thesis was about self-discovery.

it was about taking those few things i was once told were wrong, and running them to the ground in order to prove they were right.

it was not about making buildings. it's not about plans and sections, or unintelligible walls of text followed by empty conceptual talk.

it was a hedonistic search to put myself in my work.

...and i loved every second of it.

(don't think this help much but this is what thesis was for me).

Doesn't work in non-representational art forms, next!

narration as (partial, of course) representation of space/time
Yeah, this might work if you were painting the fucking Duke of Normany or creating a visual image from Herodotus.

shifting of narrative perspective to reveal that things, places, or people are not as they may seem
What about non-representational art do you not understand?

memory
Yawn.

consideration of architecture as setting of future memories (individual or collective) to encourage or not encourage preservation of memories made in space, or to encourage or not encourage manipulation of memory, ambiguity or specificity of memory
What the fuck do architects not get about non-representational forms? The buildings you build have no actual meaning. Implied meaning... maybe.

Christ. Did you all stop going to art school after Design Fundamentals?

human memory as a medium
Human memory is a faulty medium. There's an article published circa March 2009 on this. Dude, lay off the hippie-esque drug-induced rants.

future memory design
I hope you're going to an Ivy.

most metaliterature, metafiction, metapoetry especially (and the figure ground ambiguity in wallace stevens’s poetry)
Holy fuck, have you even read Derrida?

social networks and interaction
ASL R U 4 CYBER, LETS FAWK>>> BITCHES.

social deviancy
Have you ever bought drugs?

i am growing weary of you, don't you go to jail soon?

Aesthete,

I would also look at Mikhail Bakhtin and Rabelais.

Bakhtin

The Dialogic Imagination: Chronotope, Heteroglossia

The Dialogic Imagination is a compilation of four essays concerning language and the novel: “Epic and Novel”, “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, and “Discourse in the Novel”. In the nineteenth century the novel as a literary genre became increasingly popular, but for most of its history it has been an area of study often disregarded.

It is through the essays contained within The Dialogic Imagination that Bakhtin introduces the concepts of heteroglossia, dialogism and chronotope, making a significant contribution to the realm of literary scholarship.[18] Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the "primacy of context over text" (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relation between utterances (intertextuality).[19] [20] Heteroglossia is "the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance."[20][21] To make an utterance means to "appropriate the words of others and populate them with one's own intention".[22][20] Bakhtin's deep insights on dialogicality represent a substantive shift from views on the nature of language and knowledge by major thinkers as Ferdinand de Saussure and Kant.[23]

"In Blindness and Insight de Man examines several critics and finds in their writings a gap between their statements about the nature of literature and the results of their practical criticism. Like a classic, this book commands attention as a book that should be reread, and reread carefully. This edition, with its new introduction by Godzich and five additional essays by de Man, is meant to challenge those interested in literature to a new understanding of their chosen task as readers.

"Certainly one of the half dozen volumes that belong on the shelf of anyone interested in post-war critical theory." —Washington Post Book World

"Blindness and Insight is the most subtly argued book of its kind I have ever read: the product of a continuously alive intelligence. I has what Wallace Stevens calls 'The hum of thoughts evaded in the mind'" —Geoffrey Hartman, The American Scholar

"It is a book to be meditated long and late; it will disturb our habits of sleepy reading and careless speaking about literature. I think it's likely to go down as one of the most influential critical books of our time." —Robert Martin Adams, The Hudson Review

"The 24 review essays collected here make a powerfully sustained claim for regarding de Man as a writer of the short critical essay who ranks with Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, and Jean-Paul Sartre." —Choice

Paul de Man (1919-1983) held appointments at Cornell, Johns Hopkins, the University of Zurich, and Yale. Among his books are Aesthetic Ideology (1996), The Resistance to Theory (1986), Critical Writings, 1953-1978 (1993), and Allegories of Reading (1979)."


b3ta, I challange you to find me a convincing piece of work that even remotely suggests rhetoric exists in non-representational arts of the modern, post-modern and contemporary eras.

Carl Andre has a nice short bit of text where he notes that what allowed him to produce his work was the assumption that autonomy was possible - an assumption he renounces in the brief text, an assumption Slutzky has no interest in as theres the fact that autonomy turns around and looks us in the eye.

while i'd agree that arch is mostly non-representational, the act of narration, even if only of one's experience of a place, is key to the work of a good chunk of our historians (rowe, wittkower, wolfflin) - there's still space for some thinking to be done there.

hill: youre sounding like brit spears via cell phone video links on gawker on the way down - I hope yr ok.

this thread is making me dread developing my thesis

My whole point was that you can have abstract representational architecture (ie, my client loves sailing so I design the facade to look like billowing sails). But most architecture is not representational.

I think this whole "concept" of "narrative" to be bullshit-- narrative is a pretty old concept dealing with a pretty specific thing. If your project does not literally tell a story then narrative does not exist.

I mean if you want to talk about buildings that have a defined concept or narrative behind them... then I will not complain. If you want me to believe there is an actual narrative behind something like the Denver Library... I will verbally kill your puppy.

see this; If your project does not literally tell a story then narrative does not exist. this is where you fall apart. this is bullshit.

Aesthete,

a literal narrative > Stowe Garden. Look at it as an example of as close to literally creating a narrative in design as possible.

