Architecture is a content area in art education that is not much investigated by art educators. Even less addressed is Romanesque architectural style. Based on direct experiences of visiting hundreds of Romanesque churches in France, Italy, and Spain; many years of teaching design courses; and subsequent research and visual analyses of photos, the author discusses the aesthetic merits of Romanesque architecture through design principles: unity by repetition, variety and contrast, proportion, hierarchical forms, and articulation. Unity, variety, and (...) contrast are found in many modern design books, proportion, less so, but it was very important in the medieval period. Hierarchical forms and articulation are uniquely Romanesque. The author demonstrates that Romanesque builders possessed a great sense of design and creativity. (shrink)

Approaching the subject from an interdisciplinary point of view, in the present article I will suggest an interpretation of several capitals in the Romanesque church at the monastery of San Martín de Frómista in light of the urban revolts at the beginning of the twelfth century in León-Castile. I will also claim a later chronology for the church, whose construction frequently has been located in the second half of the eleventh century. A document making reference to the construction of (...) the monastery of Frómista is dated 1066; it states that an ample donation of land was included along with a subordinate neighborhood of townspeople. Through an architectural and iconographic analysis of the building and the close reading of a narrative source, the so-called Primera crónica anónima de Sahagún , I will propose that the church of San Martín was constructed around 1120, after the subordination of the monastery to Cluny two years earlier. (shrink)

This article presents the recent literature about the church Nossa Senhora da Consolação, considered through the prism of the study of sacred art. After a historical overview about the neighborhood and the ancient temple of Consolation, will be highlighted some most relevant artistic aspects of architecture and works of art gathered in the sacred building, designed by German engineer Maximilian Emil Hehl, whose inspiration reports to the formal and stylistic features of Romanesque architecture as well as the influences of (...) eclecticism with a predominance of Romanesque Revival architecture and Gothic Revival in São Paulo in the early twentieth century. (shrink)

L'incompréhension qui nous saisit face aux nombreuses créatures réelles ou chimériques qui peuplent l'iconographie romane clunisienne, est révélatrice du défi que constitue la pénétration de l'intelligence médiévale du cosmos. Convaincu que ces images trouvent leurs racines dans une vision théologique, Arnaud Montoux soutient que leur présence manifeste le rapport des Clunisiens à la société dont ils se veulent les guides. Parmi les oeuvres théologiques majeures du Moyen Âge carolingien dans lequel s'enracinent l'histoire et la geste clunisiennes, celle de Jean Scot (...) Érigène tient une place singulière ; par son ampleur qui embrasse la totalité de la nature et par son ouverture sur la théologie des Pères grecs, cette pensée témoigne d'un projet théologique de réintégration de la totalité du cosmos en Dieu. Cet ouvrage nous invite à lire l'énoncé iconographique clunisien à la lumière de l'intelligence des destinées du monde que propose le grand théologien irlandais. La première partie s'attache à lire l'histoire de Cluny sous l'angle du réordonnancement du monde, qui caractérise l'action de ses grands abbés. La seconde dégage au sein de l'abbatiale des éléments qui mettent en lumière la procession des êtres à travers lesquels Dieu se manifeste. La troisième partie prétend reconsidérer la place des extrêmes cosmiques que sont l'indigence, la faiblesse, l'étrangeté et la mort dans la dynamique globale de cette procession. Ces recherches interrogent notre capacité à recevoir le foisonnement des images clunisiennes de manière nouvelle, comme signe d'une espérance pour le cosmos."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Este trabajo es una reconstrucción hipotética de la desaparecida iglesia románica medieval de Samper de Calanda, que se basa en las fuentes documentales conservadas y en los materiales procedentes de su fábrica, reutilizados en la iglesia barroca actual. Destacan sendos dinteles de puerta insertos en las paredes norte y sur, cuyo diseño se debe al arquitecto Giacomo de Vignola, que fechamos en el siglo xvii. Palabras clave: iglesias románicas, iglesias barrocas, Giacomo Vignola, arquitectura renacentista, siglo XVII This work is a (...) hypothetical rebuilding of the missing medieval Romanesque church of Samper de Calanda, wich is based on preserved sources of information and material from its masonry, which have been reused in the existent church, which was built during the Baroque period. We must speak about two separate lintels in north and south walls, designed by architect Giacomo de Vignola, dated in the 17thcentury. Key words: Romanesque churches, Baroque churches, Giacomo Vignola, Renaissance architecture. (shrink)

