Lecture

Learning from Las Vegas: Symbolism and Form

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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 book 'Learning from Las Vegas' by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, exploring the forgotten symbolism of architectural form in the context of Las Vegas. It discusses the significance of A&P parking lots, commercial values, and methods, emphasizing the communication system, persuasion, and vast spaces in historical tradition. The lecture also touches on the plea for architectural realism, the challenges of accommodating social realities, and the importance of understanding the desires of ordinary people. It analyzes the transformation of architectural sensibility through new sources, such as Hollywood, Las Vegas, and various residential backgrounds, highlighting the need for architects to adapt to diverse needs and social contexts.

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

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New Urbanism

New Urbanism is an urban design movement that promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies. New Urbanism attempts to address the ills associated with urban sprawl and post-Second World War suburban development.

Sustainable urbanism

Sustainable urbanism is both the study of cities and the practices to build them (urbanism), that focuses on promoting their long term viability by reducing consumption, waste and harmful impacts on people and place while enhancing the overall well-being of both people and place. Well-being includes the physical, ecological, economic, social, health and equity factors, among others, that comprise cities and their populations.

Anti-realism

In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is a position which encompasses many varieties such as metaphysical, mathematical, semantic, scientific, moral and epistemic. The term was first articulated by British philosopher Michael Dummett in an argument against a form of realism Dummett saw as 'colorless reductionism'. In anti-realism, the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic mechanisms, such as the context principle or intuitionistic logic, in direct opposition to the realist notion that the truth of a statement rests on its correspondence to an external, independent reality.

Philosophical realism

Philosophical realism – usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters – is the view that a certain kind of thing (ranging widely from abstract objects like numbers to moral statements to the physical world itself) has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it exists even in the absence of any mind perceiving it or that its existence is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder.

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