On Contemporary Architecture
GSD 3211, Spring

What remains in contemporary architecture of the “avant garde” modern architecture principles?

Until very recently, it was widely accepted that contemporary architecture arose directly from the roots of the early XX century “avant garde” modern architecture. It was understood that current architecture came as a result of an elaboration and exacerbation of XX century “avant garde” principles. And yet I believe that today, with the exception of certain points of coincidence, many inspirations of the XX century “avant garde” no longer influence the work of today. This lecture course examines this change and explores the reasons behind these new and different conditions. First we establish certain foundation principles of the “avant garde” and the circumstances which provoked them. For the purposes of the course, we focus on specific references that allow us to establish clear counterpoints and oppositions. I will use the work of Le Corbusier, both texts and designs, in order to establish those beginnings in order to better define the contrasts explicit in today’s attitudes. Other architects and sources are also cited where necessary but I believe the work of Le Corbusier offers a synthesis of the avant garde ideology and therefore provides a particularly pertinent reference. In as much as we use a single figure to establish the tenets of modernism, we consider a broad range of architects in order to understand today's tendencies. These architects include Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Toyo Ito, Zaha Hadid, Steve Holl, Greg Lynn, FOA, MRVD, van Berkel, Sejima, Zumthor, etc. The lecture course is developed in four one week segments during the first week of February, March, April and May.

This lecture course follows the latest episodes in contemporary architecture. The development of a critical perspective is, in my view, one of the ways of understanding the architect's initial goals, their immediate references, the particular cultural challenges, and the specific issues to be resolved. Our consideration of these conditions allows us to establish a criticism from within the discipline of architecture.

We focus on specific buildings with a clear objective: to analyze how these buildings have been designed. In addition to the consideration of theoretical and cultural questions, I would like to revisit the architect's intentions and the architectural design process. While it is very difficult to make general considerations about methodology, I do believe it is feasible with specific buildings and so we focus on buildings that I have visited and that allow me to talk of both the results and the intentions. We judge how the architects' resolved their stated objectives and the tools they employed. Once more we base our research on individuals, and even moreso on specific buildings, instead of analyzing a style or a school.

Buildings from Within
GSD 3424, Seminar, Spring 2007

As a complement to the lecture course, this seminar examines 4 projects of my own. For each individual project, I will attempt to relate the architectural design principles and goals in their specific circumstances. Often in the schools, architecture seems to be a practice freed of the constraints that appear in daily life. The reality is that design is fraught with obstacles and opportunities determined by the site, the program, codes, budgets and the building industry.

Most current architecture evolves through a process of resolving imposed demands and limitations which ought to be overcome by means of the architectural design. Is architectural knowledge still a valuable tool for solving these problems? This is the question I would like to consider with these 4 examples. Our goal is to generate a genuine dialogue between the architect and the students through an examination of buildings with similar programs, yet marked by the differences of site, program and circumstance.

The projects discussed include:

Harvard University LISE
Cambridge, MA
2001-present

Novartis Laboratories
Basel, Switzerland
2005-present

Columbia University Laboratories
NYC
2005-present

Princeton University Laboratories
Princeton, NJ
2006-present

Architectural criticism in the post-Tafuri era
GSD 3416, Spring

Twentieth century modern architecture always had as a mandatory companion a group of critics, which were ready to argue in favor of the new works. Le Corbusier and Mies, Gropius and Aalto, enjoyed a partisan criticism ready to fight on behalf of their architecture. A critic like Sigfried Giedion is a clear example of a scholar who became the advocate of the avant-garde and whose intention was to provide the intellectual support for justifying a specific architectural trend. Giedion came from an aesthetic school which could be considered related with the late nineteenth century idealistic critics and his reading of the architects he speaks for tries to explain their work as a synthetic expression of the spirit of the times, which is reflected in the appearance, that means including in them all the technical and visual achievements. His attempt was to give to what we call "Modern Architecture" a solid theoretical foundation.

And the same could be said of a critic such as Bruno Zevi, who was always looking forward to trying to legitimize modernity, and went a bit further seeing the fulfillment of architectural history in the assumption of architecture as "art of the space" and identifying Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture as the first moment in history in which that happens without mediations.