The Erlöserkirche at Bad Homburg was built between 1903 and 1908 at the instigation of Kaiser Wilhelm II. It combines a neo-Romanesque exterior with Norman-Sicilian mosaics inside. Both were „Germanic“ to the emperor, and the church embodied his all encompassing claim to the tradition of the medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Alternatively, the contemporary Byzantinist Ernst Gerland pointed to a Byzantine origin of the Norman-Sicilian models (and thus subtly contradicted the „pan-Germanic“ myth). This „Byzantine“ reading has (...) prevailed ever since, but does not stand up to scrutiny. It only serves to obscure the „pan-Germanic“ concept of the church. This contribution restores the „Germanic“ understanding and makes the point that the latter must be acknowledged in order to make proper sense of the church’s art and architecture, but also in order to face (rather than to downplay and conveniently forget) the racist-chauvinist character of German imperialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 88-94 [Access article in PDF] A Postmodern Tonantzín Jane Duran Visitors to the Puebla area in Mexico are frequently taken to the church of Santa María Tonantzínla, where they are told that they will see three or more styles of architecture simultaneously. Guidebooks to the area prominently feature this church and others like it, both as examples — or so the reader (...) is told — of the "Baroque," and as exemplars of the handiwork and craftsmanship of the indigenous.1 Because of the importance of various notions of style insofar as teaching in the arts is concerned, it might seem important to try to articulate what is meant by simultaneity of styles. In addition, today's students are often baffled by uses of the term "postmodern." In this essay I will argue that Santa María Tonantzínla may have somesurprising lessons for us all.There is no question that the visual effect of the building's interior is, in fact, stunning and that the visitor is simultaneously awed and bemused. Arrivals at this church in the Puebla suburb of Cholula see a riotous profusion of cherubs, angels, and other figures covering the walls, ceiling, nave, and almost every square inch of available space. Although some of the figures do indeed appear to bear a resemblance to those found in European structures created during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, other figures are more or less unrecognizable to most visitors, and clearly seem to be, as the books indicate, of non-European origin. To add to the effect of the stylistic mixing, the façade of the building is somewhat Romanesque, which only makes the interior more surprising and, in its own way, unexpected.I shall argue that work such as that at Tonantzín presents us with a variety of conceptual difficulties from the standpoint of aesthetics, and opens the door for some novel lines of argument. It is first of all quite unclear where the notion of "style" begins at Tonantzín; the boundaries are blurred and here, perhaps more than in most architectural treasures, one does not know how to announce or delineate the various styles. But much more important, [End Page 88] perhaps, is that this very amalgamation lends itself to the notion that one trope, the "postmodern," continually used in a discussion of contemporary architecture, is perhaps more relevant to Tonantzín than one might at first expect. In this essay I shall weave these two lines of argument together to support the contention that Tonantzín is, after all, postmodern. But before we can move to that assertion, it is important to try to think about what a meshing of such styles as "Spanish baroque" and "indigenous" could possibly mean, and why it has seemed urgent for writing on Tonantzín to employ these labels. Architectural Diversity In an intriguing article on the use of terms such as "modern" and "postmodern" in contemporary architecture, David Goldblatt has argued that Venturi's claim that modernity lacks what he terms diversity is more or less vacuous. As Goldblatt claims, the concept of diversity within a given work does not make much sense. More important for our purposes, Goldblatt goes on to provide a gloss on the notion of electicism, and its relation to a variety of architectural styles. He writes: When Venturi claims that modern architecture lacks diversity, he primarily means that it fails to achieve what he calls a pluralism. What he calls for is "Scarlatti and the Beatles, if diversity is to be achieved"....What Venturi is advocating is eclecticism.2As Goldblatt claims, eclecticism is the hallmark of the postmodern in architecture, and the eclectic pastiche that is Las Vegas — especially in terms of borrowed styles, ornamentation, and visible fripperies within the context of one building — becomes exemplary of that term and what it evokes. But to say simply that there may well be instances of the postmodern in architecture before the twentieth century, and before the decline of modernity itself, is to say very little. As Goldblatt... