 This is architecture 511-0. Welcome to the new reality that you will be living with for the next 15 weeks, 8 o'clock in the morning in the journalism building. You guys should already be proud of yourselves for finding the room. It took me a while to do that. And you should also be proud of yourselves for getting up so early. It's going to keep happening again and again. Soon the weather will be terrible. Soon there'll be snow or driving rain, or you'll be really tired, but you'll still be coming here at 8 o'clock in the morning. It's exciting, very exciting. Does everybody have a syllabus? We've been handing syllabi out, and this is basically the game plan for the course. Raise your hand if you don't have a syllabus. My goodness, thank you for speaking up. This is the game plan for our course. We're going to cover early moments in the history of architecture fairly rapidly. That is to say, we're going to talk about, I don't know, 4,000 years of history in a couple of weeks, and then we will slow down. We'll slow down when we get to the renaissance. And I think one reason that we choose to do that is this is a history of architecture course being taught in an architecture program. And we think of all of you guys as budding young designers. So the strategy is to somehow configure the history of architecture course to give you things that you can use in your design work. So not many of you will be making phoenix funerary monuments. I think very few of you will be designing giant tombs in the desert or sanctuaries to Apollo or any of that stuff, much as we love all of that. But as we get to more contemporary technologies, more contemporary building programs, more contemporary social and cultural questions, I think it will be more interesting to go more slowly and see how architecture responds to those challenges. So if any of you are archaeologists, you're going to find this to be wretchedly superficial because we are going to go quite quickly through the early history. But if you are all interested in strategies you can pull out of your back pocket and use to help launch a studio project, I hope we will be more useful to you there. So historically, and by historically I mean last year, we were on quarters. I think of that as the good old days. Last year, do you know where we would have been right now? Swimming, boating, fishing, you know, still up from last night. Who knows, but now we're in school. And so one of the questions here was, how do you package several 10-week courses into two 15-week courses? Hmm, 10 plus 10 plus 10 equals 15 plus 15. Personally, I can't do the math. It's just too challenging. But one thing I decided to do, at least for the short term, and I think it's not a bad idea, is simply give you three tests. Instead of giving you one big test that tests 15 weeks worth of knowledge, a final exam, to give you a series of tests after each five weeks more or less of material. So in a sense, we're conserving the memory of the old quarter system by giving you something like a midterm, a final, and a midterm. The good news about that is that there is no real final exam. And so the final exam, I think, would have happened on something like the 12th of December, and we're not doing that. We're just going to get out of here earlier and have a more lovely life because of that. So I'd like to introduce to you a number of people. One of them is me. Hello. My office is not in the journalism building. It's in Nolten Hall, 226. And I'm often there. And if I'm there, I'm happy to talk to you. I'm going to try to always be there on Thursdays between 9 and 11. That is to say, right after class. So if you have some questions about a homework assignment or just you have a problem that you need to discuss, please come and talk to me. Additionally, we have a distinguished cast of teaching assistants. And they're always going to be in the building. They do not sleep. They're up in the graduate studios. And they will be available if you have some questions about what to do or if you need to, I don't know, have a friend who's a little bit older and wiser. They're there for you. So I'm going to ask you guys to make your presence visible. So the first one we have here is Yana Grinblatt. Yay. Big round of applause. Make her feel welcome. Brian Peterson. Show him contempt. Oh, good. Make him feel welcome too. No, sorry, Brian. My earlier instructions were followed. Justin Turley over here and Natalie Snyder. Yes, I'm so glad for Natalie. These people will be leading recitation sections. And they will be doing grading. And they will be basically co-teaching in many ways. As I mentioned before, there will be all kinds of different things that will be asked of you throughout the quarter. One thing will be these three tests, each of which will happen roughly five weeks into the quarter. And they will be more or less focused on the material from that chunk of the course. However, you might be asked to refer to things that happened in earlier quarters. So the ambition is not to have you forget everything that you learned in the first five weeks when you enter the second five weeks, but to have specific attention to the new material. So vocabulary words might come out. Certain typologies might come out that we refer to over and over again as the course progresses. There will also be two papers that you will be doing. And the papers are in part, well, let's say, for the most part, the papers will be formal analyses developed through diagrammatic analysis. So we'll have a further discussion of them when we hand out the first