The Architecture of the city by Aldo Rossi (text)
Les espaces d’AbraHousing at Noisy-le-grand, France by Ricardos Bofill ( Architecture/ paired building)
Essay Instructions
For your Essay you are to choose one of the pre-defined pairings of a theory text and a building from the list of pairings provided in the Assessment Folder. For your essay you will then use the selected theory text to critique the paired building. You should draw in other texts and buildings for critical comparison or supplementary explanation as and when required by your arguments. The lectures for this module (see syllabus) will deal with many of the complex ideas surrounding these texts and buildings and the ways that these ideas and buildings are interconnected across texts, across buildings and across lectures. Your essay should reflect an understanding of this interconnectedness. Structured and focussed arguments are the main point of this essay, 50% of the essay marks will be for how valid, plausible, well-premised, well-evidenced, clearly articulated, relevant to the conclusion and persuasive you make them. Other criteria of assessment are; the correct use of academic writing conventions, focus on addressing the question and the range of knowledge displayed.
There is a single question for all pairings and it is this:
“In what ways can [selected theory text] and the ideas it contains be used to interpret [paired building], its architect’s intentions and the cultural context in which the building was produced? Discuss.”
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Objective
By way of information you will see in all but a few cases the theory texts pre-date their paired buildings, often by decades and in some cases much longer. The purpose here beyond answering the essay question successfully and gaining a good module mark is to see how the written word in the form of theoretical treatises from the past has profoundly shaped recent and contemporary architecture and therefore how architectural history and philosophy remains a vital element at the highest level of architectural design. In a very few cases, a later theory text has been paired with an earlier building which it references but it is to the same end, to explicate theory informing design.
