Week Three Summary -  'Notes Towards a History of Change'

In this article Simon Sadler uses the lives of recently deceased, David Bowie and Steve Jobs, to discuss the nature of change.  Throughout their successful careers both men reinvented themselves a number of times and even seemed to have viewed their impending deaths as a final creative opportunity. Sadler believes students study design out of a desire to “change things” but don’t actually get taught the change process which should be goal-directed. Sadler frames his discussion by acknowledging that understanding and predicting the course of change is challenging. He uses the analogy of a new window in his kitchen which will immediately result in a lighter room but will it also improve his lectures and motivate his students? Impossible to predict the impact a small change might ultimately have on the larger system. He identifies a number of different schools of thought all with different views and understandings of design and change, yet all somehow managing to co-exist as a single discipline. Sadler traces the changes in the practice of design over the past 50 years suggesting that it has moved from ambitious self-confidence to less ambitious “ creative problem solving and optimistic design thinking” He concludes by reminding us that while change happens at both a personal and societal level, lasting change requires “people working together with discipline and persistence”.

Week Two Summary: 'Architecture & Disjunction' 

This essay by architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi (1994) reflects on the 1970’s when he controversially argued that there is no architecture without spaces and events. He felt that architecture had become obsessed with stylistic concerns and was often reduced to an object or a glossy image in a magazine that you looked at instead of a place and the events that occur within it. His theory is that architecture is not defined by its form but by the way it weaves together space, movement and events. He discusses the interconnected concepts of program and movement. Program explores the activities and events that take place in a building, while movement charts the flow of bodies through spaces. He encouraged his students to explore and incorporate other genres such as art, dance, music, film and literature into their research. At the time he was criticised by his colleagues for this approach.  

Week One Summary: ‘The Eyes of the Skin’

In the now classic architectural textbook, The Eyes of the skin, Juhani Pallasmaa (2005) points out that for centuries architecture has been dominated by what is seen while the other senses have been neglected. According to Pallasmaa (2005) the built environment helps us to structure and understand the world we live in. It also helps us understand the concepts of permanence and change and the culture and time we live in. Places and spaces play an inherent part in our memories, they become part of who we are, what we identify with and where we feel we belong. He argues that one of the key tasks of architecture is to bring together people and places and this happens through the stimulation of all the senses not just visually. He quotes architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, who using the human characteristic of integrity, applied it to buildings, and urged architects to defend the quality of integrity in their buildings.