Asked "what is architecture?" I'd rather answer to the question "what are the architectures I like". This lecture sums up some of my main research lines regarding contemporary architecture (some missing, though), putting them in a narrative order that allows me to speculate on the current conditions of the discipline.
5. Charles-Dominique-Joseph Eisen
Frontispiece of Marc-Antoine Laugier’s
Essai sur l'Architecture
1755
Giovanni Antonio Belmondo
Frontispiece of Bernardo Antonio
Vittone’s Istruzioni Elementari pe’
l’indirizzo dei giovani allo studio
dell’Architettura Civile
1760
7. 8 definitions of architecture
Antonio Monestiroli
La Metopa e il Triglifo
2002
8. 28 definitions of architecture
Nicola Braghieri and Monica Bruzzone
Laboratorio di Fondamenti della Progettazione Architettonica 1, Università di Genova
2007
9. 70 definitions of architecture
Julie Marthe Hoffmann, Luca De Giorgi, Olaf
H Grawert
What is Architecture?
www.whatisarchitecture.cc
10. 121 definitions of architecture
Becky Quintal
121 definitions of architecture
Archdaily, 17 October 2016
11. The definition of architecture makes visible the value that is given to it in the
moment in which it is formulated.
Antonio Monestiroli
La Metopa e il Triglifo
2002
13. What is the system of phenomena and discourses that I am interested in bringing back to
the idea of architecture in this precise historical moment, given that my knowledge and
taste are limited by a specific frame of experiences and that I have specific
intentions as researcher and teacher?
29. Social Media Research Foundation
Graph representing a network of
3,758 Twitter users whose tweets
in the requested range contained
"futureofwork", or who were
replied to or mentioned in those
tweets. The network was obtained
from the NodeXL Graph Server on
Tuesday, 30 May 2017 at 11:34
UTC.
44. Once the normative place of beauty is destroyed there is no obvious way to logically
isolate aesthetic judgement. Hence the "concept" of art can change depending on the
social agreements under which art develops.
To make art is at the same time to define art.
Because history remains open to the future, the future meanings of art cannot be
determined in advance. The present therefore is fundamentally open to the risk of new
praxis and meaning.
(John Roberts, Revolutionary Time and the Avant-Garde, 2016)
45. 3. What do the architectures I like deal with?
70. SUPERSTRUCTURE / IDEOLOGY
BASE / ECONOMY
Art
Family
Culture
Religion
Philosphy
Education
Science
Politics
Media
Law
...
Means
Relations
Commodities
...
121. Although austerity and scarcity are inevitably intertwined — the regimes of austerity
induce real scarcities — austerity is not the same as scarcity. Austerity is the
outcome of the ideologies of neo-liberalism, whereas scarcity is a higher-level
condition that both drives those ideologies and also threatens them.
Jeremy Till
Scarcity contra Austerity
2012