Lecture

Meaning in Architecture: Aldo van Eyck, Denise Scott Brown

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In courses (2)

AR-365: Theory and architectural culture

Le cours offre un résumé de la théorie et la culture architecturales depuis 1789 dans le monde occidentale. Le but est de comprendre des textes dans lesquels l'architecture est définie comme une discipline synthétisant une variété de thèmes (sociales, arti ...

AR-366: Theory and architectural culture: exercises

Le cours offre une méthode pour discerner et comprendre les idées, les théories et les valeurs culturelles dans des bâtiments et des projets d'architecture. ...

Description

This lecture delves into the architectural philosophies of Aldo van Eyck and Denise Scott Brown, exploring the concept of built meaning and the integration of past experiences into present designs. It discusses the importance of unity in design, the significance of human adaptation to space, and the reconciliation of divergent spatial conceptions. The lecture emphasizes the need to create architecture that resonates with the human experience and reflects a continuum of past, present, and future. It also touches upon the influence of cultural anthropology on architectural solutions and the quest for a fundamental anthropological significance shared by diverse spatial concepts.

Instructor

Christophe van Gerrewey

Christophe Van Gerrewey (1982) is an architecture critic and theorist, writing about contemporary buildings, their recent histories and intellectual dimensions, and their connections to society, philosophy, art and literature. In particular, he is an expert on the work of OMA/Rem Koolhaas as well as on Belgian architecture. He is one of the editors of architecture journal OASE, and of art and culture journal De Witte Raaf. In his writings, architecture is considered as a source of comprehensive and integrated knowledge that pertains to diverse disciplines – a way of looking at, and of understanding, many aspects of the world we live in. This gives his activities an unusually broad and comprehensive aspect, transcending divisions of knowledge. Since 2015, he is Assistant Professor Tenure Track of architecture theory at EPFL Lausanne. He was trained as an architect-engineer at Ghent University and as a literary theorist at KU Leuven. In Dutch, his mother tongue, he has published three novels and a collection of essays between 2013 and 2017.

Official source

Related concepts (32)

Architecture

Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings or other structures. The term comes ; ; . Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural symbols and as works of art. Historical civilizations are often identified with their surviving architectural achievements.

Cultural anthropology

Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The term sociocultural anthropology includes both cultural and social anthropology traditions. Anthropologists have pointed out that through culture, people can adapt to their environment in non-genetic ways, so people living in different environments will often have different cultures.

Social anthropology

Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology. The term cultural anthropology is generally applied to ethnographic works that are holistic in spirit, are oriented to the ways in which culture affects individual experience, or aim to provide a rounded view of the knowledge, customs, and institutions of a people.

Anthropology

Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. A portmanteau term sociocultural anthropology is commonly used today. Linguistic anthropology studies how language influences social life. Biological or physical anthropology studies the biological development of humans.

Cultural relativism

Cultural relativism is the idea that a person's beliefs and practices should be understood based on that person's own culture. Proponents of cultural relativism also tend to argue that the norms and values of one culture should not be evaluated using the norms and values of another. It was established as in anthropological research by Franz Boas in the first few decades of the 20th century and later popularized by his students. Boas first articulated the idea in 1887: "civilization is not something absolute, but .

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