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 88-94 [Access article in PDF] A Postmodern Tonantzín Jane Duran Visitors to the Puebla area in Mexico are frequently taken to the church of Santa María Tonantzínla, where they are told that they will see three or more styles of architecture simultaneously. Guidebooks to the area prominently feature this church and others like it, both as examples — or so the reader (...) is told — of the "Baroque," and as exemplars of the handiwork and craftsmanship of the indigenous.1 Because of the importance of various notions of style insofar as teaching in the arts is concerned, it might seem important to try to articulate what is meant by simultaneity of styles. In addition, today's students are often baffled by uses of the term "postmodern." In this essay I will argue that Santa María Tonantzínla may have somesurprising lessons for us all.There is no question that the visual effect of the building's interior is, in fact, stunning and that the visitor is simultaneously awed and bemused. Arrivals at this church in the Puebla suburb of Cholula see a riotous profusion of cherubs, angels, and other figures covering the walls, ceiling, nave, and almost every square inch of available space. Although some of the figures do indeed appear to bear a resemblance to those found in European structures created during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, other figures are more or less unrecognizable to most visitors, and clearly seem to be, as the books indicate, of non-European origin. To add to the effect of the stylistic mixing, the façade of the building is somewhat Romanesque, which only makes the interior more surprising and, in its own way, unexpected.I shall argue that work such as that at Tonantzín presents us with a variety of conceptual difficulties from the standpoint of aesthetics, and opens the door for some novel lines of argument. It is first of all quite unclear where the notion of "style" begins at Tonantzín; the boundaries are blurred and here, perhaps more than in most architectural treasures, one does not know how to announce or delineate the various styles. But much more important, [End Page 88] perhaps, is that this very amalgamation lends itself to the notion that one trope, the "postmodern," continually used in a discussion of contemporary architecture, is perhaps more relevant to Tonantzín than one might at first expect. In this essay I shall weave these two lines of argument together to support the contention that Tonantzín is, after all, postmodern. But before we can move to that assertion, it is important to try to think about what a meshing of such styles as "Spanish baroque" and "indigenous" could possibly mean, and why it has seemed urgent for writing on Tonantzín to employ these labels. Architectural Diversity In an intriguing article on the use of terms such as "modern" and "postmodern" in contemporary architecture, David Goldblatt has argued that Venturi's claim that modernity lacks what he terms diversity is more or less vacuous. As Goldblatt claims, the concept of diversity within a given work does not make much sense. More important for our purposes, Goldblatt goes on to provide a gloss on the notion of electicism, and its relation to a variety of architectural styles. He writes: When Venturi claims that modern architecture lacks diversity, he primarily means that it fails to achieve what he calls a pluralism. What he calls for is "Scarlatti and the Beatles, if diversity is to be achieved"....What Venturi is advocating is eclecticism.2As Goldblatt claims, eclecticism is the hallmark of the postmodern in architecture, and the eclectic pastiche that is Las Vegas — especially in terms of borrowed styles, ornamentation, and visible fripperies within the context of one building — becomes exemplary of that term and what it evokes. But to say simply that there may well be instances of the postmodern in architecture before the twentieth century, and before the decline of modernity itself, is to say very little. As Goldblatt... (shrink)

