Introduction to Architectural Thinking

Welcome to the week one lecture of ARC 151, Architectural Thinking 1. In this lecture, it's going to be a little different than the rest because we're not going to be looking at historic works, but giving just a general introduction to why you might be taking this class, what you might be getting out of this class, and giving a little bit of a framework of how this class is going to fit into your... into your education, right? It is, as I mentioned in the other introductory video, this is a history theory class, and you may be wondering how that's useful. You may have taken history classes in, you know, other parts of your college career or in high school, and maybe even after those wondered why you took them or what they're good for. Part of this lecture is to sort of explain that and to sort of build a framework so you can get the most out of out of all the lectures that go past this. So we're going to start with why architectural history? Like what does it, you know, why does it matter? Why would you take this class? Why? Why when you're seeking an architectural degree as most of you are? Would this be a required class? Like what is this useful for? Architecture is generally a very forward-thinking career, at least nowadays it is, right? Because you're building things that don't exist. You're looking to the future, almost always, imagining new worlds of the future where there's new buildings and that's what you want to do. You may be thinking like, why in the world would I care about old buildings? Old buildings are old, part of other social structures that You do or don't agree with, and that's good. You should be critical of everything. But why learn about architectural history? And, you know, historians might be upset with what I have to say here, but generally I think the main, you know, it's really only worth it for two reasons. One, you just enjoy history, right? You just like historical things, you read historical novels. You like to think about the past. You like to learn about the past. For whatever reason, it's just something that interests you. So that could be a reason to take this class, and that's a good enough reason, I think, as well. But for the fact that you're paying a lot of money to go to school, the main reason that history can be very important to you is that you can use it to inform decisions you make about the future. right? And complete with all the cliches, right? Learning about the past, learning from the past, not repeating mistakes, right? Say those that don't know history, the mistakes of history, you don't know the history, are bound to repeat it if that trope is true or not. But you should be learning from the past, right? You should remember the great triumphs. You should understand what did work, what didn't work. what you can take, what you can suss out of what other people have thought about. When it comes to architecture, every single thing that's built that still exists today, from any time period, took an immense amount of thought. Somebody spent, in some of the works we're going to look at in this course, they spent their entire lives looking at these buildings being built. So did their children and their children's children, right? We're going to look at buildings that took hundreds of years to build, right? So the amount of information that's sort of inscribed into old buildings is immense. So there's something to be learned there. You can take from it, steal from it, you know, pull it apart and just make yourself a more informed designer, right? Throughout this course, you'll notice that I'm often talking to designers. I know not everybody that's taking this is... pursuing an architectural degree. But I think it's important that the way in which we think about history, again, unless you just enjoy history, is one that's sort of practical. It's something you can use in your studies as you go forward into designing, hopefully, right, for most of you, right? And that last bit, like gaining a better understanding of how how we got to where we are and imagine where we're going, right? You can, we'll be able to follow certain threads through history and there'll be certain moments, hopefully, that you're like, aha, that's why that's the way it is, right? And then you can think, should it still be that way? Or should we get rid of that? Or should we move that forward? And that's really in where, that's where the power of history and studying history lies. And this class is particularly about architectural history. But you're going to notice that a lot of what we talk about are sort of the social and cultural constructs, sometimes the technical. technological constructs that surround these buildings, right? And we'll get a little bit more to that in a few slides. You know, so really, I mean, at least for me, I think it will be for you, and this is one way to think about it, and I'm sure there's got to be some history major in here that's just going to be like, that's wrong. But let's have that conversation too, that understanding history is kind of only important if you can relate it to your own time. to you. History doesn't... history only exists in us, right? We're the only ones that are keeping it alive. So if it... it needs to matter to you. It needs to be something that you can use, you can add agency to, you can... you can... you can judge what you're doing by, right? This is... this is literally the learning from history part. And