Arch.Uth Postgraduate Course Postgraduate Course Postgraduate Course Postgraduate Course Arch.Uth UTH.gr Ελληνικά
SPECIAL HISTORY AND THEORY TOPICS ON THE CITY AND ARCHITECTURE
ΘΚ0709, THEORY AND CRITICISM,
Elective at semester(s) 7, 9, ECTS:

 

LEARNING OUTCOMES

The course runs through a long period, starting from mid 18th century and ending in the late 20th. It focuses on the systematic examination of the deposited fragments of history and theory of architecture and urban planning: not so much of the materialized artifacts themselves but rather, of their verbal documentation, of their numerous representations, oral testimonies, published annotations, in short, of the discourse that always accompany the final architectural and urban projects.

Within discourse, it seeks the complicated mechanisms consolidating individual architectural styles and town planning practices.

After completion of the course,the following issues should have been made clear:

i. The ways in which dominant paradigms of architecture and urbanism are being progressively formed.

ii. The enormous importance of the historical and theoretical study of architecture and the city, and especially, the significance of theory as the sole factor that in all cases documents and legitimizes architectural and urban practice.

iii. The profit generated from the analysis not only of the materialized, deposited, architectural structures but of architectural discourse (oral or written documentation of these architectural structures, their plans, representations etc.) too.

Students are expected to have developed, their own analytical, critical and rhetorical abilities.

SUBJECT

Enlightenment which initiates the course’s historical overview, claimed to have raised upon mankind a duty of 'intellectual adulthood'. From mid-18th century, architecture (among a set of newborn institutions and mechanisms), shoulders too, analogically, its own share of the promised 'duty' of 'adulthood'. Adopting a rather scientific expression -which will prove indispensable- it attempts to capture and create these forms which will meet the needs of its present time. It is this history of the reconstruction of architecture's objects that the course follows through all major social, political and cultural shifts, specific thoughts, currents and practices.

Some of the lectures are:

-‘Space Reserves Dangers': The introductory text of Adamantios Korai’s 'Hippocrates on airs, waters, places' edition (1800). -The turn towards confronting space as a key tool in the fight against European woes.

- Plan of the New City of Athens: The vision of an ideal past and the prefiguring of an even more ideal future.

- People Elsewhere: The anthropological turn: -'Sad Tropics. '-Modernisms Elsewhere. -Team 10.

- Inheriting the Past: Re-turn: -For the protection and preservation of monuments and sites (ICOMOS, 1964). -Aldo Rossi.

- Personal is political: The Feminist shift: -The 'inflated' vision of architecture. -Sitouasionistes and feminism.

-Bigness: Rem Koolhas.

ASSESSMENT

A limited number of some of the most important texts of architecture and urban planning (whole or selected passages) will be available to students from the beginning of the course. Students, in groups of two or three persons, should indicate which pair of the given texts are going to analyze comparatively in line with one basic concept/category.

INDICATIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture, History and Criticism, Themelio Editions, Athens, 2009 (2nd edition).

DAVID WATKIN, History of Western Architecture, MIET, Athens 2005.

Panagiotis Tournikiotis, Historiography of Modern Architecture (Alexandria, 2002)