paper. But there will be a lot of personal responsibility to look carefully at the building to understand how is it organized? How does it relate to its site? How does its technology drive the solution? How does it relate to precedence buildings that came before it? How does it advance the discourse, and so forth? We're also going to have quizzes. And there will be quizzes during most of the recitation. So one way the recitations will be organized is that you'll have a little quiz, not a long quiz. It might take the first 20 minutes of the recitation. And the rest of the recitation might involve a discussion of that quiz or a discussion of how to do the papers or a review of certain techniques, like building analysis, diagramming, and so forth. The reason the questions are on the quizzes is that I think they're important. There'll be a lot of vocabulary words on the quiz because architecture has a very specific vocabulary. So if you're trying to discuss architecture, you better know the words that describe architecture. So if I find concepts, vocabulary words that I really want you to know, they'll probably happen on the quiz. And they might happen again on the test. So the quizzes become a good tool for studying for the tests. There's also 50 points for participation, which is really exciting also. Everything about this course is really exciting. So I hope you're all as really excited as I am about this chance to get together at 8 o'clock in the morning on the third floor of the journalism building. Let me say we're going to do one thing slightly different this year. And I think it's something that's going to help you a lot. Well, we're going to try to make movies. You saw Justin fiddling around with his computer. What he was doing, I think, that's really no way that I know. But I think what he was doing was launching quick time to capture the images and the talking so that we can then post it and you guys will be able to go over the material again. Not that this lecture is very interesting, by the way. If any of you have to watch this one again, God help you. But I think as we get into more difficult vocabulary or we rattle through a lot of buildings during a given talk, you might want to have the opportunity to do this. In spite of all that, people will, I predict, do kind of horribly at the beginning. There tends to be a kind of, I don't know, crash and burn on the first test because you guys think it's going to be easy. In fact, it's going to be really hard. And so when you take the first test, your grade will be shocking. Or maybe when you hand in the first paper, you will have been lazy and you will have done it at the last minute. And you've learned your lesson, you're doing better. Your second test, your second paper, these are great. So how can these great students who thought laziness was a good idea recover? And the answer is they can do some extra credit. That's really visually clear, isn't it? I'm gonna go back to this one. The KSA has a lecture series. And the lecture series typically takes place in the lecture hall of the Nolten School at 5.30 on Wednesdays. And the lecture series that they have scheduled for this coming fall term is gonna be a really good one. So you're lucky. It will be something that you should do anyhow. You should attend the lecture series anyhow, but you can get some extra credit for it. And the way you can get extra credit for it is by paying attention and taking notes. So we want you to take notes during the lecture and hand in Xeroxes of your notes. Additionally, type up a critical response to the lecture. And for example, you might say, the main points of this lecture dealt with how to build in a desert. For example, how to build in a desert when your client wants eternal life and a tomb shape like a pyramid. And then you might say, a problem with this project is you need 50,000 slaves in order to do it and that's just not feasible. Or a problem with this project is that it bankrupts the nation and people starve or something like that. Or you might even say, the way the lecture was delivered was incoherent. He was talking about one thing, he was showing images about another. But what you want to do is try to identify what the main ideas were and then respond. And the response could be, this was the best thing I've heard. It's changed my idea about how to build in a desert or it might be a political take, it might be a aesthetic take, whatever you want. So we want you there. We want you to plug into the discourse of architecture. We want you to begin to self-identify as cool people. Eventually we want you to get rid of your baseball caps and buy berets because then you'll really look fancy like artists. But for the time being, I understand you're comfortable with your baseball caps. But go to the lecture series and that too is gonna help you a lot when you go to your desk and you look at a blank piece of paper and you have to conceptualize something. Because quite a lot of what happens in studio is thinking. I mean, you might think, well, my ability to, I don't know, render drawings isn't so good. I don't know how I'll ever progress. But if you can think, if you can conceptualize, if you can get a good idea, your skills will follow. So I really believe that history class and with history class, the lecture series will sharpen your thinking skills. They'll give you access to what counts as good architectural ideas. And with that information, you can move forward. So you might think that courses like architectural history are just support classes and they're just filling up