been trying to mimic nature and it's forms.  Nature has no boxes, the closest thing to a straight line is the edge on a honeycomb cell.  Circles are found in nature but only as the result of a carpenter bee.  I feel that we will never return to a common occurrence of box-ish and regulated forms and spaces.  And I feel none too sad about it.

The Geth, Legion, and Alberti.

In reading and connecting with my classmates over the interwebs, I stumbled upon something that caught my attention. Not in a good way.  The only reason I feel comfortorable calling Kristin out on this is because we're friends.  Go look at http://flamboyantcuttlefish.blogspot.com/ .  In her blog she states that Alberti is "quite pedantic and difficult to read."  No argument.  But what she goes on to say is that he is simply making a list of the building, describing the difference of lineaments and structure as this. 

Alberti states that architecture is created through lineaments (the outline or design of the details of the building) and structure (the actual construction and physicality of the building).

I disagree. 








So that I wont sound like Steve Jobs in the squabble over the entirely new Itunes icon, I'll delve a little deeper.  What I think you said was that lineaments were but mere outlines.  But lineaments can't be described so easily.  I think that to describe lineaments you would also have to describe yourself.  I'm saying this because I think that they are subjective.  To be more specific I beleive that we contextualize what exactly lineaments are.  What I think Alberti is hinting at is that the lineaments are our perceptions of the building not just formally but purposely.  Here's what makes me think that.

Since that is the case, let lineaments be the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in learned intellect and imagination.

What he's saying is that there is a distinction in architecture, between what is perceived and what simply is.
Your take on what something is would be based on your past experiences with it, your upbringing, nature, nurture, and all that jazz.  There are too many variables to name them all.  It reminds me of Mass Effect 2.  For those of you familiar with the game I'm talking about the conversations Shepard has with Legion.  Specifically the portion where legion explains that the geth (alien robot race) aren't all on the same side. He goes on to say that the difference between what side they fight on is how they build thier concensus, for them it is infalibly calculated, and for them to disagree means that they are both right but one has more information.
Its like you saying 4 is more than 3, but your friend stating 3 is more than 2. Both are equally valid, one just take one more variable into consideration.  This is why i play video games for the philosophy.  Here's the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-cusTeK1VA

Legion says alot of really deep stuff for a robot.  If you have the time I personally listen to all of the dialogues from him.  If you listened to the vid you'll get what I'm about to say.  As architects and designers I beleive it isn't our role to  "impose concensus"  on the public based on our own valid one, but rather to build concensus by doing our homework and as Alberti said, perfecting lineaments "in learned intellect and imagination."

Art, Craft, Intention, Expression

So we were discussing vitruvius and scruton in class and the proffessor was talking about this idea of art v. craft.  It struck me that that would be a good topic for a post.  Lets see what the two had to say on it.

Scruton write here in his "The Problem Of Architecture"-

Moreover, the attempt to treat architecture as a form of 'art' in Collingwood's sense involves taking a step towards expressionism, <sup>9 Collingwood began his exploration of art and the aesthetic from a distinction between art and craft. Initially it seems quite reasonable to distinguish the attitude of the craftsman -who aims at a certain result and does what he can to achieve it-from that of the artist, who knows what he is dOing, as it were, only when it is done. But it is precisely the case of architecture which casts doubt on that distinction. For whatever else it is, architecture is certainly, in Collingwood's sense, a craft. The utility of a building is not an accidental property; it defines the architect's endeavour. To maintain this sharp distinction between art and craft is simply to ignore the reality of architecture -not because architecture is a mixture of art and craft (for, as Collingwood recognized, that is true of all aesthetic activity) but because architecture represents an almost indescribable synthesis ofthe two. 


 I'd have to agree with Collingwood and Scruton.  I do and have always believed that it is an incredible blending of art and craft (or math and science).  But here's what he goes on to say-


 towards seeing architecture in the way that one might see sculpture or painting, as an expressive activity, deriving its nature and value from a peculiarly artistic aim. For Collingwood 'expression' was the primary aim of art precisely because there could be no craft of expression. In the case of expression, there can be no rule or procedure, such as might be followed by a craftsman, vvith a clear end in view and a clear means to its fulfilment; it was therefore through the concept of 'expression' that he tried to clarify the distinction between art and craft. Collingwoodif he can identify the feeling it is because he has already expressed it. Expression is not, therefore, an activity whose goal can be defined prior to its achievement; it is not an activity that can be described in terms of end and means. So if art is expression, it cannot be craft (although its realization may also involve the mastery of many subsidiary crafts).

Here's what I think. I am not going to argue Intention versus Expression. I think that its like arguing pre-determination or fate.  And almost as pointless. I think its not either expression or intention, art or craft. I think that, like a grayscale, it starts mostly as one and ends mostly as the other.  Consider this.  All actions or expressions begin with a prompt.  For the architect it is a RFP, but say your cat knocked over your antique ming vase and shattered it.  That is the prompt.  You then analyse what happened and an intention builds. You know your emotional aim, It is then manifested in an expression. Whether it is kicking the cat or crying because something beautiful was destroyed. It is an expression. In much the same way I believe that architecture or the act of architecting something begins with the analysis and the intention forms and as you are executing your intention it slowly becomes expression.  Any student and I'm sure most good architects can honestly say that you put the initial momentum into a project.  But as you move on and it developes itself. It developes its own mind and reveals opportunities and potenial back to you.

Here's one more example to look at. Valve made a game called team fortress 2. In the xbox360 version of orange box (the game title that TF2 came in) they had an aim with was a strong stylized concept and a game that conveys all of its messages through visuals in gameplay as opposed to through the HUD.  Go get the game and walk throught the commentary that they formulate.

I believe architecture should be an expression or at least have an expressionistic quality, because without expression we have the products of intention but without a humanistic feeling, they lack emotion and depth.</sup>

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Assignment Zero

My name is James Edward Lamb III and I am a Senior in Architecture at Louisiana Tech University.
This blog is an assignment

So, I was in class today and the proffessor read this quote, "The architect should be equipped with knowledge of many branches of study and varied kinds of learning, for it is by the architect's judgment that work done by the other arts is put to test." -- from Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1960)

It got me to thinking. I'm not just a student of architecture. I'm a student of art as a whole. Because to be an architect is to be a specialist in everything remotely pertinate to your design. So In addition to whatever posts I make pertaining to architecture and my studio projects, I will probably review movies, games, books, furniture, plays, and anything else I can get my hands (or my eyes) on.