I want you to also think about the fact that that's different than other ways of gaining knowledge and producing knowledge. So history is set apart from, say, science. Not that science doesn't have history, and it's not completely divorced from it. But in science, we use experimentation. We test things. and there's outcomes and we observe things that we're doing to understand them better. In mathematics, we're using proofs. We're using the construct of numbers to figure something out, right? And in art, you're producing things, right? That's the way that that information is made and learned, right? through, in that case, observation, right? And those are different than history, right? Not lesser or more, but they're different. So how we're doing this is looking to the past, thinking about the past, talking about the past, and then the critical moment is when you apply it to yourself today, right? As you... as you think about the future, right? So there are caveats to this though, right? Because history is incredibly subjective. We really only have the information that was recorded. And then there are certain essentially scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists that go through and try and suss out information, but even then it's an incredibly subjective way of looking at the world in which they're deciding what they see, you know, what it is about what they see that that makes any sense to anybody. And that's, you know, that comes to also, you know, kind of the old saying that, you know, the victors, right, history is written by the victors, right? And we We know this, and it's interesting because in, you know, our current, the current state of our society, particularly here in the United States, is we're going through and checking who won all the battles and who lost, and then trying to understand a more complete view of the history of things. Now, this class in particular is pretty broad, right? And we're not diving into any particular project or culture or space in particular. depth, right? So we might not get into, you know, moral relativism of what these buildings are, but we will discuss it, right? And it's important if we have information about buildings, about why and how they were built, you're gonna notice that most old buildings that we study are built for like a few reasons, right? For religious reasons. for defense of some type, or military reasons, or other sort of political reasons, or to gather people, which is a political reason as well, right? And we'll be looking at these, and you're going to, we can glean at least a little bit about you know, what these people were like, right? We're going to look at it, we're going to try, again, try to be somewhat objective about it, but at the same time, you're going to look at something and be like, oh, those people are terrible, or wow, they were amazing, they did something amazing, right? It being the time period that we're studying, again, this class mostly covers from sort of ancient Egypt through the Renaissance. Things were different back then, and that is not an excuse, but a warning that the way and the reasons a lot of these things were built don't hold up to our standards of how humans should be treated today. But I want you to keep that in mind for your entire career past this class about what it means to build a building. Because as I mentioned, every one of these buildings took a name. an intense amount of time and thinking and labor, right? And we want to understand all these buildings within that context. So I'm going to take a step backwards, though, from architectural history. That's what this class is about to some, you know, just this this class. This lecture only has like three or four slides and more words than we're normally going to have. and talk about some broader things that I think a lot of people take for granted. Oh, and a quick note, just if you're wondering about the images that are on this. Usually the images for this class are going to be pictures of historic buildings and pyramids and temples and things like that. But as I was making this and I was trying to think, usually these introductory class, I put some like goofy stock imagery of like architecture and stuff. But for this class, I... thought it would be interesting to just ask mid journey right an ai text to image program which i'm assuming most of you are familiar with what i'm just asking them the general questions right so we see like this is what a history professor is supposed to look like and oh maybe i wish i had that much hair and white looks good. I like the jacket too. And I do have a lot, a lot of books. I don't have a bookshelf behind me, but like, yeah, maybe, but that's what, how AI works. And this is not off topic of what this class is about. It takes everything on the internet, all the images of what people think history professors look like, and just makes this image. And it's like, it's like painterly. I literally just. Typed in you can see exactly what the prompt is do it yourself It's kind of interesting and it like they all came back and they looked like paintings for some reason right? And for this one, I just I typed in ancient architecture, right? And that's what it shows which you know when we get into this class I think we'll be able to place some sort of idea of what this is this, you know looks like classic India Maybe, but it's like nowhere descript. But that's what the internet thinks that ancient architecture is. And