A critic as Reyner Banham was aware that he served the new generation of architects "his contemporaries of Team" and looked to incorporate life and history in a broader sense when talking about architects. Less confident than Giedion or Zevi, Banham could not be called an advocate of the same modernity Giedion and Zevi talked about. But he still can be seen as related to the architects of his age and tries to put his broad field of knowledge to their service. James Stirling or the Smithsons thought that Banham was their spokesman. Less linear in the arguments he uses, he opens the doors to what would be the new approach which transferred the pure-visual considerations to sheer history.

In the sixties and seventies history—even written with capital letters—became the only way for explaining architecture, a history which rapidly is put in context by Marxism. Tafuri would be the best known critic of such a tendency. Instead of an architectural criticism based on formal considerations—such as Colin Rowe's following the steps of a historian like Rudolf Wittkower—what the architectural historians were pursuing was at most to establish the connections between the works they examined and the ideology behind them, explaining architecture as one more reflection of the class struggle. Architecture in itself or as a work of art was not the issue. Architecture, architectural practice, would no longer be helped by critics. Tafuri resisted what he called "operative criticism" and as the result architects do not benefit from the efforts of the critics to clarify and explain the works they do.

Since then, criticism would no longer be an ally of the architectural practice and, instead, it was increasingly looking to become autonomous. The emphasis of deconstructivism in the subject—the reader as the only one responsible for the text—became the way of approaching architectural writing. Criticism lost contact with the referent to architectural works to be examined and tried to be inspired by the new philosophical reflection. Those who write about architecture were tempted either by the literary value of what they write or by new subjects such as gender/race or the presence in architecture of everyday life. So critics are often closer to what we can to see in texts of philosophers or sociologists, but very rarely are they enticed by a clear architectural reference. As the result, architectural criticism did not play the role it had in the middle of the twentieth century anymore. Obviously not all the critics can be considered in the same way, and therefore it is quite valuable to establish differences.

This seminar examines the situation in which we find ourselves today through the reading of pieces by critics which support clearly the field nowadays: texts from Robin Evans, Beatriz Colomina, Josep Quetglas, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Catherine Ingraham, Jeff Kipnis, Mary McLeod, Jennifer Bloomer, Michael Hays, and Mark Wigley are examined.

Design Theories in Architecture
GSD 3211, Spring 2002

Throughout our investigation of twelve contemporary buildings this lecture course examines the development of architecture during the last forty years. During the first week we approach the late 50s and 60s by taking a look at buildings such as Louis Kahn's Yale Art Gallery, a building that would mark his first appearance as an important architect, Torre Velasca, the daring solution of BBPR for the construction of a skyscraper in the city of Milan and the optimistic and challenging Sydney Opera House by Jørn Utzon.

The second week brings us to the work of architects who dominated the architectural scene in the 60s and 70s. We start with the Stuttgart Museum, a late career building of James Stirling that summarizes the aesthetic of post-modernism. We then look at the Sainsbury Wing extension of the National Gallery in London of Venturi and Scott Brown, and example of a certain, personal vision of architecture followed by one of the last works of Rossi, the Schützenstrasse housing block in Berlin, where the drama of materializing his theory reaches its apogee. During the third week we study the work of architects who dominated the 89s, Gehry, Eisenman and Siza. In the case of Eisenman, we look at one of his largest works up until now, the Wexner Center in Ohio, his last project related to artificial excavation and we will contrast it with one of his recent works, the City of Culture in Santiago de Compostela. For Gehry we look at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, which is still in most people's view, his most fulfilled work. For Siza we look at the church in the town of Marco de Canavezes where the wisdom of a mature architect reaches an admirable level of formal economy. During the fourth week, we discuss a large and small work by Rem Koolhaas and we study the Dominus Winery in the Nappa Valley of Herzog and de Meuron. In the last lecture, I present the L. A. Cathedral, one of my most recent works. I hope that this presentation allows students to better understand my views on the work of such an important group of colleagues.