Tectonic Thinking
after the
Industrial Revolution
Robert Pirsig, Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture
Lars Spuybroek, The Architecture of Continuity
Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
Ed Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture, Vol. 1
Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism
“... Eduard Sekler defined the tectonic as a
certain expressivity
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Expression (ik-SPRESH'uhn) n. Definition --n.
1. The act of expressing, conveying, or
representing in words, art, music, or
movement.
Express (ik-SPRES') tr.v. Definition --tr.v. pressed, -pressing, -presses.
4. To make a representation of; depict.
5. To represent by a sign or symbol;
symbolize.
[American Heritage Dictionary Online]
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
“... Eduard Sekler defined the tectonic as a
certain expressivity arising from the statical
resistance of constructional form in such a way
that the resultant form could not be accounted
for in terms of structure and construction
alone.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Aesthetics
From Webster’s Online Dictionary
1.a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty,
art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of
beauty
2.a particular theory or conception of beauty or art
Beauty
derived from the Greek Word for “sensory perception”
“skin deep”
“in the eye of the beholder”
classical beauty expresses order and clarity
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Dualities
Art <–> Nature
Art <–> Science
Art –> Fine Arts
Art as expressing
Artist-centered, receivers attitude is irrelevant
Art as pleasing
Viewer-centered, receivers attitude is some form of sensory pleasure
Art as moving
In the lives of the receivers hearts and minds
Art as revealing
Discloses something about reality, enlightening
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Reality
Pirsig, Robert M; Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Quality
Pirsig, Robert M; Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 2: Peace of Mind
“Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.
Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things
and there never is. And when you presume there's just one
right way to do things, of course the instructions begin and
end exclusively with the rotisserie. But if you have to choose
among an infinite number of ways to put it together then
the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the
machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be
considered, because the selection from among many choices,
the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind
and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That's
why you need the peace of mind.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 3: Harmony
“Sometime look at a novice workman or a bad workman and
compare his expression with that of a craftsman whose
work you know is excellent and you'll see the difference.
The craftsman isn't ever following a single line of
instruction. He's making decisions as he goes along. For
that reason he'll be absorbed and attentive to what he's
doing even though he doesn't deliberately contrive this. His
motions and the machine are in a kind of harmony. He isn't
following any set of written instructions because the nature
of the material at hand determines his thoughts and
motions, which simultaneously change the nature of the
material at hand. The material and his thoughts are
changing together in a progression of changes until his
mind's at rest at the same time the material's right.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 4: Transcendance
“All that talk about technology and art is part of a pattern
that seems to have emerged from my own life. It represents
transcendence from something I think a lot of others may be
trying to transcend. Well, it isn't just art and technology.
It's a kind of non-coalescence between reason and feeling.
What's wrong with technology, is that it's not connected in
any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart.
And so it does blind, ugly things quite by accident and gets
hated for that. ….. the ugliness is being noticed more and
more and people are asking if we must always suffer
spiritually and esthetically in order to satisfy material
needs.….. It can't be solved by rational means because the
rationality itself is the source of the problem.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 5: Technology
“The ugliness the Sutherlands were fleeing is not inherent
in technology. It only seemed that way to them because it's
so hard to isolate what it is with technology that's so ugly.
But technology is simply the making of things and the
making of things can't by its own nature be ugly or there
would be no possibility for beauty in the arts, which also
include the making of things. Actually a root word of
technology, technikos, originally meant "art." The ancient
Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their
minds, and so never developed separate words for them.
Neither is the ugliness inherent in the materials of modern
technology - a statement you sometimes hear. Massproduced plastics and synthetics aren't in themselves bad.
They've just acquired bad associations.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 6: Technology
“But, the real ugliness of modern technology isn't found in
any material or shape or act or product. These are just the
objects in which the low Quality appears to reside. It's our
habit of assigning Quality to subjects or objects that gives
this impression. The real ugliness is not the result of any
objects of technology. Nor is it, if one follows Phaedrus'
metaphysics, the result of any subjects of technology, the
people who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or
its absence, doesn't reside in either the subject or the
object.
The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the
people who produce the technology and the things they
produce, which results in a similar relationship between the
people who use the technology and the things they use.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 7: Fusion
“It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all
the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern,
dualistically conceived technology lacks.
The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity with it.
The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity with it.
The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with it.
The way to solve the conflict between human values and
technological needs is not to run away from technology.
That's impossible. The way to resolve the conflict is to
break down the barriers of dualistic thought that prevent a
real understanding of what technology is--not an
exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the
human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends
both.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Historical Tectonic Attitudes
Vitruvius: Firmness, Commodity & Delight
Pugin: “…no features of a building which are not there for
convenience, construction or propriety…all ornament should
consist in the essential construction”
Ruskin’s Architectural Deceits: 1) suggestion of a mode of structure
other than the true one, 2) painting of surfaces to represent some
other material and 3) use of cast or machine made ornaments of
any kind.
Nervi: “... marvelous possibilities cannot be fully developed if the
three fundamental factors of any construction – the architectural
concept, the structural analysis and the correct solution to the
problems of execution.”
Konstantinidis: “Good architecture starts always with efficient
construction.”
Pjer Feld: The use of a given material should never happen by choice
or calculation but only through intuition and desire.