your mornings in an uncomfortable way. But in fact, this is stuff you can steal. Why wouldn't you be paying attention? You will be desperately trying to think of a good idea. And then you will realize that there is nothing new under the sun. Every good idea has already been deployed. All you have to do is find one and transform it and make it specific to the project at hand. And that's where history comes in. So this is your lucky day. We have a bunch of books required for this course because the course covers a long span of architectural history. There is this kind of main book that we have. And it's mostly a picture book, I have to say. The text is because it covers everything everywhere in the world from the beginning of time to the present. It doesn't dig too deeply into these topics. But it has a lot of good illustrations and it frequently changes its title. So the second edition was called a World History of Architecture. The first edition had a different title still. The third edition is called Buildings Across Time. Any of those would be fine. The reason we've selected this textbook instead of some others that maybe are a little bit more nuanced in their reading of history is that this one has a few chapters on non-Western architecture. And we're going to try to give you some instruction on non-Western architecture as well as Western architecture because the world is increasingly flat and you're going to be dealing with cultures other than European culture and American culture in your careers. So why not become conversant with them now? Any questions yet? The next books, I think, are more fun to read because they're written with a really strong point of view. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism is by Rudolf Wittkauer. And it really is a kind of watershed book. It marks, I think, the first moment where an architectural historian began to look at architecture in a way that is specifically interesting to architects and not art historians. So if an art historian were talking about Palladio, let's say, there might be a lot of this kind of archaeological stuff. The bricks were manufactured with mud from the Poe River and baked at 500 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 days, carted along the old Appian Way to their building site and constructed. And you're just reading this and you think, oh my god, I don't care about this. Why am I reading this? Wittkauer begins to look at architectural principles. That is to say, ordering principles. What's the big idea, is what Wittkauer would say? Or how is a certain formal constraint transformed and manipulated? So Wittkauer is incredibly important because Wittkauer was a kind of teacher, as well as a art historian. And he influenced some important people whose names directly taught and influenced some people whose names you'll be hearing a lot of as we progress through this course, notably Colin Rowe, great architectural critic. And through Colin Rowe, the architect Louis Kahn, for example. So architectural principles in the age of humanism. Great read. Next book we read is also written with a really strong point of view. We're going to come to this one later on in the course. This is Space, Time, and Architecture by Ziegli Gideon. And what's interesting about this book, I think, is just who wrote it and who his friends were. So Gideon was palling around with all the high modernists, friends with Corbou, friends with Mies van der Rohe, friends with Gropius, friends with Alto. And so he's knocking back Vodka and saying, Alto, I really like the way you respond to landscape. Keep pushing that. That's a great idea. Or Corb, this mechanical metaphor that you're using. Great idea. Keep pushing it. And so when you read this book, you're not simply reading a kind of overview of a history that's been written, but you're reading a polemic that forces the history to write itself in many ways. And so Gideon goes back to the Baroque period. And so we'll be reading this throughout this course, and we'll be reading a little bit of it also next quarter. He looks at the Baroque period as a moment when architecture started to be really about space, stopped being about the edges of a building, and more about the play of space, which for Gideon is the modern condition of architecture. So it's a great book. That one is so much fun to read. And then we have two more books. And again, these two books will come in toward the end of the course. And they are Barry Burgdahl's European Architecture, 1750 to 1890. This is a beautiful book. It's really smart. It's really, really well written. And again, it's about the ideas that drive architecture. It's about how architecture situates itself in the complexities of a kind of cultural context, and not simply this is a building, this is a building, this is a building. So this period that Burgdahl writes about, 1750 to 1890, is a really interesting period for architecture. Because up until that point, more or less, there was a consensus about what architecture should be. If you were an architect in 1280, you're probably doing something gothic-y. If you're an architect in 1500, you're probably doing something renaissance-y. If you're an architect in 1750, you have no idea what to do. You have absolutely no idea what to do. People begin to look at historical examples and say, well, maybe it should be gothic. I don't know. Maybe it should look like a giant cow. I don't know. Maybe I should just make it square. I don't know, because square is a rational thing. So it's the moment when theory, the whole kind of self-reflexivity