btw, the end of the lower flow chart is "thresholding"

""traditional" Bauhaus pedagogical camp: I have a very strong interest in the craft of building, and in issues related to scale, context, space, program, tectonics, sustainability, etc."

i don't see the bauhaus link. it seems to me more neo-arts&craftsy (they swear by ruskin and morris)

sometimes, calling oneself a luddite is simply a happy embrace of one's technophobia rather than an actual ethical stance. rife with laziness, personal insecurities and a fear of inevitable change (perhaps masking a fear of death).

...sometimes it's an acknowledgement that most general contractors don't have vacuum-forming equipment.

you got some lousy gc's steven...

i meant to say lazy...

man, i wish i had a pair of elephant panties with a built-in condom.

and to answer your question, msarch...you need to learn the basics of architecture before you start tackling issues such as generativity etc. and because architecture schools have to teach those issues to be accredited, you'll be ok at any of those schools.

once you learn the basics then get a post-prof degree where you can study such theoretical issues to your heart's content.

with that in mind, go to a state school for your first prof master's

Meta,

“Architecture is traditionally concerned with external phenomena: politics, social conditions, cultural values, and the like. Rarely has it theoretically examined it’s own discourse…”-Diagram Diaries, Peter Eisenman

I think this is eisenman's general idea…there is a general belief that in order to study and create architecture, the architect must have knowledge of or insight into other areas of knowledge (politics, pop culture, etc)…for eisenman, architecture is contaminated by these other forms of knowledge or fields or disciplines…while he’s not against the contamination or the influence (architecture must inevitably respond to these, right?), he’s attempting to explore a pure architecture…the fundamental of architecture…the language of architecture…

Typography has its own language. Typographers study aspects of a font from serifs to the different radii to the lineweights, etc…it’s a study of their language…the language of types and fonts. That is the purest form of typography…

If you remove all the “external phenomena” from architecture, what are we left with?...space/form…there’s your pure architecture…

But how do you accomplish the forms, and more importantly, the emotive qualities of the forms?...

How do you handle the inevitable contamination?...study architecture in its purest and in its contaminated state…I agree, it is much more than form/space…but don’t dismiss explorations of form and space…

^ agreed, eisenman is a hack philosopher. and why do academics have to over-intellectualize architecture?

i'm definitely with zumthor and his approach - a building is a building; not a representation or symbol of some theory. as soon an idea is illustrated, it becomes uninteresting...

Im not a huge eisenman fan either, but I do appreciate the things hes studying. Why does everything have to be all as dogmatic as that? Im of the opinion there is nothing off limits, you could pick any idea or direction and if you took it far enough you could produce something good from it. You can argue that intellectualizing is elietist, but its results need not be wholly so. People do care what buildings mean, there are very real social and cultural implications to different forms and materials, and one could easily make the point that to ignore that language relegates you to very empty territory.