Building Theories
Architecture as the Art of Building
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Book Description
Building Theories speaks to the value of words in architecture. It addresses the author’s fascination with the voices of architects, engineers, builders, and craftspeople whose ideas about building have been captured in text. It discusses the content of treatises, essays, articles, and letters by those who have been, throughout history, committed to the art of building. In this, Building Theories argues for the return of a practice of architectural theory that is set amongst building, buildings, and builders. This journey of close reading reinterprets the words of Vitruvius, Alberti, de L’Orme, Le Camus de Mézières, Boullée, Laugier, Rondelet, Semper, Viollet-le-Duc, Hübsch, Bötticher, Berlage, Muthesius, Wagner, Behrendt, Gropius, and Arup. With chapters dedicated to texts from antiquity, the Renaissance, and the nineteenth century, and with a critical eye on architectural theory popularized in the Anglo-Saxon world post-1968, readers are introduced to a wider, more inclusive definition of architectural ideas. Building Theories considers how contemporary scholarship has steered away from the topic of building in its reluctance to admit that both design and construction are central to its concerns. In response, it argues for a realignment of architecture with the concept of techné, with a dual commitment to fabrica e ratio, with a productive return to l’art de bien bastir, with the accurate translation of the term Baukunst, and with an appeal to the architect’s ‘composite mind.’ Students, practitioners, and educators will identify in Building Theories ways of thinking that strive for the integration of design with construction; reject the supposed primacy of the former over the latter; recognize how aesthetics are an insufficient scaffold for subtending the subject of architectural ethics; and accept, without reservation, that material transformations have always been at the origins of built form.
Table of Contents
1. Thinking through Building
1.1 Positing a Theory of Building
1.2 Theory’s problem with Technology
1.3 Theory seeks Autonomy
- In the Shadow of the Digital
- Conceptual Architecture
- Theory, in Oppositions
1.4 Is Theory Dead?
- Or, just Post-Critical?
- And then, we were Post-Digital
1.5 Building, in Theory
2. Building and the Treatise
2.1 Building in a word, Techné
2.2 Fabrica e Ratio – Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
2.3 Mechanical Art, Disegno, or both?
- Building Artisan and Author – Averlino, detto Filarete
- Literary Scholar and Architect – Leon Battista Alberti
- Stone Mason and Humanist – Philibert de L’Orme
2.4 Ornamentalist and Carpenter – Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières
2.5 L’Art de Bien Bastir, that is the Art of Building Well
3. Architect as Builder and Thinker
3.1 Architecture as Fine Art or Building Art? The case of Jean Baptiste Rondelet
- Architecture, Essai sur l’Art
- Traité Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de Bâtir
3.2 Constructeur, Entrepreneur, ou Architecte
3.3 Trabeated or Arcuated? The Quarrel between a Clergyman and a Military Engineer
4. Matter(s) Hidden in Plain Sight
4.1 Eyes which do not see
• In the Glare of the Forge
• Alternatively, the Engineer’s Aesthetic
4.2 The Death of Matter?
• Architecture in Ruins – Hubert Robert
• Denial of Iron in Support of Builders – John Ruskin
4.3 or, The Composite Imagination
• Structural Hybrids – Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc
- Woven Surfaces – Gottfried Semper
5. Lost in Translation
5.1 Baukunst, the German Building Art
- The case of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
5.2 Style, Bauweise, und Tektonik
- In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? - Heinrich Hübsch
- Bauweise und Tektonik - Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm Bötticher
5.3 Baumeister and Baukunstler
- Praktische Ästhetik - Hendrick Petrus Berlage
- Stilarchitektur und Baukunst – Hermann Muthesius
- Moderne Architektur or Die Baukunst unserer der Zeit - Otto Wagner
5.4 Bau, Architecture’s Subconscious
- The Victory of the New Baustils – Walter Curt Behrendt
- Bauen, Architecture’s Zeitgeist – Sigfried Giedion
5.5 When Language Fails Building
6. From Aesthetics to Ethics, and back
6.1 Building, a Crisis in Representation
6.2 Architecture as Aesthetics, Language, or Re-presentation?
• Aesthetics
• Language
• Re-presentation
6.3 The Ethics of Matter
6.4 A Return to the Art of Building, in
Making,
Craft,
Details,
Tectonics,
Surfaces
Metamorphosis,
Maintenance,
Error
7. Design and Construction - Walter Gropius and Ove Arup
7.1 Building Collaboratively - Walter Gropius
- Style or Society?
- Design Divorced from Building
- Artists who Make, at the Bauhaus and in Industry
- Teamwork and Genius
- Union of Opposites
- Naively Heroic or Falsely Utopic?
- Integrated Practice, the origins of
7.2 Engineering Total Design - Ove Arup
- The Key Speech
- Concrete, and the Material Imagination
- Spatializing the Structural Skin
- Integrating Systems in Building Sections
- Re-presenting the Invisible
- Architects, Engineers, and Builders - Engineering Total Design
- Musings of an old gentleman in a garden - "Architecture is sick, should it be revived?"
8 The Composite Mind Re-Builds Theory
8.1 The Composite Mind
8.2 Re-building Theory
Index
Bibliography
List of Illustrations and Credits
Author(s)
Biography
Franca Trubiano is Associate Professor and Graduate Group Chair of the PhD program in Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania and a licensed architect with the Ordre des Architectes du Québec. She received graduate and post-graduate degrees from McGill University and a doctorate in the history and theory of architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Previous publications include Women [Re]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures (ORO, 2019) and Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge, 2013). She teaches and conducts research on forced labor in the built environment, emerging materials and human health, tectonic theories, integrated design, and architectural ecologies.
Reviews
"Trubiano reminds us that it is precisely the serial historic identity crisis of the architect around the irreconcilable meeting of thought and material that is architecture’s shapeshifting impetus for renewal. In a moment when architectural imagination around the becoming-of-things is more critical than ever, she navigates the minefield of past moralism, zealotry, despair and naïve hope with not another disciplinarian rappel a l’ordre, but an inspired coaxing of every architect, no matter how estranged from matter, back into the fray of the building site where materials feature as nature’s protagonists in the drama of construction. With cunning and rigour Trubiano exposes the opposition of text and material as false in order to harness anew the transformative power of making and its mutuality."
Francesca Hughes, author of The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision