Design Writing Assignment

At which point does architecture and urbanisms come together? In the article ‘How to Construct an Architectural Genealogy’ by Timothy Hyde, he agues that in one example, they might meet in the mat building such as Venice Hospital. He goes on to say that massiveness and collected spaces allow every edge to hold a different condition. These actions help the object slowly settle itself safely throughout its surroundings, instead of defining itself into a distinct object. A transformation takes place within the city due to this mat building effect; the city performs like a building. More importantly, Hyde points out that the activities of mat building can modify dense horizontal surfaces of program, structure and circulation.
In Alison Smithson’s related article about recognizing and reading mat buildings, Smithson suggests that one should think in a process of several images. The main idea is that architects can learn from the past, not by initiating or copying, but by developing the main conceptual idea even further than what has evolved. This method of thinking let any and all projects open for more work, and more development.
Although it has been more than a decade since this article was written, the evidence remains vibrant in individual projects such as Foreign Office Architects’ Yokohama Port Terminal. This project indicated a mat movement and waiting spaces by means of warped and folded sheet plates. There is minimal formal distinction between garden spaces and the waiting spaces. These spaces only differ in the intensive occupational occurring along a continued surface. Circulation is vital in this project. A resident enters the interior and moves through a courtyard and patios. The grand inter-connectivity of it all makes the nodes they connect as important as the connections themselves.
Stan Allen’s article agrees with ideas of establishing a conceptual link with the aesthetics in architecture, but also to embrace the modern technological opportunities available. The shift between technologies of production and technologies of reproduction, architecturally speaking, was given expression as an architecture that produced meaning by the grafting of conventional signs onto a neutral technical frame. Work with transparency and depth, as well as shallow surfaces, has a meaning that resides in graphic information lying on the surface.
Post modernism is usually linked with a rediscovery, or similarity in architecture, in architecture’s historical past. In the 1960’s an equally important shift occurred that underwrote the postmodern turn in history. Postmodernism responded to a demand for meaning in architecture.
Going back to architectural thinking in frames this way competes with film, painting, literature, performance art, etc. Architecture’s relation to its material is indirect; it works in retrospect through calculation, abstract systems, and projection. Architecture’s instrumentality can be reconceived, at the site of architecture’s contact with the real. While it has been said that architects are not the engineers or the technicians of territory, communication and speed. Territory, communication and speed are infrastructural problems, and architecture has developed means to deal with these variables.
Architecture was a unique way of structuring the city in a way that theater, film, literature, and politics can not. Architecture addresses social and cultural aspects. Infrastructures do not propose certain building on specific site, but it prepares the ground for certain building and creates the conditions for future events.