zooms for spring 2023
Since our primary mode of getting together will be via zooms on a regular schedule, our time should be precise at the beginning, open and sloppy at the end. We can invite friends, include clips, make short presentations, play music. It is an interval. This spring semester four members from WAAC join to talk about architecture and narrative, critical theory, and the art of making cuts.
background
We come from different places, ages, cultures, mentalities. What we bring must fit in a small carry-on. The beginning of every seminar requires an inventory that decides what to bring, what to leave at home. Thanks to M. Eisenman, a “starter” reading list provided a starting point, using Paul Ricœur’s essay “Architecture and Narrativity.” D. Kunze was inspired to write a critique and suggest three film clips to study the way narrative and architecture have been combined under the heading of “the sequential and the simultaneous.”
- Metaphor and Scene–Blocking: a thought experiment about narrative ┼ architecture. To read Ricœur’s essay, “Architecture and Narrativity,” click here.
- The Importance of Ethnology, a short essay on the necessity of grounding study in cultural practices. The title suggest that this will be a matter of practical, easily accepted advice, but the connection of architecture theory to ethnology is a controversial and complex matter. What IS the ethnological? What is the role in the contemporary theorizing projects of architecture? This essay goes in every direction, without warning, sometimes elaborating related difficult topics involving complicated arguments about cultural practices (liminality, the rites of passage) and, later, about metaphor and metonymy (Freud’s parapraxis). The reader should not try to take in this argument at one gulp. Its fragments require independent reflections and some background knowledge. The ultimate aim however is to unify architecture’s relation to the ethnological in a provable, testable, unified way.
proposed projects
The group will decide on what to read, what to watch and what to do. This will be a directory to these activities.