Exercises in Architecture: Learning to Think as an Architect

✍ Scribed by Simon Unwin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 225
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Architecture is a doing word. You can learn a great deal about the workings of architecture through analysing examples but a fuller understanding of its powers and potential comes through practice, by trying to do it... This book offers student architects a series of exercises that will develop their capacity for doing architecture. Exercises in Architecture builds on and supplements the methodology for architectural analysis presented in the author’s previous book Analysing Architecture (third edition, Routledge, 2009) and demonstrated in his Twenty Buildings Every Architect Should Understand (Routledge, 2010). The three books taken together deal with the three aspects of learning: description, analysis of examples, and practice. The book offers twelve exercises, each divided into a short series of tasks aimed at developing a particular theme or area of architectural capacity. The exercises deal with themes such as place-making, learning through drawing, framing, light, , uses of geometry, stage setting, eliciting emotional responses, the genetics of detail and so forth.

✦ Table of Contents

EXERCISES IN ARCHITECTURE learning to think as an architect
Copyright
Contents
PRELUDE: the ‘architecture’ drive
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
‘Architecting’
Studying the architectural mind at work
Drawing (and its limitations)
The Exercises
Interludes and Observations
Materials and equipment
Keeping a notebook
Producing good work
Section One FUNDAMENTALS
EXERCISE 1: the substance without substance
EXERCISE 1a. Imposing an idea
EXERCISE 1b. Centre
EXERCISE 1c. Identificat on of place (by object)
EXERCISE 1d. Introducing the person
EXERCISE 1e. Person at the centre
EXERCISE 1f. Identification of place (by person)
EXERCISE 1g. Circle of place
EXERCISE 1h. Threshold
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (circles of place)
EXERCISE 2: flipping perceptions
EXERCISE 2a. Container for a dead person
EXERCISE 2b. Pyramid
EXERCISE 2c. Theatre and house
INTERLUDE: ‘The Artst is Present’
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (flipping perceptions)
AN OBSERVATION: appearance and experience
EXERCISE 3: axis (and its denial)
EXERCISE 3a. Doorway axis
EXERCISE 3b. Quartering
EXERCISE 3c. Relating to the remote
EXERCISE 3d. Temple
INTERLUDE: The Woodland Chapel
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (axis in space)
EXERCISE 3e. Lines of doorways
INTERLUDE: lines of doorways
EXERCISE 3f. Countering/denying the power of the doorway axis
EXERCISE 3g. Make a senseless doorway/axis/focus composition...
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (contradiction of axis)
SUMMARY OF SECTION ONE
Section Two GEOMETRY
EXERCISE 4: alignment
EXERCISE 4a. Geometries of the world and person
EXERCISE 4b. Geometries aligned
EXERCISE 4c. Architecture as an instrument of alignment
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (instrument of alignment)
EXERCISE 5: anthropometry
EXERCISE 5a. A big enough bed
EXERCISE 5b. Some key points of measure
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (the size of people)
EXERCISE 6: social geometry
EXERCISE 6a. The social geometry of a circular house
EXERCISE 6b. Other situations in which architecture frames social geornetry
INTERLUDE: choir stall
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (social geometry)
EXERCISE 7: the geometry of making
EXERCISE 7a. Form and the geometry of building components
EXERCISE 7b. Putting a roof or upper floor on your walls
EXERCISE 7c. Parallel walls
INTERLUDE: a Welsh house
AN OBSERVATION: regarding the circle
EXERCISE 7d. Now redesign the circular house...
INTERLUDE: Korowai tree house; Farnsworth House
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (geometry of making)
INTERLUDE: a classic form, with innumerable variations and extensions
EXERCISE 7e. Spanning greater distances
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (structural geometries)
INTERLUDE: a conflict in the geometry of making (for a reason)–Asplund’s Woodland Chapel (again)
AN OBSERVATION: attitudes to the geometry of making
EXERCISE 7f. Transcending the geometry of making
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (attitudes to the geometry of making)
EXERCISE 8: the geometry of planning
EXERCISE 8a. Parallel walls
EXERCISE 8b. Mult-room buildings
AN OBSERVATION: geometris brought into harmony by the rectangle
INTERLUDE: modifying the rectangular geometry of planning
EXERCISE 8c. Columned spaces/the free plan
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (‘free’ plan)
EXERCISE 9: ideal geometry
EXERCISE 9a. A square space
EXERCISE 9b. Extending the square
EXERCISE 9c. Cube
EXERCISE 9d. Problems with wall thickness
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (ideal geometry)
INTERLUDE: sphere
EXERCISE 10: symmetry and asymmetry
EXERCISE 10a. Axis of symmetry
AN OBSERVATION: the (im)possibility of perfection?
INTERLUDE: 9 Square Grid House
EXERCISE 10b. Subverting axial symmetry
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (symmetry and asymmetry)
EXERCISE 11: playing with geometry
EXERCISE 11a. Layering geometry
EXERCISE 11b. Twisting geometry
EXERCISE 11c. Breaking ideal geometry
EXERCISE 11d. More complex geometries
EXERCISE 11e. Distorting geometry
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (distorted geometry)
INTERLUDE: using a computer to generate complex (mathematically based) forms
SUMMARY OF SECTION TWO
Section Three OUT INTO THE REAL WORLD
EXERCISE 12: making places in the landscape
EXERCISE 12a. Preparation
EXERCISE 12b. Identify a place by choice and occupation
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (choice and occupation)
INTERLUDE: Uluru (Ayer’s Rock)
EXERCISE 12c. (Begin to) make your place better in some way
EXERCISE 12d. Making a new place on open ground
INTERLUDE: Richard Long
EXERCISE 12e. Circle of place
EXERCISE 12f. (Begin to) modify your circle of place (to make it stronger or more comfortable)
EXERCISE 12g. Making places with people
INTERLUDE: Australian aborigine place making in the landscape
INTERLUDE: Ettore Sottsass
EXERCISE 12h. Anthropometry
EXERCISE 12i. Geometry of making
EXERCISE 12j. Responding to conditions
INTERLUDE: Nick’s camp
EXERCISE 12k. Framing atmospheres
EXERCISE 12l. Setting down rules for using space
EXERCISE 12m. Experiment with time as an element of architecture
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (draw places in the landscape)
IN YOUR NOTEBOOK... (buildings that exploit or mitigate conditions)
SUMMARY OF SECTION THREE
POSTLUDE: Drawing plans and sections
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
READING
INDEX