Architecture Depends

mybooknotes | davide tommaso ferrando

I am used to writing on the books I read, summing up and sometimes commenting the parts that are more relevant to me on their first pages, which are usually left blank, so to be able to easily find them. What follows is what I noted down at the beginning of Architecture Depends, written by Jeremy Till (MIT Press, 2009).

Codex Seraphinianus

Notes

p.15 Fresh conservatorism

p.22 A text is not a building is not a drawing – each has ts own conditions of production and reception

p.47 The contingent researcher

p.50 [Modernity]

p.55 Uncertainty creates gaps in which opportunities for transformation keep flowering

p.58 [Relativism]

p.60 Situated knowledge, alternative objectivity -> be responsible, look at the particular and don’t worry to be partial

p.67 ALL ARCHITECTURE IS BUT WASTE IN TRANSIT!!

p.68 Construction and [demolition] are closer than most architects would admit

p.69 [Waste]

p.79 [Time]

p.85 Architecture and capitalism

p.88 Spatial complexity is down to far more than mere formal attributes

p.95 [Thick Time]

p.101 [Whitewash]

p.106 [Entropy]

p.110 Sketch: autonomy driven by the obsession for the codes of representation

p.112 You are not drawing buildings: you are drawing ideas

p.118 [Space]

p.123 “Neutral” space is the space of capitalism

p.124 |Architecture is always political|

p.125 |(Social) space is a (social) product|

p.137, 145 [Lo-Fi architecture]

p.138 Las Vegas: popular forms appropriated by the market as velvet gloves for the iron fist of corporate capitalism wrapping hard space in quasi-familiar images

p.139 The everyday

p.140 Architecture as progress

p.161 The knowledge needed to define the profession is different from the knowledge needed to effect architectural practice

p.165 |Architect as interpretive agent| [Participation]

p.167 |The best solution to an architectural problem is not necessarily a building (Cedric Price)|

p.173 [Ethics]

p.178 The aesthetics = ethics equation is flawed because architecture depends on society and not the other way around

p.182 |Phony sustainability|

p.186 Postmodern ethics: the best possible choices in the name of others

p.190 |Dialectical utopianism|

p.192 In every formative context there is the potential for change

p.193 Hope is founded in the intersects of the given