After successful completion of the course, students are able to attain a broader understanding of architecture, not only as a discipline aimed at the realisation of buildings, but also as a device of architectonic thinking that concerns and connects both material and immaterial domains of production and theory.
Mythos and logos: philosophy and, ultimately, science predominantly spring from the contrast staged by such an antinomy. Academic discourse seems today akin to the latter and, after all, from the New Testament to Wittgenstein, from Hegel to Derrida, our world is of logos rather than of myth. The course wants to try to ‘suspend’—to operate an epoché—the implicit judgment in such an antinomy and investigate the hiatus between its terms.
The research to be conducted in the context of a Ph.D. in architecture will be understood not just as research about architecture—that hence follows formats dictated by academic standards external to architecture itself. Instead, architecture will first and foremost be understood as playing a constitutive and ‘projectual’ role for what concerns formats and standards. The course will abstract from academic discourse and disciplinary territories to investigate the possibility of architecture as a form of writing. If epos is what stood in between mythos and logos, this course aims to look at writing as a sort of architectural epos or, conversely, at epos in architectonic terms.
The course will be constituted of three main components: one part of frontal lectures concerning the importance of an architectonic approach to research; a second part of readings on exemplary cases within architecture theory; a third part of presentations by the candidates’ research in light of the themes discussed within the seminar.
Provisional program:
W1 IntroductionW2 EkphrasisW3 Exercise IW4-5 Easter breakW6 RhapsodyW7 Exercise IIW8 EposW9 Exercise IIIW10-11 Exercise IVW12-13 Exercise VW14-15 Final Presentations
Masters students who are working on their diploma and are interested in the topics are also very welcome to join the course!
Attendance and active participation to the course will be the requirements to successfully pass the course.
For any troubles with the registration please contact riccardo.villa@attp.tuwien.ac.at