of architectural discourse begins to mushroom, and it's incredibly interesting, and Burgdahl handles it very well. And then the next little book that we read, and these are thin, and these are cheap. That's the nice thing about them. And probably widely available through the half-priced book network also, so you can get them even cheaper, is Kenneth Franton's A Critical History of Modern Architecture. And he just picks different avant-garde and talks about them for a while, looking at the early 20th century and moving forward. And what's interesting about this is that he recognizes that 20th century architecture is not so unified, as you might think, and it has to do with all these different movements that are driven by national conditions. This is what's happening in Germany, this is what's happening in England, or technological conditions, or certain attitudes about style. So these are great readings. You are so lucky. And we might put a few more readings, a few more important essays on the Carmen website, and perhaps eventually on iTunes University. So for the rest of this class period, we're going to talk about a few buildings, and we're going to talk about a few ways to think about buildings before we launch into a kind of historical narrative that is continuous. We're gonna talk about basic organizations, certain terms that you can have that make it possible for you to discuss a lot of different formal organizations in ways that are meaningful. For example, this little drawing is by the Swiss artist Paul Clay, and he's talking about something that is true, it's a Pythagorean progression, and it's the relationship between different geometrical conditions. The idea of point, if you drag a point in space, what do you get? A line. If you drag a line in space, you get lots of little points marching forward. What do you get? A plane. If you take the plane, and you take the field of points on the plane, and you translate them vertically, what do you get? A volume. So in this little drawing, Paul Clay is more or less identifying everything you need to know about architecture and form. Of course, how you use these terms is up to you, but point gives you the idea of center, which is kind of nice. It's a little thing. The world can be organized around it, and curiously enough, volume or object at a different scale gives you the idea of center. Things can be organized around it. So it seems like there are two fundamentally different conditions that we have here. One might be center, and the other one might be edge or datum. So we see the line here, and the line is less a thing in itself than a reference. We can say this is at the beginning of the line, this is at the end of the line, this is under the line, this is over the line. So the line could be understood as a datum, and datum is like a neutral reference plane against which difference can be registered. Using the concept of datum, how does the table help us understand where my cup is? Young man, what's your name? Harrison. Harrison, how does this table help us understand where my cup is? Okay, he's way more specific than I would have been, but absolutely right. He's noticing that this is not a simple plane, which would have been good enough, but that it's a plane that's been articulated by a series of points. So he's using the six points, the screws that attach it, and the surface to begin to say it's on top and it's in that corner relative to one of these points. What's your name? Jacqueline. Jacqueline, beautiful name. Where's my cup now? Below the plane, this girl knows things. Good. We could keep going on this, but I think we got the idea. And that's useful, but another way to think about line is as axis. An axis is a kind of organization that begins to allow things to unfold from side to side in various ways. This is not much of an axis, but there's some kind of axial relationship between where I'm standing and the stairs. And the fact that the stairs, this major circulation path, and me are organized axially gives hierarchy to the room. I'm so much more important than people who are not organized on the axis. Sorry, that's just the way it is. And so forth. So we have all of these conditions of center, edge, axis, plane, object, datum, figure, field, and that they're all interrelated through translation, dragging, or transformation. So these are some basic organizations that we can look at. And we're starting with something as elemental as a square. And in a sense, we're picking up on what Harrison was saying about how a square table here can be understood as something that is articulated. And by articulated, I mean broken into related elements. Here we have a four square grid. And that's kind of a no-brainer, right? You take a square, and one of the properties of the square is that it replicates its own form, square, square, square, square, at different scales. And at the same time, we get some of these other elements like center or perimeter. We could also get the same thing going with a nine square grid where the center, instead of being a point, becomes a plane or a cell. So those are kind of interesting ways of finding an organization that configures center in different ways, a center that can be occupied, a center that deflects activity around its point. So all kinds of things to look at, proportion. I have the letter A here and the letter A here. Sometimes when we're studying proportion, it's kind of silly to measure the thing and say this is 1.35 inches and the other dimension is also 1.35 inches. We just might find relationships and say this