Representations of monsters and the monstrous are common in medieval art and architecture, from the grotesques in the borders of illuminated manuscripts to the symbol of the "green man", widespread in churches and cathedrals. These mysterious depictions are frequently interpreted as embodying or mitigating the fears symptomatic of a "dark age". This book, however, considers an alternative scenario: in what ways did monsters in twelfth-century sculpture help audiences envision, perhaps even achieve, various ambitions? Using examples of Romanesque sculpture from (...) across Europe, with a focus on France and northern Portugal, the author suggests that medieval representations of monsters could service ideals, whether intellectual, political, religious, and social, even as they could simultaneously articulate fears; he argues that their material presence energizes works of art in paradoxical, even contradictory ways. In this way, Romanesque monsters resist containment within modern interpretive categories and offer testimony to the density and nuance of the medieval imagination. (shrink)

This book is a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. The Architecture of the Mind has three main goals. One is to argue for massive mental modularity. Another is to answer a 'How possibly?' challenge to any such approach. The first part of the book lays out the positive case supporting massive modularity. It also outlines how the thesis should best (...) be developed, and articulates the notion of 'module' that is in question. Then the second part of the book takes up the challenge of explaining how the sorts of flexibility and creativity that are distinctive of the human mind could possibly be grounded in the operations of a massive number of modules.Peter Carruthers's third aim is to show how the various components of the mind are likely to be linked and interact with one another - indeed, this is crucial to demonstrating how the human mind, together with its familiar capacities, can be underpinned by a massively modular set of mechanisms. He outlines and defends the basic framework of a perception / belief / desire / planning / motor-control architecture, as well as detailing the likely components and their modes of connectivity. Many specific claims about the place within this architecture of natural language, of a mind-reading system, and others are explained and motivated. A number of novel proposals are made in the course of these discussions, one of which is that creative human thought depends upon a prior kind of creativity of action.Written with unusual clarity and directness, and surveying an extensive range of research in cognitive science, this book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the nature and organization of the mind. (shrink)

There is fast-growing awareness of the role atmospheres play in architecture. Of equal interest to contemporary architectural practice as it is to aesthetic theory, this 'atmospheric turn' owes much to the work of the German philosopher Gernot Böhme. Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces brings together Böhme's most seminal writings on the subject, through chapters selected from his classic books and articles, many of which have hitherto only been available in German. This is the only translated version authorised by (...) Böhme himself, and is the first coherent collection deploying a consistent terminology. It is a work which will provide rich references and a theoretical framework for ongoing discussions about atmospheres and their relations to architectural and urban spaces. Combining philosophy with architecture, design, landscape design, scenography, music, art criticism, and visual arts, the essays together provide a key to the concepts that motivate the work of some of the best contemporary architects, artists, and theorists: from Peter Zumthor, Herzog & de Meuron and Juhani Pallasmaa to Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell. With a foreword by Professor Mark Dorrian and an afterword by Professor David Leatherbarrow,, the volume also includes a general introduction to the topic, including coverage of it history, development, areas of application and conceptual apparatus. (shrink)

This article connects value-sensitive design to Gibson’s affordance theory: the view that we perceive in terms of the ease or difficulty with which we can negotiate space. Gibson’s ideas offer a nonsubjectivist way of grasping culturally relative values, out of which we develop a concept of political affordances, here understood as openings or closures for social action, often implicit. Political affordances are equally about environments and capacities to act in them. Capacities and hence the severity of affordances vary with age, (...) health, social status and more. This suggests settings are selectively permeable, or what postphenomenologists call multistable. Multistable settings are such that a single physical location shows up differently – as welcoming or hostile – depending on how individuals can act on it. In egregious cases, authoritarian governments redesign politically imbued spaces to psychologically cordon both them and the ideologies they represent. Selective permeability is also orchestrated according to business interests, which is symptomatic of commercial imperatives increasingly dictating what counts as moral and political goods. (shrink)

La contribution de Michel Troper à la théorie générale du droit et à la théorie constitutionnelle est aujourd'hui reconnue et célébrée un peu partout dans le monde. Un talent d'architecte se tient à l'origine de cette audience rarement égalée dans la sphère francophone : celui qu'il faut pour accommoder toutes les exigences, quel que soit l'ordre de valeur dans lequel on les trouve : originalité, rigueur, souci de la fonction, esthétisme, solidité, adaptation, intelligence, inquiétude, esprit critique, renoncement, réalisme... A ces (...) mérites, on ajoutera une curiosité insatiable, un goût prononcé pour l'échange et le débat, un refus distingué de l'académisme, un sens exigeant de l'amitié et une méfiance profônde pour les adjectifs... C'est cet édifice de qualités que les élèves, collègues et amis de Michel Troper sont heureux de célébrer en lui offrant ces Mélanges. (shrink)

