MEANING AND RELEVANCE IN NIGERIAN TRADITIONAL ARCHITECTURE: THE DIALECTICS OF GROWTH AND CHANGE

Aside from the brief descriptions of some traditional dwelling types and settlements gleaned from the notes of early Europeans explorers and missionaries, few and scattered efforts exist to provide information on the African Traditional Architecture. The early assumption that the Africans lived in unstructured, isolated bush communities with little appreciation of the aesthetics in town design may have restricted enquiry into indigenous African Architecture. This lack in information would appear compounded as architectural history and the theory of Architecture have traditionally emphasized the study of monuments. The monumental work in Sir Bannister Fletcher's History of Architecture left out the rest of Africa after elaborating on the Architecture of Egypt which featured the pyramids and the temple

Form Follows Function

Natural history. Teaching. Writing. All have form, all have function. But just as no architecture is risk-free, no architecture is neutral. In this personal essay, I explore the surprising connections that develop when university students engage with natural history as way of knowing the ground underfoot

Architectural design education through history of architecture: the lesson of Bruno Zevi

Ponencia presentada a Session 3: Educación y arquitectura en las universidades / Architectural education in the universitiesBruno Zevi, born in 1918 and died in 2000, is one of the most important Italian theorists of architecture. His anti-historical and critical reading of the classical historiography has highlighted a different architectural geography, recognizing the merits of that architecture which had been improperly defined as minor or peripheral. His reading method aims to minimize the contemplative attitude in favour of the involvement and the actualization of the history of architecture, far from a historicist vision that prevents from reading the past as an irreplaceable occasion to understand and deal with the contemporary season of architecture. In his vision of history as a “methodology of architectural practice" he draws not a philological portrait of the past, but a breeding ground for "extracting the forgotten subversive components". According to Italo Calvino’s statement, a classic (in art, literature, music, architecture etc.) is something that has never finished saying what it has to say; Bruno Zevi strengthens the concept emphasizing that when good architecture of the past was built, the solutions adopted were most of the times extremely modern, so they are worth to be analysed to understand processes and ideas they subtended, and actualised in contemporaneity. Thus, it is important to learn history of architecture by the methodology of investigating what the masters of the past wanted to achieve rather than the final building just as a successful solution. It is a complex and engaging method because it is not only about “knowing how to look at architecture" but he sets forth new categories of judgment that enables to learn and judge contemporary architecture and the urban aspects, in an actualization that becomes immediate. It is very useful to unleash oneself, as Zevi suggests, from that compact vision of the historiographical process like the ones handed down to us by the various Giedions, for instance to reconsider the contributions that would make the architectural periods of Countries considered "peripheral", substantial. This useful means of updated reinterpretation can be of educating and stimulating for planning in today’s cities, considering that it is also able to define new aspects and contradictions in the history of so-called “official architecture”. This paper will focus on the strong interaction suggested by Bruno Zevi between the architectural design education and the history of architecture as methodology of teaching, considering several examples extrapolated from his numerous texts

Narratives of Modern Architecture: learning at the intersection of cross-historical constructions

This paper presents the results of experimental course work in 2015 with secondyear students at IE School of Architecture and Design under the auspices of Culture and Theory in Architecture I. The subject of the course is History of Modern Architecture. Importantly, this is the first contact IE students have with theory and history of architecture. One of the goals was to allow students to understand that history is not a monolithic object that stands before us ready-made, but a set multiple constructions in narrative form, hence necessarily a representation: a collection of stories, instead only one history. To accomplish this goal, the students were instructed to write their own particular narrative of a significative moment (building, design, event) in modern architecture.Este artículo muestra los resultados obtenidos en la docencia del curso de Cultura y Teoria en Arquitectura I durante el año 2015 en IE School of Architecture and Design. Este curso es el primer contacto de los alumnos con la teoría y la historia de la arquitectura, y su contenido principal fue la historia de la arquitectura moderna. Uno de los objetivos del curso ha sido hacer comprender a los aumnos que la historia no es un objecto monolítico que se encuentra ahí delante de nosotros para poder observarlo, sino un conjunto de múltiples construcciones que necesariamente tiene la forma de una narración. Es por tanto una representación. Para conseguir esto, se pidió a los alumnos que escribieran su propia historia de un momento significativo (un edificio, un proyecto, un acontecimiento) de la arquitectura moderna

A historical outline of school architecture in Malta

Although the history of education in Malta is well documented, the architectural history of local educational facilities is still as yet uncharted territory. The available literature on the architecture of schools in The Maltese islands and their underlying design philosophy is almost non-existent. A tentative outline can only be sketched on the basis of the substantial corpus of surviving drawings, various ad hoc reports ar.d for the international style modern schools, built in the 1950's and 60's, by direct verbal communications with their architects. This paper will present a concise historical exposition on school architecture in Malta and Gozo.peer-reviewe

Introduction to Heritage Assets: 19th- and 20th-Century Convents and Monasteries

A short description of the history and architecture of English nineteenth and twentieth-century convents and monasteries, with an emphasis on their most significant attribute

Architecture and Visual Narrative

Architecture communication tools have been implemented in recent history by strategies and narrative artifices imported from cinema, comic, photo-journalism and infographic. The architect has integrated the traditional encoded drawing with more extensive narrative artifacts to expand the basin of its interlocutors and to describe underestimated aspects of architecture and design process. Through the illustration of recent significant experiences, this paper intends to highlight the great variety of images that can be attributed today to architecture and the lack of proper attention on this production by Visual Studies

Pecinan as an Inspiration the Contribution of Chinese Indonesian Architecture to an Urban Environment

Since the abrogation of Presidential Instruction Number 14/1967 which banned Chinese customs celebrations and religion in public, there has been a revival in Chinese festivals, language, art, media, culture and not in the least in the field of architecture and urban planning. With increasing interest in heritage and the support of the Indonesian government for heritage cities programmes, several promising initiatives involving Chinese architecture have been launched in cities both large and small. A brief glance of the history of Chinese Indonesian architecture is given, as well as some recent initiatives in selected cities plus a discussion of the importance of public space in accommodating Chinese festivals. Study of old maps and photographs prompts reflections on the characteristics and development of Pecinan during the colonial era and of their later history. The analysis in this article and examples of recent developments in the cities discussed can be used as an inspiration in the revitalization of Pecinan, thereby contributing in an attractive and livable urban environment