Looking Towards the Avenues

I don't deal exclusively with the popular image. I'm more concerned with it as a part of my landscape. Pop Art is only one facet of my work. More than popular images, I'm interested in personal images...
- Jim Dine, quoted in Art News, November 1963

Three sculptures by Jim Dine, under the collective name "Looking Toward The Avenue" 1989

Mr. Dine, a resident of New York and London who is widely viewed as having been one of the first Pop artists, reverted to an old theme, a variation on the Venus de Milo that he first hit upon in the 70's. What he produced was three bronze figures that are 14, 18 and 23 feet high and that resemble the famous armless goddess, minus her head.

THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS

THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS

Artistic forms are not to be played with: life is to be recreated so that it will of necessity express itself as a pattern……

INDTRODUCTION
§ Since the 17th century architecture has been approached from four fundamentally different points of view
1. The academic architect
2. The craftsman builders
3. The civil engineer and
4. Other technological experts
and more in the recent years, the social scientist.

The architectural designs made annually at the ecole des beaux arts in Paris for two and half centuries before 1968 by competitors for the grand prix de Rome are of particular importance for the history of architecture because they constitute so complex and extreme and expression of one of these basic approaches, namely that of academic architect.
§ Four basically different kinds of training for the young architect have developed. These may similarly be characterized as the
1. Academic
2. The craft
3. The technological, and
4. The sociological.

§ It is this system of architectural education, the character of official architecture in France from the 17th century to our own time and was most completely and clearly reflected in the design made for the prix de Rome.

THE ECOLE DES BEAUX-ARTS
§ Academic tradition: Source from the classical antiquity, especially to roman architecture and classical “idealism” in philosophy, the more immediate sources lay in Italian art and art theory of the high renaissance and baroque.
§ The heir of Academie Royale.
§ Recommendation for a new school of architecture should be joined with the new school of painting and sculpture.
§ French revolution: Napoleon
§ A new school of architecture under revolution.
§ Attack on the notion of the primitive hut occupies, jettison the link with nature.
§ By altering the ideas of the Greeks and of Vitruvius later architects had sometimes improved upon them as long as the general classic “rules” were not violated.

T.S ELIOT “the fixity of the intellectual structure, and the reduction of the past, puts me in the mind of an aphorism, tradition, cant’ simply be inherited it must be labored for. You can’t approach it without a historical sense: and a historical sense means that you appreciate the pastness of the past as well as its presence”.
THE PROGRAMMES :1810-1914
§ Monthly architectural competitions both in form of
Esquisses: sketch design
Project rendus: rendering
§ The competitions written by the professors of architectural theory were practical and relevant to the Grand Prix Projects.
§ About twenty subjects were set per year. There were more than five hundred different programmes. Where baths, schools and monuments were the subjects repeated often.
§ Industrial architecture was not the concern of the Ecole.
§ The greater part of the programmes set for the student can be divided, roughly into
Public buildings or buildings to be used by the public
Ecclesiastical buildings (variety of churches)
Private buildings

THE COMPETITION FOR THE GRAND PRIX IN 1824
§ The competition was the final hurdle in the education of the 19th century French architect, which awarded the highest possible achievement for a student and virtually ensured a prestigious career.
§ The theory and design manifested derived mainly from literary and artistic sources of the Italian Renaissance, exemplified a beauty of form based on fixed principles of taste.
§ The competition was traditionally entered by advanced students of French citizenship to prepare designs for large architectural projects, customarily for some kind monumental building with royal state or civic connotations, which were basically excursive of imagination.
§ Criticized as “paper architecture”.
§ The drawings were plans, sections, and elevations and later perspective views to be presented in an allotted square feet of area.
§ First to conceive the general project of a building then to study its principal parts and finally its details. This approach is different from a “romantic” where the designer will start out with some a detail that struck his fancy or utilitarian “functional” point of view with the answer to a problem of utility, structure, or economy.
§ Absence of visually “realistic” approach to architectural design because the academic point of view had its philosophical basis in classical “idealism”.
§ These drawings are ”idealized” abstractions of the “real” world of nature and the senses, inasmuch as they do depict architecture “realistically” as it appears to the eye of the beholder

PRINCIPLES AND METHODS ILLUSTRATED
§ Theory of Design
§ Character
GENERAL CHARACTER
TYPE CHARACTER
SPECIFIC CHARACTER
Transition between type character and specific character was what became known as “narrative architecture”

§ Programs

Good Design

HOW DO WE KNOW GOOD DESIGN WHEN WE SEE IT?


Buildings are like people, they have a soul, they feel and they like people, they are liked by people, at times hated too. When I say they are like people I can hereby categorize them into:

· Good looking buildings
· Good buildings &
· Good buildings that are good looking

Design can be defined more on experience basis than form. A design does not become good just by a single sensory perception called “sight”, but a good design is the one that serves all of them, or at least attempts to fulfill some of them. A good design is not the one that “looks good” but is the one that feels good. A good design is responsive of the contemporary movements to the needs of users, a review of the development of processes and methods of design approaches, and a redefinition of design in terms of users experience, not physical form.

A design that is natural, that is comprehensible, by grounding the meaning of architectural expression in a given cultural situation. A good design is a design where the user can relate himself. A building is like a body, and the user is like a soul, and it is the user that makes the design alive.

It is not the award winning design that is beautiful but it is the test of use that makes it beautiful. A good design is responsive to user wishes; it develops a pattern language that enables the users to shape their own environment, wherever permitted. A good design emphasis on the software aspect of design- use, experience, and perception, than on the hardware aspect- physical form.