By considering S/Z as an early example of the romanesque in Roland Barthes's oeuvre, this article considers the generic and thematic anticipation of La Préparation du roman in Barthes's seminars of the late 1960s. It suggests that his seminar notes on Balzac's Sarrasine written in 1968 and 1969 are a form of proto-essayism, albeit given as seminars in the institutional context of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. This essayism is traced through the notion of perte de (...) soi evident in two aspects of the seminar notes: firstly, in the ‘drugged reading’ that Barthes proposes, and then through his ambivalence to the literary character. Working ‘retroactively’, the article concludes that La Préparation du roman can help us to explain S/Z and its genesis, that is proactively, by applying this perte de soi to the act of one about to write a novel. (shrink)

The literature on theoretical reason has been dominated by epistemological concerns, treatments of practical reason by ethical concerns. This book overcomes the limitations of dealing with each separately. It sets out a comprehensive theory of rationality applicable to both practical and theoretical reason. In both domains, Audi explains how experience grounds rationality, delineates the structure of central elements, and attacks the egocentric conception of rationality. He establishes the rationality of altruism and thereby supports major moral principles. The concluding part describes (...) the pluralism and relativity his conception of rationality accommodates and, taking the unified account of theoretical and practical rationality in that light, constructs a theory of global rationality--the overall rationality of persons. Rich in narrative examples, intriguing analogies, and intuitively appealing arguments, this beautifully crafted book will spur advances in ethics and epistemology as well in philosophy of mind and action and the theory of rationality itself. (shrink)

Architecture Theory is a comprehensive and groundbreaking one volume overview of, and introduction to, contemporary critical discourse in architecture. In bringing critical theory and Continental philosophy to bear upon architecture, it provides a solid framework for a fully up-to-date theory of architecture, one that reflects the latest developments and concerns. The book is divided into four sections—groundwork; constructing the "individual"; pluralities; instrumentality—each covering a core theme in contemporary architecture theory. In each section an introductory essay by Andrew Ballantyne provides valuable (...) context, exposition, and analysis. This is followed by a selection of writings on architecture and other related cultural concerns from major contemporary thinkers, including Zvizvek, Irigaray, Lefebvre, Lyotard, Kristeva, Nancy, Virilio, Deleuze, and Negri. (shrink)

Amongst philosophers and cognitive scientists, modularity remains a popular choice for an architecture of the human mind, primarily because of the supposed explanatory value of this approach. Modular architectures can vary both with respect to the strength of the notion of modularity and the scope of the modularity of mind. We propose a dilemma for modular architectures, no matter how these architectures vary along these two dimensions. First, if a modular architecture commits to the informational encapsulation of modules, as it (...) is the case for modularity theories of perception, then modules are on this account impenetrable. However, we argue that there are genuine cases of the cognitive penetrability of perception and that these cases challenge any strong, encapsulated modular architecture of perception. Second, many recent massive modularity theories weaken the strength of the notion of module, while broadening the scope of modularity. These theories do not require any robust informational encapsulation, and thus avoid the incompatibility with cognitive penetrability. However, the weakened commitment to informational encapsulation greatly weakens the explanatory force of the theory and, ultimately, is conceptually at odds with the core of modularity. (shrink)

Architecture as Experience investigates the perception and appropriation of places across intervals of time and culture. The particular concern of the volume is to bring together fresh empirical research and animate it through contact with theoretical sophistication, without overwhelming the material. The chapters establish the continuity of a particular physical object and show it in at least two alternative historical perspectives, in which recognisable features are shown in different lights. The results are often surprising, inverting the common idea of a (...) historic place as having an enduring meaning. This book shows the insight that can be gained from learning about earlier constructions of meaning which have been derived from the same buildings that stand before us today. (shrink)