that's interesting. At the end of this class, I think you may have a different view of what that might be. But again, that's a bit off topic. There's only a few slides in here. Let's step back, right? So what is architecture? For most of you, I think this is... probably your introduction to architecture it's you may have had some you know architectural drafting classes in the past um you may have you you've lived in buildings before uh you've probably seen buildings that you like and um i'm here to tell you though or get you prompt you to start thinking in slightly a different way about architecture than is sort of the typical way as young scholars, your view of what architecture is needs to be more refined than just the general public's idea, than what Midjourney would tell you it is, right? Than what the internet is if you just type in what is architecture. Do that though. See what it says. And as you go through your schooling, if you continue through an architecture program, you're going to find out how difficult this question is to answer. And it will be literally argued about in front of you. with work that you produce that you say is architecture when a professor is like that's not architecture you might get a professor that says that's not architecture when i went through school and it was a bunch of old stuffy white dudes they were often saying that to us i don't know if they were right or not um but architecture you know broadly we think it's existed a bit longer than civilization itself you and we're going to talk about that at least a little bit throughout this class but the idea that architecture predates civilization and some would argue causes civilization it is one of the causes of civilization of true civilization we'll get into that It's kind of intense. So maybe like about 6,000 years of things that we would call architecture. But generally, broadly, we would maybe say that it's the conscious planning and design of buildings. So that's where the arguments come in, right? Because, I mean, all buildings that are built today are planned. Kind of mostly have to be. There is a type of architecture that we... We'll talk about a little bit that we call vernacular, which is essentially a folk style of building architecture where there's no real plans. You just build it based on knowledge, traditional building techniques. And I'm generally arguing with this slide that that's not really architecture, right? It doesn't involve the planning of buildings. That's maybe a longer conversation again, right? So this is. This is where the difficulties come in, right? And then there's high architecture and low architecture. Is the suburban house you grew up in architecture, is that the same architecture as the pyramids? Like, those are both architecture. Can we put those in the same category? Is the building you're in right now architecture versus, say, the Taj Mahal? building you may be familiar with, or the Forbidden City, or is that the same as a Haudenosaunee longhouse? We'll talk about those. Or, you know, Machu Picchu, Inca temple, religious site, or Angkor Wat. Are all of these things the same, right? An apartment building? Right? So those are all, it gets really mushy, right? But the other thing I want you to think about, though, is that architecture is not doing, it's not making the building. Our contemporary view, particularly of architecture, is not the making of the building or even the buildings themselves, right? That's not the architecture. the architecture is all that design bit that happened. It's all of the ideas and thinking and planning and everything that went into making that building. The building itself is a construction, right? And that's sort of a hard switch of the brain from what I think most of the public thinks architecture is. They look at a building and they say, oh that is the architecture. The architecture itself is arguably just the ideas behind the building, right? And, you know, we won't get into all the platitudes of architects of the past necessarily, but a lot of architects argue about what this is, say, say it's archi-what is the saying, Mies van der Rohe, architecture happens when two bricks come together, right? That's the start of architecture, or it's a defined space. Right? So at the end of this class, you probably still won't have an answer to this question. In fact, you might be more critical of even asking this question. And I would encourage you to, anytime somebody says something like, that's architecture, to think really hard about what they're saying. Right? Because it's not quite so simple. Right? Then there's the other question. What is an architect? Now this is actually easier, a little bit easier to answer. Today, as you know it, right, and this won't actually apply to most of what we're talking about in this course, a modern architecture is a professional, somebody who has a license, often multiple degrees, like an education, they've been tested, they get paid sometimes, to do the work in the field of architecture, in this broad field which we call architecture. right and as a profession some argue that you know there are people we can point at throughout history as far back as egyptians that were like oh that was the architect of that building but as um the idea of sort of this master of design it goes maybe back to the renaissance and as architect As the profession, as we really understand it, particularly in the United States, it goes back maybe 150 years. It's