The design should serve the purpose for which the building is intended to. A good design should also have the character of the place, it should relate to the human scale. It should be beautiful in a sense that it should be a pleasure to be there, experiencing it. If it were an office building, the employees should feel the pleasure of working there, at the same time it should motivate and force them to behave in a disciplined manner. The building should also have a character of the purpose, it should be overpowering if it is a governmental building, and it should be welcoming it is a public building. A good design should also be part of the natural landscape.

And depending upon all these necessitates designing at the scale of life itself.

In short I mean that user’s requirements take over the major dictator of design capability. And we have the technology, so the only goal for the designer is to input user lifestyle into the design, making the design more flexible for users of different cultural backgrounds, and generally considering the social context. In other words a disciplined interlocking of logic and art. You have to know people first before designing.


There are some buildings that the world watches and some that the profession watches. More than the design, the process of design makes it more beautiful. Where a designer interprets the brief “client’s given-and to the lay person, understandable criteria”, into more ambiguous one of “sense of place”. Designing does not mean just making houses, or constructing useful things in general, but signified expressing oneself, communicating, arguing and freely creating cultural habitat. And in this process of expressing and communicating, it is important to remember with whom the designer is communicating, and to who is he expressing, other question is expressing what?

The buildings that exist are activated, because of peoples’ needs and wishes, and they are live because of their active participation.

The challenge is to understand the process design, and the ways of bringing this about.

The Debate

Christopher Alexander & Peter Eisenman
The Debate....

what you see depends on where you stand, (read it somewhere), the world is also not all black and all white, infact all shades of color in between...well all the colors are either how much light they absorbe or reflect....
Both the architects come from a very rich experienced background and they have their own veiw about architecture, both feeling that their belief is true...I would like to start with PE statement where he say "this is wash"...

CA is trying to defend his baby and PE trying to make a meaningful argument about architectural practice...I must comment first on PE's effort to make the argument sublime in the first place than viewing the whole thing as "offense and defense" on CA's first reaction to PE's starting statement...
in this world there are people who are feelers, thinkers, intutors and sensors
I am the feeling types... and i do believe in "feeling spaces" ...I would again like to state "what you see depends on where you stand"

The smell of materials, inhabitants, food, surroundings, the fee and texture of materials and surfaces, the sound of echoes and footsteps, all are part of the complete architectural experience. In other words architecture is experienced as a synthesis of many stimuli and is only fully understood in totality. That is what I mean when I say "feeling architecture"
YET, I agree more with PE, my intervention on their discussion:
"feeling(in architecture) is something you see and thinking is something that you look into, kind of reading between the lines"
jung classification about order and form..this theory is i feel very much based on feeling architecture...eclectic...
Chartres has its Gothic accent... sure it practices form and order and harmony...but for sure its boring to me too... I believe more on Venturi's view on complexity and contradiction than a monotonus harmony....Let me give one example here....I was walking through the commercial downtown of St. Austine, a historic downtown and a very beatiful architecture .... all the houses/shops were different and it provided a diffrent view of the tower at the end of the street from each and every nook of the street...there was order in the fenestration, building height ratio to width...every next store bought some characteristic of the neighbouring buildings, this mutation eventually made the first and the last shop completely different and interesting in its own way...it was a very romantic walk i ever had...falling in love with architecture at those nooks and corners of the street....
Lets go to Palladio's Palazzo , a fine example of georgian classical architecture, sure there is harmony and order and at the same time there is contarast. PE's observation on the negative spaces is something that most of the architect tend to over look, the similarity in the fenestrations is also because of the harmony in the spaces between them. "What is interesting about serial structures is the spaces between, not the elements themselves, but the differences between the two.", here thinking is in practice...
Let me come back to Venturies view, where he talked about pitched roof in one of his buildings, a very primitive idea of house, and yet a powerful one, I as a child always drew pitched roof in my drawing classes, well lets not get into the white fenses and the rising sun :)...I disagree here with PE, using a primitive form is not moving back...its probably going back to the basics and emerging out of it! Well Well Well you will get that I am not suggesting to design pitched roofs if you know what i am talking about here...
I agree with CA here "see man and the universe as more or less intertwined and inseparable"
To preset with a theory of human environment in which the built world is seen as a kind of nature unto itself. Like the natural world out of which it is created, the built world operates in response to its own rules, its own means to change and permanence through the interaction of a host of contributing forces. Most important among those interacting forces is our human nature in all its dimensions, including our quest for meaning in the things we create, the fundamental nature of the materials out of which the world we create for ourselves is built, and our idea of nature itself. As we have progressively perfected our world it has moved us farther from the nature that once served as the paradigm for its creation. Seriously my aim is to get as close as possible.
PE says the cosmology in 300 years has changed and CA is asking to go back and revisit ...
Let me go back to Venturi's view, Sanisbury wing, National Gallery a very good example of going back to basic and emerge out of it(Study the Fenestration). A very good example of the argument above!!! not just talks!!

context

Our life view, forms a context for our design philosophy; which in turn serves as context for our attitude towards-and-descisions within particular projects...

Falling Waters

Falling Waters

Cut 1:
I remember my first week at MSU; the 1st year students were called on the upper floor for an AV presentation.

My first introduction to architecture in true sense was this video on "Falling Waters"

a 45 minutes presentations let my jaws dropped and left me in a total awe...

Cut 2:
Came to USA 5 years back, and after all this years my plans to visit "Falling Waters" finally were on grounds.

when I first saw this place in person, I felt this adrenaline rush!

the video left me awed ....the place I visited left me breathless....