Building Theories : Architecture as the Art of Building

1. Thinking through Building

1.1 Positing a Theory of Building

1.2 Theory’s problem with Technology

1.3 Theory seeks Autonomy

• • In the Shadow of the Digital

• • Conceptual Architecture
  • Theory, in Oppositions

1.4 Is Theory Dead?

• • Or, just Post-Critical?

• • And then, we were Post-Digital

1.5 Building, in Theory

2. Building and the Treatise

2.1 Building in a word, Techné

2.2 Fabrica e Ratio – Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

2.3 Mechanical Art, Disegno, or both?

• • Building Artisan and Author – Averlino, detto Filarete
  • Literary Scholar and Architect – Leon Battista Alberti
  • Stone Mason and Humanist – Philibert de L’Orme

2.4 Ornamentalist and Carpenter – Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières

2.5 L’Art de Bien Bastir, that is the Art of Building Well

3. Architect as Builder and Thinker

3.1 Architecture as Fine Art or Building Art? The case of Jean Baptiste Rondelet

• Architecture, Essai sur l’Art
• Traité Théorique et Pratique de l’Art de Bâtir

3.2 Constructeur, Entrepreneur, ou Architecte

3.3 Trabeated or Arcuated? The Quarrel between a Clergyman and a Military Engineer

4. Matter(s) Hidden in Plain Sight

4.1 Eyes which do not see

• In the Glare of the Forge

• Alternatively, the Engineer’s Aesthetic

4.2 The Death of Matter?

• Architecture in Ruins – Hubert Robert

• Denial of Iron in Support of Builders – John Ruskin

4.3 or, The Composite Imagination

• Structural Hybrids – Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc

• • Woven Surfaces – Gottfried Semper

5. Lost in Translation

5.1 Baukunst, the German Building Art

• • The case of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

5.2 Style, Bauweise, und Tektonik

• • In welchem Style sollen wir bauen? – Heinrich Hübsch
  • Bauweise und Tektonik – Carl Gottlieb Wilhelm Bötticher

5.3 Baumeister and Baukunstler

• • Praktische Ästhetik – Hendrick Petrus Berlage
  • Stilarchitektur und Baukunst – Hermann Muthesius
  • Moderne Architektur or Die Baukunst unserer der Zeit – Otto Wagner

5.4 Bau, Architecture’s Subconscious

• • The Victory of the New Baustils – Walter Curt Behrendt
  • Bauen, Architecture’s Zeitgeist – Sigfried Giedion

5.5 When Language Fails Building

6. From Aesthetics to Ethics, and back

6.1 Building, a Crisis in Representation

6.2 Architecture as Aesthetics, Language, or Re-presentation?

• Aesthetics

• Language

• Re-presentation

6.3 The Ethics of Matter

6.4 A Return to the Art of Building

7. Design and Construction – Walter Gropius and Ove Arup

7.1 Building Collaboratively – Walter Gropius

• • Style or Society?
  • Design Divorced from Building
  • Artists who Make, at the Bauhaus and in Industry
  • Teamwork and Genius
  • Union of Opposites
  • Naively Heroic or Falsely Utopic?
  • Integrated Practice, the origins of

7.2 Engineering Total Design – Ove Arup

• • The Key Speech
  • Concrete, and the Material Imagination
  • Spatializing the Structural Skin
  • Integrating Systems in Building Sections
  • Re-presenting the Invisible
  • Architects, Engineers, and Builders – Engineering Total Design
  • Musings of an old gentleman in a garden – “Architecture is sick, should it be revived?”

8 The Composite Mind Re-Builds Theory

8.1 The Composite Mind

8.2 Re-building Theory

Index, Bibliography, List of Illustrations and Credits