not actually a really old profession like, say, lawyers, politicians, prostitutes, bakers, farmers. Those are professions that are much, much older. So when you talk about an architect today and... and legally in the United States, at least when you say architect or you say you are an architect, you have to have a license, which takes a long time to get, right? It's all the schooling and testing and stuff. Ask your academic advisor about what it actually takes to become an architect. We're not going to really cover that. As I mentioned, though, like the act of doing architecture isn't the building part. There is there are actions that happen when the primary product of an architect is our drawings today in particular right they're they're digital drawings today but you know and as we can see in this mid-journey we've got a guy and like the i actually think this looks more like an engineer it's like a weird thumb sort of weird mid-journey thing architects do wear hard hats sometimes when you visit a site You do look at printed drawings occasionally, but we spend way more time behind a computer. We do like pens. Maybe this is what an architect looks like, but kind of not so much. But what architects do do is we produce drawings over and over. We spend hours, days, making drawings of buildings. And those drawings are a set of instructions given. to somebody that actually does build the building, to builders, right? Construction workers, to contractors and stuff. So we're giving them what we produce are just the instructions, right? And arguably, again, arguably, those drawings are much closer to what the architecture of a building is than the building itself. I'm talking in loops maybe, right? But I want you to be like thinking about that. Like, what are we doing, right? So those drawings themselves, they're drawings of their ideas, right? They're the drawings of the ideas that the architect has, the manifestation of that. The building is a manifestation of the drawings. And obviously, in some cases, they're very technical assemblies of pieces. But even that, for the most part, architectural drawings don't go into the amount of detail that people think. Architects are mostly, mostly involved with planning the sizes and the shapes of spaces, what finished materials are, like what that that like very outer layer of material is, maybe maybe an inch into the wall, something like that, and what things look like. How things are built is not usually actually in the hands of the architect. for those of you engineers, you help us out with that, and builders, they tell us how things are actually built, and we just tell them what we want built, right? And that, again, is very different than what the public probably thinks an architect is. We do walk around with rows of drawings, and we do point at things a lot, and we're in the city, we're always craning our heads and looking around at buildings, and we plan all of our vacations around seeing temples that nobody else wants to see, but... You know, in general, what architects do is make drawings. And if you're an architecture school now, you're going to learn a lot about that, right? We build models every once in a while, but for the most part, we're making drawings, right? And this is the last slide. We're already almost through your first lecture of this class, right? So what's maybe more important about what is an architect and what is architecture is, like, what matters to architects? Like, what do we actually care about? And I bring this up because this is sort of what I want you to be looking through, looking for through this entire class. Right? These are the things you should be paying attention to. And you're going to hear me say these things probably again and again, at least in some form or another, if not explicitly when I point out a building, when I talk about it. The first bit are the politics of the building, of the architecture, of the space, whatever we're talking about. It's politics. And when I'm talking about politics, I'm not necessarily talking about the government, which... you know, how this class is landing, it's going to be hard to like, when you hear the word politics, obviously, in an election here in the United States, it's hard not to think of that. Now, I'm not saying that it's devoid of that, not at all. But again, I want you to have a slightly broader view of what politics means. And the politics of architecture are sort of broader than just, you know, who people are voting for. or not voting for, right? And I like to divide it sort of into these three bits, right? Politics are the relationships, it's all about relationships between people and people, so that includes communities, families, hierarchies of power, which is where probably government comes in closest, but not necessarily, right? It also has to do with, you know, who has power over who, what people have power to do, what agency they have in the world, right? And that is that that has an interplay with architecture, right? Next is the relationship between people and buildings, right? And I just told you in the last slide that architecture is not the buildings themselves, and really I just don't, you know, I don't have a better word. And this is just easier to remember, but it's people and the architecture, you could call it, but also people in physical buildings, too. And that relationship is is a lot of what we focus on. Right. So that has to do with symbols and icons. Like what do