Billington: Efficiency, Economy & Elegance
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
A4229 Studies in Tectonic Culture,
Kenneth Frampton
“ The tectonic suggests itself today as a critical strategy
largely because of the current tendency to commodify
architectural form. It has to be conceded that this concern
largely arises out of a reaction to Robert Venturi's concept of
the "decorated shed." In this regard, it may be seen as a
response to the fashion for reducing architecture to a
spectacular expendable mise en scene. This amortizable
scenographic approach has accompanied the general
dissolution of references in the late modern world. With the
possible exception of applied science, the precepts
governing many discourses today have become rather both
incommunicative and unstable.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Cecil Balmond, 2002
“To my mind the answers lie deep in configuration. As we
are made of patterns, both random and regular, both
physical and emotional, probing the archetypes of pattern is
important - in its recognition and resonance we may find an
element of beauty. In the past , beauty was conditioned by
aspects of purity, fixed symmetries and pared minimal
structure being accepted as norms. …. Now that the world is
being accepted as not simple, the complex and oblique and
the intertwining of logic gain favor. Reason itself is finally
being understood as nascent structure, non-linear and
dependent on feedback procedures. Beauty may lie in the
actual processes of engagement and be more abstract that
the aesthetic of objecthood. Ultimately it may really be a
constructive process.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Richard Sennett, 2008
The architect Renzo Piano explains his own
working procedure thus: “You start by
sketching, then you do a drawing, then you
make a model, and then you go to reality-you
go to the site-and then you go back to
drawing. You build up a kind of circularity
between drawing and making and then back
again.” About repetition and practice Piano
observes, “This is very typical of the
craftsman's approach. You think and you do at
the same time. You draw and you make.
Drawing ... Is revisited. You do it, you redo it,
and you redo it again.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Lars Spuybroek, 2008
Similarly for Spuybroek, the inherently
empathetic nature of materiality is the basis
for a politics of the object, enacted through
the material logics of architecture, which are
understood as continuous with those of the
world. It is the "burning surfaces" of space, he
concludes, that "make us catch fire. That is
true continuity.
from the foreword by Detlef Mertens
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
A Final Thought
“In theory, there is no difference between
theory and practice, but in practice there is.”
Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, 1953–1994
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 8
“When this transcendence occurs in such events as the first
airplane flight across the ocean or the first footstep on the
moon, a kind of public recognition of the transcendent
nature of technology occurs. But this transcendence should
also occur at the individual level, on a personal basis, in
one's own life, in a less dramatic way.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Zen 9
“Such personal transcendence of conflicts with technology
doesn't have to involve motorcycles, of course. It can be at a
level as simple as sharpening a kitchen knife or sewing a
dress or mending a broken chair.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
A.W. Pugin
76 page book entitled “Principles of Pointed or
Christian Architecture”
Two great rules of design:
“there should be no features of a building which are not there for
convenience, construction or propriety”
“...all ornament should consist in the essential construction of
the building. In pure architecture, the smallest detail should
have meaning or purpose.”
Rational Building
= Monolithic Construction
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
John Ruskin:
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
The Lamp of Truth:
Architectural Deceits
1st: The suggestion of a mode of structure or support, other than the
true one......
2nd: The painting of surfaces to represent some other material than
that of which they actually consist.....
3rd: The use of cast or machine made ornaments of any kind.
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Pier Luigi Nervi, 1961
“… the unlimited possibilities of design offered by scientific theories of
construction, the executions made possible by new building materials and
current techniques, and the architectural themes growing ever greater and
more complex as dictated by our social and economic developments, open
horizons of unprecedented possibilities of construction as compared to
what humanity has achieved from prehistoric times to the present.
Nevertheless these marvelous possibilities cannot be fully developed if the
three fundamental factors of any construction – the architectural concept,
the structural analysis… and the correct solution to the problems of
execution – do not proceed in close collaboration having as its aim the sole
and unique goal of arriving at a proposed result combining functionality,
solidity and beauty.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Aris Konstantinidis,
Architecture, 1964
“Good architecture starts always with efficient
construction. Without construction there is no
architecture. Construction embodies material
and its use according to its properties, that is
to say, stone imposes a different method of
construction from iron or concrete.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Sigurd Lewerentz: St. Peters
The column itself is not what it at first appears to
be: split in two from top to bottom, its twin
cross-trees – which are not symmetrical – carry
at their extremities yet further beams which
are also split into pairs. Upon these beams
stand steel struts to support the metal ribs that
support the brick vaults at both springing and
ridgelines alternately. Then again, these ribs to
the vaults are neither horizontal nor do they
run parallel but expand and contract as they
run from wall to wall. Lewerentz speaks of the
vaults as a recall of the ancient symbol of the
heavens, but here his treatment of them is
strangely moving and insinuates into the mind a
closer analogy to the rhythm of breathing – the
rise and fall, the interlocking of expansion and
contraction.
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio
Pjer Feld, 1983
“The use of a given material should never happen by choice or calculation, but
only through intuition and desire.”
“The calculated column expresses nothing more than a particular number . . .
In a world that is determined by calculation, material loses all capacity for
the expression of constructive thought.”
“For the young architect each material is a measurement of strength. To apply
the material to its ultimate capacity is natural for youth. The expression of
this inherent force complements a natural vitality. The material's sensation
carries its conviction and the energy of youth attains a structural
perfection.”
Carnegie Mellon • School of Architecture • Third Year Studio