Essays at the intersection of philosophy and architecture explore how we understand and inhabit space. To be outside allows one a fresh perspective on the inside. In these essays, philosopher Elizabeth Grosz explores the ways in which two disciplines that are fundamentally outside each another—architecture and philosophy—can meet in a third space to interact free of their internal constraints. "Outside" also refers to those whose voices are not usually heard in architectural discourse but who inhabit its space—the destitute, the homeless, (...) the sick, and the dying, as well as women and minorities. Grosz asks how we can understand space differently in order to structure and inhabit our living arrangements accordingly. Two themes run throughout the book: temporal flow and sexual specificity. Grosz argues that time, change, and emergence, traditionally viewed as outside the concerns of space, must become more integral to the processes of design and construction. She also argues against architecture's historical indifference to sexual specificity, asking what the existence of (at least) two sexes has to do with how we understand and experience space. Drawing on the work of such philosophers as Henri Bergson, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Lacan, Grosz raises abstract but nonformalistic questions about space, inhabitation, and building. All of the essays propose philosophical experiments to render space and building more mobile and dynamic. (shrink)

Architectural Philosophy is the first book to outline a philosophical account of architecture and to establish the singularity of architectural practice and ...

Cognitive architectures - task-general theories of the structure and function of the complete cognitive system - are sometimes argued to be more akin to frameworks or belief systems than scientific theories. The argument stems from the apparent non-falsifiability of existing cognitive architectures. Newell was aware of this criticism and argued that architectures should be viewed not as theories subject to Popperian falsification, but rather as Lakatosian research programs based on cumulative growth. Newell's argument is undermined because he failed to demonstrate (...) that the development of Soar, his own candidate architecture, adhered to Lakatosian principles. This paper presents detailed case studies of the development of two cognitive architectures, Soar and ACT-R, from a Lakatosian perspective. It is demonstrated that both are broadly Lakatosian, but that in both cases there have been theoretical progressions that, according to Lakatosian criteria, are pseudo-scientific. Thus, Newell's defense of Soar as a scientific rather than pseudo-scientific theory is not supported in practice. The ACT series of architectures has fewer pseudo-scientific progressions than Soar, but it too is vulnerable to accusations of pseudo-science. From this analysis, it is argued that successive versions of theories of the human cognitive architecture must explicitly address five questions to maintain scientific credibility. (shrink)

Ciudad Cayalá in Guatemala brands itself as the country’s first private city. I turn to Hannah Arendt to show how and why Cayalá does not and cannot provide the space of appearance she argues is needed to support the possibility of political action. I show how Arendt provides two apparently distinct phenomenological accounts in The Human Condition—one historically-oriented and the other politically-oriented—that articulate how Cayalá fails in its aspiration to privatize the political. Yet the apparent divergence between her accounts raises (...) concern about her relevance for liberatory feminist projects. To demonstrate how and why Arendt’s political phenomenology is aligned with certain feminist aims, I also generate a Cayaláian reading of Arendt to demonstrate the coherence of her two phenomenological accounts through interpreting her thinking by way of Cayalá’s architecture. This article enacts a dialogue between Arendt and Cayalá, mediated by feminist and architectural theory, concerning why efforts toward the privatization of cities will fail. (shrink)

In this paper we engage in a reciprocal analysis of situated cognition and the notion of ‘meshed architecture’ as found in performance studies (Christensen, Sutton & McIlwain 2016). We argue that the model of meshed architecture can operate as a tool that enables us to better understand the notion of situated cognition. Reciprocally, by means of this new understanding of situation we develop a richer conception of meshed architecture. This enriched notion of a meshed architecture includes affect and bottom-up, non-automatic, (...) intrinsic control aspects of body-schematic processes and intelligent habits, on a vertical axis, as well as extended, ecological and worldly (material, normative, social, cultural) constraints and affordances on a horizontal axis. This gives us a very productive way to think about how various elements come together in skilled action and performance, but also a detailed way to characterize situated cognition. (shrink)

