Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices

Architecture's Changing Scope in the 20th Century

Marianna Charitonidou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032431109
• eBook ISBN: 9781000896626
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Architectural Drawings as Investigating Devices explores how the changing modes of representation in architecture and urbanism relate to the transformation of how the addressees of architecture and urbanism are conceived.

The book diagnoses the dominant epistemological debates in architecture and urbanism during the 20th and 21st centuries. It traces their transformations, paying special attention to Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's preference for perspective representation, to the diagrams of Team 10 architects, to the critiques of functionalism, and the upgrade of the artefactual value of architectural drawings in Aldo Rossi, John Hejduk, Peter Eisenman, and Oswald Mathias Ungers, and, finally, to the reinvention of architectural programme through the event in Bernard Tschumi and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Particular emphasis is placed on the spirit of truth and clarity in modernist architecture, the relationship between the individual and the community in post-war era architecture, the decodification of design process as syntactic analogy and the paradigm of autonomy in the 1970s and 1980s architecture, the concern about the dynamic character of urban conditions and the potentialities hidden in architectural programme in the post-autonomy era.

This book is based on extensive archival research in Canada, the USA and Europe, and will be of interest to architects, artists, researchers and students in architecture, architectural history, theory, cultural theory, philosophy and aesthetics.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• List of figures
• Foreword by Gevork Hartoonian
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Different ways of relating fiction to reality and architectural drawings: object-oriented and subject-oriented modes of representation
• 3 Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and the modernist ethos: around the spirit of truth and clarity
• 4 Individual-community assemblages in post-war era architecture: the dissolution of universality
• 5 Decodification of design process as syntactic analogy: the primacy of the observer in the 1970s and 1980s
• 6 Identification of the architect with the architectural artefact: autobiography vis-à-vis the design process
• 7 Bernard Tschumi and the intensification of urban conditions: uncovering the potentialities hidden in the programme
• 8 Bernard Tschumi’s architecture as the discourse of events: disjunction and a new definition of metropolis
• 9 Rem Koolhaas and the congestion of metropolis: how the artificial would replace the reality?
• 10 Conversing with Bernard Tschumi on his conception of architecture’s modes of representation: instead of epilogue
• Index