what does, you know, a building mean to us when we see it? Is it a symbol of something for us? Right. For those of you in Milwaukee. Nearly the symbol of the city now is the Quadraci Pavilion, which is the big white turkey on the lake at the art museum. The Calatrava, as it's called, which is the name of the architect. For those of you maybe in Madison, it's the Capitol Building. Capitol Buildings are always symbols of something, right? And how they're built and everything about them is all symbolic and iconographic. We're going to talk a lot about that, right? uh, ownership, right? We can, we can own buildings and own space and own land, right? That's a complete construct, right? Which makes it a political construct. Uh, and then also we use buildings for shelter. They protect us from something, right? Um, they provide us with safety, both physically and psychologically, right? And the psychological part is super important, too, because it's more than just a shell, usually, hopefully, right? And then the last one is a bit more abstract. And again, for lack of better words, it's the relationship between buildings and buildings. Like when buildings are together, you know, obviously humans need to like sort of perceive this. But when you put more than one building. or a building in its relationship sort of to itself, there are spatial and formal relationships that are there whether humans are there or not or whether the intended humans are there, right? We all live in places that are much older than ourselves for the most part, right? I live in a 110 year old hundred and 11 or 12 year old house. Many of the buildings that you're in are 50 years old, 100 year old. We're going to be looking at buildings that people still occupy that are 500 years old, 1,000 years old, right? And they were not designed for what they need, but there's still relationships of space within them, right? When you get multiple buildings together, we usually call that an urbanism, right? When things are close enough together that they produce another space, right? That space in itself gets designed, right? And it produces a city, right? When we get enough buildings together, it becomes a city. And that arrangement of buildings is political in itself, right? And I put environment in this as well. I know that's sort of the building. and its relationship to nature, right? Or to the, I think environment's a better word, but we're not going to use the word nature, but the environment, right? And multiple buildings to the environment and what those buildings do to the environment, whether the environment is one that is completely a human construct or whether it's an animal construct or a plant construct or a climactic construct, there's also that relationship. So that set of politics, every time we look at a building, and when you start designing buildings, every time you do it, you need to, I want you to go through those thoughts and think about what all those relationships are. Those, you know, that's sort of the meat of it, right? Who are these people? Why did they build it? What were the power structures? What did these buildings mean to people? And why are there... three pyramids, right? Like why is that building lined up with that building? And why is there a view that way and a view that way? Why is it built out of what it's built out of, right? The other thing that architects really care about and that we care about in this class too is sort of a simpler and probably the more accepted definition of where architecture comes in. And that's shelter in space. Again though, I want you to think of this sort of broadly, right? A lot of people, again back to that question, like what is architecture, say that this is where it starts. And you know, maybe is a cave architecture if, you know, it causes shelter, is you know, a hollowed out log. You can argue it a lot of different ways. But these things do matter to us, right? And it matters for this class and it matters as you think about architecture, buildings, the act of building, the politics of space, right? So we have physical and psychological protection from the elements, animals, and often from each other, right? So we often think about like this idea that our buildings protect us from the outside and that's true because we're kind of really fleshy we can't just like be outside today it's too hot for all of us in the midwest it's too cold for much of the year um there's not tons of dangerous animals around here but there's bugs and things that we we generally try and keep out um and then we we separate ourselves out right like We divide ourselves into groups, clans, tribes, nations, neighbors, and then we make that division physical, right? And you're saying like, oh, yeah, of course. But remember, that's just completely a human contract. We could just live together without walls between us, right? And that's where the psychological part comes in, right? The idea of privacy, right? that we don't want people to see what we're doing. We have doors, hallways, bathrooms. These are all these are all inventions, right? These are all inventions essentially by architects to fulfill some psychological want or need of a culture, right? Like always think of that, right? that a bathroom is an invention for it doesn't like you don't need a bathroom at all right you don't actually do anything that couldn't be done in a much more public way but our culture doesn't allow that right or we don't we don't like want