is the same as this. This is A, and if this were, if I was looking at this and I called this short dimension of the four square grid A, what would I call the long dimension of the four square grid? Two A, great. This is not very well drawn. Somebody did a bad job here. I think it was me. But let's pretend this is a good nine square grid. If this were A, the short section, what would the long section be? Three A, exactly right. So if you are looking at a building and trying to study proportions, use this little tool. Look for relationships. Don't simply say this one's A, this one's B, this one's C, this one's D, but realize that it's A and three A and so forth. And we spoke earlier about the notion of axis and the axis can be configured in different ways. Here we see the idea of an axis threading itself through a gateway, an axis organizing a path along a void, but an axis can also operate toward a destination. So these are kind of figure ground reversals of how an axis locks into its space. Here, the axis operates through the void. Here, the axis operates by targeting solids. And here's our friend Datum again. There. Now we know everything that has to do with architecture. And we can begin to talk about incredibly old buildings. For example, this is Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England. Druids built it a long time ago. It seems to be some kind of calendar. It seems to be unbelievably difficult to make. When you look at this thing and you think, how was it possible, A, to bring these giant slabs of stone there? B, to lift them so high that you could begin to span with the giant chunk of stone. And people still speculate on these questions. There is no absolute answer as to how it happened. But what we're going to do right now is not even ask those questions, but instead look at how this thing is organized. And if we look at it, a lot of the words we were talking about on our earlier discussion come into play here again. That is to say, there's a really clear idea of center. There's a really clear idea of perimeter. And those distinctions alone begin to set up a lot of hierarchical distinctions. For example, if you had to find the most important spot in Stonehenge, where would that be? Guy with an eagle on his shirt, what do you think? The center, why do you think that? It draws your eye immediately to it when you look at plan or in space, everything surrounds it. The entire organization, not simply of the stones, but also of this annular mound that surrounds it, lock on the center. And that has to do with a concentric organization. If we look at the way the path cuts in, it's an axial organization. So there are lots of different organizational strategies beginning to say, this is different. This is important. And that's how architecture constructs meaning. You think about language. And actually, if this were a philosophy class, we would say language is hard to understand how that means anything also. But if I were to say, the cup is on the table in a not very philosophical mode, you would more or less understand what I'm saying because there's a convention that words mean something. In architecture, the way you establish meaning is by organizing difference within a field. So here we see, oh, green field, same, same, same. Woo, different, woo, even more different. Wow, most different. And so we have all these different kinds of organizations inflecting toward a center, creating hierarchy, and establishing meaning within this organization. So we spoke about concentric rings, the idea of the path. Are you inside? Are you outside? Axies cross, it gives us a point. We have a perimeter that organizes itself around a center and so forth. There, several thousand years of history done. We're not done yet. Let's go back to 21, 2100 BCE. BCE, let me just go forward here. BCE, which we write down here, means before the common era. And often if you're speaking about examples that happened really a long time ago in parts of the world that aren't particularly locked into the trajectory of Western civilization, it's more useful to say BCE before the common era than BC, but they mean the same thing. So we're looking here at Mesopotamia, the crossing of the Tigris and the Euphrates, cradle of civilization over here, and particularly the city of Ur, which is right down here somewhere. Ur, does anybody here speak German? Do you know what Ur means in German? No, that's my bad German, but you are, Ur means primal or original. For example, if you were a certain kind of psychologist, you would speak about the Urschrei, the primal scream. Would you guys like to do one? Eight o'clock in the morning in the journalism building and nobody wants to give me a nice Urschrei. One, two, three. Urschrei. So Ur is so ancient that its very name means original or primal. And in Ur, we have another incredibly important, incredibly enigmatic, incredibly ancient piece of architecture to look at, and that is the ziggurat of Ur. Ziggurat is a name for this kind of wedding cake of a building where we have a lump that becomes a terrace for a lump, that becomes a terrace for a lump, that becomes a terrace for a lump. So that's, lump is not really a technical vocabulary word for those of you who are trying to find out what the vocabulary words are. The upper image shows you what it looks like now, and what it looks like now is really more geological than architectural because it's been badly eroded over time, but in its original condition, it would have been something like this. And if we look at it diagrammatically, in the same way that