Paulo Freire is undeniably a prominent figure who greatly influenced 21st century higher education. More specifically, architectural education been greatly affected by Freire’s thinking in relation to producing a design project with dialogue and consciousness. This study aims to implement Freire’s thoughts in contemporary design studios, where the core courses of architectural education occur. This study employs a narrative methodology and in-depth interviews with third-year students from the design studios of two universities, one public and another private. The study investigates (...) the impact of the concept of ‘dialogue’ on student creativity, and ‘banking education’ thought of Freire to determine how this idea affects students’ consciousness of their learning process. Therefore, this research attempts to apply three of Freire’s key thoughts that have been discussed in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: ‘dialogue’, ‘consciousness’, and ‘banking education’. As a result, banking education applied by local-experienced instructors in the public university has confused students when applying given information to the theoretical part of their projects, which directed them to show fewer creative concepts. On the other hand, the students had greater consciousness of their learning process, awareness of their strengths and weaknesses in regard to the concepts of their design projects, and involvement in their classes when they felt a dialogue by the abroad-experienced instructors in the private university. This study shows that architectural education in that region requires a serious consciousness of Freirean theory. (shrink)

This survey chapter discusses four issues in architectural aesthetics: architectural design, architectural style, the justification of “optical correction”, and the metaphysics of reconstruction.

This volume presents new essays on the propositional imagination by leading researchers. The propositional imagination---the mental capacity we exploit when we imagine that everyone is colour-blind or that Hamlet is a procrastinator---plays an essential role in philosophical theorizing, engaging with fiction, and indeed in everyday life. Yet only recently has there been a systematic attempt to give a cognitive account of the propositional imagination. These thirteen essays, specially written for the volume, capitalize on this recent work, extending the theoretical picture (...) of the imagination and exploring the philosophical implications of cognitive accounts of the imagination. The book also investigates broader philosophical issues surrounding the propositional imagination. The first section addresses the nature of the imagination, its role in emotion production, and its sophistication manifestation in childhood. The essays in the second section focus on the nature of pretence and how pretence is implicated in adult communication. The third section addresses the problem of 'imaginative resistance', the striking fact that when we encounter morally repugnant assertions in fiction, we seem to resist imagining them and accepting them as fictionally true. In the final section, contributors explore the relation between imagining, conceiving, and judgements of possibility and impossibility. The Architecture of the Imagination will be an essential resource for the growing number of philosophers and psychologists studying the nature of the imagination and on its role in philosophy, aesthetics, and everyday life. (shrink)

The paper suggests that architectural making , a process of research in practice , and itself a bridging between the space of experience and the horizon of expectations , corresponds to phenomenology as a method of inquiry. This includes architectural phases parallel to epoché, phenomenological reduction, free variations, transcendental intuition of the essence, and description . The paper describes the in-between, its two edges, experience and expectations, and their mutual influences through the process of architectural making. Examples from the design (...) studio and professional literature illustrate the argumentation. The in-between is presented as structured, notably having a depth—the ineffable origin of creativity. In conclusion, the paper suggests that the edges and the in-between are temporary configurations in flux, wherein the architect makes use of his/her most inner resources, as a contribution to the metamorphosis and revitalization of his/her culture. (shrink)

Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these -- and the press of subtler questions hidden (...) in their amibiguities -- deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the program of the geometrization of nature on the other. (shrink)

Tetsuro Watsuji's Notion of Fudo and Its Cultural Significance -- 'Self-less Openness' and Fudo: Renewed Sustainable Significance of Japanese Vernacular Architecture -- The Ecology of 'We' and Ambient Warmth: Richard Neutra's Ecological Architecture -- Dialectics between the Regional and the Trans-Regional.