that uh i mean thankfully i mean as far as i'm concerned because i'm part of this culture but other cultures maybe would find that weird sort of lastly in this same thing about about culture and and space right space being not the built that but the whole the void of it right shelter is the physicality of it that that's keeping something separated and space being the space right is and i mentioned this before and a lot of what we're going to talk about falls into just a few of these categories. Things are designed and built for defense. And again, that defense could be as small as just the defense for privacy sake, but in a lot of cases, it's to stop people from killing each other, protect people, right? We build walls, castles, palaces, et cetera. Worship, and we're going to talk about worship, you know, we're going to be looking at a lot of... what we call ecclesiastic spaces, like spaces of spirituality or religion. Because for so much of history, that was, along with defense, defense and worship, that was the only thing that could get enough people together and gather, get enough people motivated to give up something, money, food. People didn't always willingly give up their freedom, but people gave up, I don't know, their morals to enslave other people, to build massive, long-lasting, intricate things. It's defense and worship, right? That's why, you know, we have French villages made out of wattle and daub, which is essentially dung and... Hey, for most of the buildings. And then you have an intricately carved cathedral that took 300 years to build. Right? Like, think about where the importance to a culture is. Right? And then lastly, like, one of the other main things, like, to this day, one of the most important things to this day is we design things and build things to gather people. Again, we're sort of dividing each other up. Think about this, right? You live in a house that's of a certain size to have a certain number of people living in it, and that certain number of people always seems to fit the group that you are a part of. It's your family, it's your dorm mate, your roommates, your significant other, even your kids someday, all the old people at the... you know, at the old people house, the old people home, or barracks, or gathering people that continues through worship, right? So we have churches and mosques and synagogues and temples, and the gathering of people is one of the highest callings for a lot of architects, right? Museums, we hold things, right? Again. There's always exceptions to the rules. There's warehouses. There's, I don't know, missile silos. I guess that goes along with defense. A lot of things. But these are the main things that architects care about. These are the things that we're going to talk about. These are the things, again, that every project we look at, every project you look at for the rest of your lives from this moment forward, you can think through and look at the building. sort of start to make these judgments, right? And if not, you can at least try and figure them out, right? And you won't always be able to. And that's all the way back to that first slide, where sort of the interest and the use and the reason for studying architectural history can can sort of come in, come alive and become a way in which you you sort of operate within the world right um and it's broad right even look at the mid journey thing i just said shelter what is shelter yes four scenes only one of them looks like it maybe could possibly exist in our world right maybe they Right? So again, at the end of this course, I do want this class to be, you know, it's not just this like theory mumbo jumbo, what one of my good Russian friends just calls water. It's kind of thin. These esoteric conversations, we're going to have plenty of those. But I do want this to be sort of practical. I want you to be able to, at the end of this course, to look at architecture, think about architecture, and think about the people that were associated with it, and how those buildings, how that architecture, how those spaces, how that shelter has affected everybody since the time it was built to now. All the way to yourself, where you're like sitting looking at a screen, looking at a picture of Encore Watt and like, oh, this building's now affecting me because it's taking up my time and I have to take a quiz about it. Not what the builders intended, but that's what happens, right? And with that knowledge, with that sort of power, you'll be able to eventually, for those of you that do become designers, become architects, how you can start to think about how you can affect people from the time you build something. time you design something into the into the future right you can imagine uh if not realistic at least a fantastic future right moving forward because you have sort of this ammunition of everything that's been built before you right so i'm going to leave it at that the next lecture uh we're mostly going to cover egypt and sumeria I think so. That's all I want to say for today. And that's again, this lecture is going to be a little bit different. We're going to start actually looking at some architecture and some buildings, starting with the next full lecture. And until that time, start thinking about how this stuff is affecting. your life today. Look at the buildings around you. Look at the buildings you interact with and see if you can start making these things matter to you. Okay. I'll see you all next week.

