Della architettura – Giueseppe Viola Zanini
At first I thought that the topic of the conversation with architecture would be obvious and that I should rather look for something else. So, I searched for typical architectural things like… pillars, measurement etc. But I was a bit confused with the results. For this reason, I switched back to the subject of architecture and in the top line I searched for the terms: cartography and geography. These terms stayed in my mind during task 2, that the author of the book attached great importance or was related to them.
For all my conversations I used the Xenotheka Library as Alice’s brain.
Koolhaas, Elements of Architecture
One of the first books I saw was this one. The Elements of Architecture by Rem Koolhaas. In Koolhaas book, like the title states, he writes about the elements of architecture. He talks about floors, stairs, doors, balconies, ramps and so on. But he also mentions geographical and cartographical aspects like mapping sites, various shapes and the geographic orientation and this using examples such as here in islamic architecture as well as Zanini, who had looked at the architecture of foreign cultures.
“Other chapters tackle astrophysics, optics, algebra, mathematics, trigonometry and geography; more than a quarter of the treatise is dedicated to geometry and cartography, both of which exert a technical and decorative influence on Islamic architecture.”
Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968
The second book I chose is architecture theory since 1968 by K. Michael Hays. This book is a discussion of architecture in which he criticizes that in cultural production a sense can no longer be understood to rise spontaneously.
“It is a geography of edges and perimeters, a becoming landscape that is marked by a cartography at once scientific and mythic”
The elements geography and geometry go across the traditional limits, spatial and discursive. Here Hays criticizes the elements that Zanini makes use of as they scientificize the whole mythical aspect of cultural architecture and that is a transgression.
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