Seminar (cliff) Notes 9th February

5 Big Ideas and a Spanner - a stand-up lecture
outline sketch for a History of Ideas in Archtiecture


- how history can be introduced as a series of interlocking ideas
- the interconnective tissue implied (across geographies, cultures,
histories and politics)
- the relevance of history to the shaping of architectural thinking (in the present)

1 suggest the last century can be selectively analysed by
considering it under the notion of
"5 Big Ideas and a Spanner"

2 ask for as many big ideas from the last century
as possible

3 these could include anything voiced from the students:
human rights,fascism, mass production, communism,
space travel, internet..................................................
................................................................................
4 make an interconnective tissue from what appears
random

5 considee how one can link these and see the
interactivity through the following five notions -
the 5 big ideas:

- Modernism (incl. modernity, modernisation - progress, equality,
democracy and the agendas for social change as the big idea)

- Constructvisim (incl the constuctive mind, Soviet aesthetics
agitprop and propaganda/social mission - suprematism, linguistics -
the heavily constructed big idea)

- Conceptualism (after Duchamp, why Dadaism is not
necessarily Duchampian, playing chess and R.Mutt's urinal -
art 'off the canvas' - the big idea)

- Plurality (linguistics, the rise of..de saussure , the significance
of language studies, semiology and structuralism - the open work
1950s literature, prelude to post-structuralism)

-Digitalism (the next paradigm after the one before - consider
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - the
21st century as a re-tread of the 20th century (computer-aided)
digital space becomes another outer space or the suburbanisation
of the mind).

The Spanner: Undoing. Contest, Interrogation - the consequences
of late 20th century thinking.

(to be continued).