You still lack alot of specificity. I say you should find it as soon as possible, otherwise you will only be lost. You do not want to go through this whole reading list at the moment, because they are really different. I see more than one thread there, but, Deleuze next to yi fu tuan will probably confuse the hell out of you. Try to find specificity in your question(s) and then reformat your reading list. However, you have a two months to do that, so I wouldnt freak out as of yet. Be careful though, you want to start the fall with a specific point(s), because you are in for a rollercoaster ride, so you want to have a solid start.


hillandrock, I see where you are coming from, but, your interpretation of how narrative can be used as a design tool, and in the design process, is very literal, and its putting you in a hole you wont come out of. There are many ways, and you seem to know that already, since you were baffled thinking Aesthete did or did not read derrida.

stowe garden is a good example of the old standard - the promenade architecturale , as used so effectively by le corbusier and many others before and since. but using narrative as a tool for the development of a design doesn't have to mean that the resulting architectural proposal communicates that narrative.

whatever ideas and design strategies you use to get there don't have to be so didactic that the result is a exhibition of the process. that's certainly a way to do it...

aesthete, i'd recommend forgetting your booklist for the moment. take that list of things in the middle of your original post: your interests. what are the things that rise to the top as most pregnant with possibility for a design exploration? which ones tie together in a way that suggests a direction?

use the thesis as an exploration for yourself. don't be thinking about what will make the coolest project, which topics are the most current or relevant or likely to impress my professors, etc.

what have been recurring themes in your own architectural education? those are the things you might be likely to build a career from, and those are the things that would be good to dig into a little deeper. use the thesis as a free opportunity to do that because you won't get another chance for a few years.

Minimalism is only nonresprentational when its "manifesto" is included. Non representation only exists within the theory and without the viewer.

Trivium (n.)-- The three arts of discourse

"Logic is concerned with the thing as-it-is-known,
Grammar is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-symbolized, and
Rhetoric is concerned with the thing-as-it-is-communicated."

Thanks everyone for the... critique. First and foremost, I don’t understand how the mention of narrative automatically suggests literal, representational architecture. I’m not even remotely interested in either of these things. Also, hillandrock, you keep talking about art, but so far as I’m concerned the architect's role is not about self-expression, and especially not formal self-expression.

I’m just going to repeat Steven Ward here, because he was spot on in saying that using narrative as a tool for the development of a design doesn't have to mean that the resulting architectural proposal communicates that narrative. My interest in using narrative as part of the design process is to possibly provide the users with a more... malleable version of the architecture, in narrative form, upon which they can communicate their own desires back to the designer (who would then send that information though yet another round of translation back to architecture, always keeping some form of checks and balances in place maybe?). The process of manipulating the matter of the building, shifting a wall, expanding a volume, whatever, also manipulates the event that will ultimately take place in that space, even if it’s your morning piss or something. And that’s typically the process designers use to resolve the spaces of buildings I’d say (of course that’s arguable but...). Obviously these moves and decisions are influenced by something, but all that activity always seems to happen around the matter of buildings. So I’m interested in just testing if that relationship can not just be reversed, but continually translated back and forth, so that the event can also be pushed and pulled and manipulated to further inform the building.

I know that what I’m describing here isn’t so far off from what designers already do at the beginning of a project so far as collecting all the relevant information about the clients and users and about the use of the space, etc. But I just suspect that, just as the first iteration of a design is never the best, the first iteration of the event being considered or accommodated probably isn’t either, and I would imagine that designing the activities the space accommodates more thoughtfully would ultimately A. better inform an architecture and B. would likely result in a better architecture altogether.

All of this just sounds like a super functionalist motivation I have, which will need to be the case up to a point, but my ultimate goal is to begin to understand the relationship between event and space well enough to make decisions in the architecture that disrupt the event in a way that enhances it or modifies it, or whatever an understanding of the users informs. The disruption would be something outside of the narrative used to design, and in a way a new (and possibly unpredictable?) narrative could serve as just one supporting document of a “resolved” design... Think Rem’s Downtown Athletic Club but with a far more specific and informed motive, but not so much that it loses its open endedness - seeming randomness in sequence of spaces, but specific sequence of experience and resultant reactions...

I’m sure that so much of what I’m saying here is nonsense, which is fine. I encourage you guys to continue to bash all of this because I need the opportunity to even defend this to myself.

Also, I hope I’ve clarified my use of the word narrative to mean a representation of the experience of the user, and that narrative will be there in any architecture whether or not we choose to design or represent the architecture from that point of view.

And I'll hold off on reading much right now I think. :)

from what i understood: perhaps how to further develop and use communication between the architect and the client to be a tool in the making of architecture. you let the client tell you what he wants to be doing day and night, rather than listing the spaces she desires, and you spatially react to her. so rather than the naming of spaces dictating interconnected discrete units of spaces, the description of activities unfolds a variegated flow of space?

Quibble, yes. I'm thinking very much along what you've just said. Only... I'm less interested in a single user, and more interested in a public group. So that makes studying their activity easy enough to some degree, and even responding to them spatially, but giving a public some field upon which they can respond back to the designer while still designing? That's what I don't know about yet. I don't even know how much more useful that could be than say, doing case studies... For the most part I feel like the only interface upon which the public and architect speak to each other is through built works. But that type of exchange can be pretty sluggish and so much is lost in translation. So why could that not happen sooner? How? With what language? My first guess would be narration, which people can easily wrap their heads around, feel personal attachment to, and respond to, but I don't know...

I don't know if this is even thesis material I'm even talking about anymore, but it's certainly something I'm often coming back to and questioning.

perhaps then you can try to find a group of creative like-minded "clients" for your thesis, people who use another 'language' that readily reacts with your creative input. i feel that your approach, reacting to a client's narration (if i accept that word at face value). would work really well with dancers, for example.

and how about a mime miming a mime? is it transitively the same as the mime miming the original or does it gain another level or parodying abstraction and sylization?

level of...etc

that sounds like you're touching on peter brooks' description of theater a little, qos&h.

he described the performance of a play as the simultaneous presentation of three times: the time of setting, the time of author writing, and the time of performance.

does it? i wouldn't know. i'm only deducing from Aesthete and enjoying the ride. perhaps Aesthe's the one doing the touching.