we looked at Stonehenge diagrammatically, we can see that in spite of the fact that it's in an incredibly different place, it's not on the green plains of Salisbury, but on the parched desert of Mesopotamia. In spite of the fact that it performs a different function and that it organizes itself in a spatial way that's quite different, it's kind of similar. And that has to do with things like how difference is established, how hierarchy is instituted. So we have a series of concentric rings, here not spatial rings, but actual solids, the terrace, the terrace, the terrace, the terrace. We have an axis that cuts into it, we have a center, we have a perimeter, we have the cross axes establishing the center, and here we have top and bottom as well as inside and outside. So everything's the same, or at least architecture makes its meaning visible to us in similar ways, regardless of the site, regardless of the material, regardless of the strategy. There is one huge difference, I guess, between Stonehenge and the ziggurat that were actually many huge differences, but let's speak about one. And that has to do with the idea of the solid rather than the idea of the void. That's fundamental to the way we understand architecture. For example, this is a plan of the ziggurat precinct at Ur, and it's a strange-looking plan. For those of you who are used to looking at plans, we see here a black lump of stuff. If you look at the perimeter, that looks like a plan. That looks like a series of walls with doors and rooms. This is just a solid lump of stuff, and there is a word that we can use to describe solid or an architecture that makes itself visible through its solidity, through its mass, through its density, and that word is haptic. Haptic has to do with something that's primarily available to the sense of touch, that you can't walk through it. You walk around it. It's a space-displacing object. It is a presence rather than a occupiable territory. And so if we make a comparison between the, these are comparisons that have never been made before, by the way, because we're going so fast, but if we make a comparison between the ziggurat at Ur and Stonehenge, we begin to see two different ways that architecture organizes itself through its material. We see the haptic at Ur, and at Stonehenge, we see the optic. And optic, we'll go back to that in a moment, optic is a term that was introduced by an architect, an art historian called Alois Regal, a 19th century, early 20th century art historian. And he said that this was what antiquity was really interested in. Antiquity was really interested in representing external objects as clear material entities. So the notion of deep space would make that harder to do. So it was all about the haptic. As opposed to the optic, and we'll come back to this image again, but let's look at Stonehenge as something optic. You can see it from far away. It is spatially penetratable by your gaze, vision, perspective, help you understand this thing, and you can surround yourself in it. So while the haptic is solid, the optic is void. While the haptic is tactile, materially present, available to near seeing or touching, the optic is visual, available to far seeing or perspective. The haptic is primarily material. Its content comes from its material presence. The optic is spatial. That its content comes from the relationships between things that can be seen through space. The haptic is primarily about the nature of the object, and the optic is primarily about the nature of relationships set up through objects in space. And so again, we have our words haptic and optic, which are vocabulary words that we will trot out from time to time. And again, it's not like the people in Ura were saying must have haptic ziggurat. Words that we're going to use, particularly when we're quoting these old Kooth architectural historians, have a lot more to do with what people in the early 20th century or the 19th century were thinking about the world than the history of the world, but they're pretty interesting. So, one more incredibly ancient thing. 2100 BC, not old enough, let's go to Eden. Let's look at another organization, Garden of Eden. Paradise Garden, Garden of Eden. A way to think about the Paradise Garden is as a four square grid. Biblical descriptions of the Garden of Eden talk about four rivers running out of a walled precinct. And if you look at a basic mobile garden, for example, the Taj Mahal Garden at Agra, its organization is paradise. It is the Biblical description of Eden. We have four channels of water running out and organizing a four square grid. So, this is an interesting four square grid, more interesting than the four square grid that I gave you in my first diagram in that the center becomes a fountain also. So, the center is not simply a point but a space. So, the reading of this thing oscillates between four square grid and nine square grid or even 16 square grid. And you get all these kind of interesting scaling relationships, recursive scales. Recursive means that the same thing is reiterated again and again in more densely nesting scales and so forth. We get the nine square grid with the center at the void. We get the four square grid with the point at the void. We get the idea of the inside, the idea of the outside and changing scale. So, essentially, we have given you already everything you need to understand architecture. And we've given you several thousand years of history. So, consider yourself introduced. And when we begin next time, we will talk specifically about Egyptian architecture.