Architecture

Lecture 1.1 Aesthetic Perception The classical philosophers said, the soul never thinks without phantasm, which is to say that thought needs a material image, something to carry the thought. So we begin to think of the imagination as bridging the gap between perception and understanding. The architectural imagination doesn't need an image to be presented in front of it rather it forms images on its own. We can be shown to buildings, one made in the olden age and one very modern but if we compare the two we can notice some comparisons in both. This means that both building had a link together a connection.    Lecture 1.2 Wittkower's Palladian Diagram Rudolf Wittkower discovered that there was one thing in common with each building designed by the Italian architect Andrea Palladio.   The buildings more likely villas had some deep structural diagram in common, some geometrical ordering system that was not always immediately apparent, but was latent and could be discovered through this activity of measuring and drawing. There are several things we can get through this. First of all, appearance is important. Appearance, representation, but also something deeper than surface appearance. There's also a deeper diagrammatic structure.  Second of all, repetition is important. Each of  villa has something in common, but they're all variations on a single, common theme. And third is the relationship between that diagram, and what we might want to call the architectural understanding, how we understand that.  Now we can be precise about the imagination. It's one part of a three-part system. At the lowest level, we might say, is our sensory experience-- our sight, our touch of the materials of a building, possibly the sounds of the building, smells of the stones but these arrive at Raw Sense Data.   The understanding, which is at the highest level, knows nothing of those Raw Sense Data. It has no way of scanning. It has no way of matching up that sense data with anything that the understanding can understand. That's where the imagination comes in, it comes in between the Sensory Experience and Understanding.    Lecture 1.3 Typology  One of the most fundamental concepts in architectural design is the concept of typology, which literally just means the logic of types. A more interesting notion of typology comes from the French architectural theorist Quatremére de Quincy. "The word 'type' does not represent so much the image of something that must be copied or imitated perfectly as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the model." The functional type is not wrong, but we need a theory of type that's more fundamental.   Lecture 1.4 Perspective Another primary example of the architectural imagination is the system of perspective. The invention of perspective was by the Italian architect Filippo Brunelleschi. X by Counterflix           Brunelleschi was an architect in Florence. He was actually trained first as a silversmith. And Brunelleschi noticed that when he stood in the doorway of the Florence Cathedral and looked out at the Florence Baptistery, which was just across the piazza, he noticed something about orthogonal lines-- that all orthogonal lines converge to a point in infinity. Brunelleschi wanted to make his observation scientific. So,  Brunelleschi turned his back to the baptistery, put the mirror on an easel, (which he created  and if he fixed his vision-- if he made a kind of aperture that fixed his vision-- then he would be able to etch in the points on the silver surface which were the corners of the baptistery. And then he would be able to draw and etch on the surface the way the orthogonal lines of the baptistery converged toward a single vanishing point. And then, he would finish and paint over the silver perspectival image of the baptistery, so that when he held the...