Paul Engelmann was Adolf Loos's favorite pupil, private secretary to Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein's most important interlocutor in the years between 1916 and 1928 as well as his partner in building the Stonborough House. Thus it was that the trenchant critique of modernity associated with Wittgenstein's Vienna originated around Paul Engelmann. The present volume of essays from an international symposium in Aarhus, Denmark in 1999 offers an interdisciplinary perspective on issues bearing upon architecture, language and cultural criticism as they (...) relate to the life's work of Paul Engelmann. (shrink)

In this study, we propose and test a model of the effects of organizational ethical culture and organizational architecture on the perceived unethical behavior of employees towards customers. This study also examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture and moral acceptability judgment, hypothesizing that moral acceptability judgment is an important stage in the ethical decision-making process. Based on a field study in one of the largest financial institutions in Europe, we found that organizational ethical culture was significantly related to the (...) perceived frequency of unethical behavior towards customers and to the moral acceptability judgment of this type of unethical behavior. No support was found for the claim that features of organizational architecture are associated with the perceived frequency of unethical behavior towards customers. This is the first study to document the differential effects of organizational architecture and organizational ethical culture on perceived unethical behavior of employees towards customers, in wholesale banking. Implications for managers and future research are discussed. (shrink)

In our contribution we will observe phenomenal architecture of a mind and operational architectonics of the brain and will show their intimate connectedness within a single integrated metastable continuum. The notion of operation of different complexity is the fundamental and central one in bridging the gap between brain and mind: it is precisely by means of this notion that it is possible to identify what at the same time belongs to the phenomenal conscious level and to the neurophysiological level of (...) brain activity organization, and what mediates between them. Implications for linguistic semantics, self-organized distributed computing algorithms, artificial machine consciousness, and diagnosis of dynamic brain diseases will be discussed briefly. (shrink)

Compositionality has been a central concept in linguistics and philosophy for decades, and it is increasingly prominent in many other areas of cognitive science. Its status, however, remains contentious. Here, I reassess the nature and scope of the principle of compositionality (Partee, 1995) from the perspective of psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience. First, I review classic arguments for compositionality and conclude that they fail to establish compositionality as a property of human language. Next, I state a new competence argument, acknowledging the (...) fact that any competent user of a language L can assign to most expressions in L at least one meaning which is a functiononlyof the meanings of the expression's parts and of its syntactic structure. I then discuss selected results from cognitive neuroscience, indicating that the human brain possesses the processing capacities presupposed by the competence argument. Finally, I outline a language processing architecture consistent with the neuroscience results, where semantic representations may be generated by a syntax‐driven streamandby an “asyntactic” processing stream, jointly or independently. Compositionality is viewed as a constraint on computation in the former stream only. (shrink)

Expanding his collected essays on architectural theory and criticism, Chris Abel pursues his explorations across disciplinary and regional boundaries in search of a deeper understanding of architecture in the evolution of human culture and identity formation. From his earliest writings predicting the computer-based revolution in customised architectural production, through his novel studies on 'tacit knowing' in design or hybridisation in regional and colonial architecture, to his radical theory of the 'extended self', Abel has been a consistently fresh and provocative thinker, (...) contesting both conventions and intellectual fashions. This revised third edition includes a new introduction and six additional chapters by the author covering a broad range of related topics, up to recent concerns with genetic design methods and virtual selves. Together with the former essays, the book presents a unique global perspective on the changing cultural issues and technologies shaping human identities and the built environment in diverse parts of the world, both East and West (from the book cover). (shrink)

In discussions regarding models of cognition, the very mention of “computationalism” often incites reactions against the insufficiency of the Turing machine model, its abstractness, determinism, the lack of naturalist foundations, triviality and the absence of clarity. None of those objections, however, concerns models based on natural computation or computing nature, where the model of computation is broader than symbol manipulation or conventional models of computation. Computing nature consists of physical structures that form layered computational architecture, with computation processes ranging from (...) quantum to chemical, biological/cognitive and social-level computation. It is argued that, on the lower levels of information processing in the brain, finite automata or Turing machines may still be adequate models, while, on the higher levels of whole-brain information processing, natural computing models are necessary. A layered computational architecture of the mind based on the intrinsic computing of physical systems avoids objections against early versions of computationalism in the form of abstract symbols manipulation. (shrink)