You may have taken history classes in, you know, other parts of your college career or in high school, and maybe even after those wondered why you took them or what they're good for. Part of this lecture is to sort of explain that and to sort of build a framework so you can get the most out of out of all the lectures that go past this. So we're going to start with why architectural history? Like what does it, you know, why does it matter?

Why would you take this class? Why? Why when you're seeking an architectural degree as most of you are? Would this be a required class?

Like what is this useful for? Architecture is generally a very forward-thinking career, at least nowadays it is, right? Because you're building things that don't exist. You're looking to the future, almost always, imagining new worlds of the future where there's new buildings and that's what you want to do.

You may be thinking like, why in the world would I care about old buildings? Old buildings are old, part of other social structures that You do or don't agree with, and that's good. You should be critical of everything.

But why learn about architectural history? And, you know, historians might be upset with what I have to say here, but generally I think the main, you know, it's really only worth it for two reasons. One, you just enjoy history, right?

You just like historical things, you read historical novels. You like to think about the past. You like to learn about the past. For whatever reason, it's just something that interests you.

So that could be a reason to take this class, and that's a good enough reason, I think, as well. But for the fact that you're paying a lot of money to go to school, the main reason that history can be very important to you is that you can use it to inform decisions you make about the future. right? And complete with all the cliches, right? Learning about the past, learning from the past, not repeating mistakes, right?

Say those that don't know history, the mistakes of history, you don't know the history, are bound to repeat it if that trope is true or not. But you should be learning from the past, right? You should remember the great triumphs. You should understand what did work, what didn't work. what you can take, what you can suss out of what other people have thought about.

When it comes to architecture, every single thing that's built that still exists today, from any time period, took an immense amount of thought. Somebody spent, in some of the works we're going to look at in this course, they spent their entire lives looking at these buildings being built. So did their children and their children's children, right?

We're going to look at buildings that took hundreds of years to build, right? So the amount of information that's sort of inscribed into old buildings is immense. So there's something to be learned there. You can take from it, steal from it, you know, pull it apart and just make yourself a more informed designer, right? Throughout this course, you'll notice that I'm often talking to designers.

I know not everybody that's taking this is... pursuing an architectural degree. But I think it's important that the way in which we think about history, again, unless you just enjoy history, is one that's sort of practical. It's something you can use in your studies as you go forward into designing, hopefully, right, for most of you, right?

And that last bit, like gaining a better understanding of how how we got to where we are and imagine where we're going, right? You can, we'll be able to follow certain threads through history and there'll be certain moments, hopefully, that you're like, aha, that's why that's the way it is, right? And then you can think, should it still be that way? Or should we get rid of that?

Or should we move that forward? And that's really in where, that's where the power of history and studying history lies. And this class is particularly about architectural history.

But you're going to notice that a lot of what we talk about are sort of the social and cultural constructs, sometimes the technical. technological constructs that surround these buildings, right? And we'll get a little bit more to that in a few slides.

You know, so really, I mean, at least for me, I think it will be for you, and this is one way to think about it, and I'm sure there's got to be some history major in here that's just going to be like, that's wrong. But let's have that conversation too, that understanding history is kind of only important if you can relate it to your own time. to you. History doesn't...

history only exists in us, right? We're the only ones that are keeping it alive. So if it...

it needs to matter to you. It needs to be something that you can use, you can add agency to, you can... you can... you can judge what you're doing by, right? This is...

this is literally the learning from history part. And I want you to also think about the fact that that's different than other ways of gaining knowledge and producing knowledge. So history is set apart from, say, science. Not that science doesn't have history, and it's not completely divorced from it.

But in science, we use experimentation. We test things. and there's outcomes and we observe things that we're doing to understand them better.

In mathematics, we're using proofs. We're using the construct of numbers to figure something out, right? And in art, you're producing things, right?

That's the way that that information is made and learned, right? through, in that case, observation, right? And those are different than history, right? Not lesser or more, but they're different.

So how we're doing this is looking to the past, thinking about the past, talking about the past, and then the critical moment is when you apply it to yourself today, right? As you... as you think about the future, right? So there are caveats to this though, right? Because history is incredibly subjective.

We really only have the information that was recorded. And then there are certain essentially scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists that go through and try and suss out information, but even then it's an incredibly subjective way of looking at the world in which they're deciding what they see, you know, what it is about what they see that that makes any sense to anybody. And that's, you know, that comes to also, you know, kind of the old saying that, you know, the victors, right, history is written by the victors, right? And we We know this, and it's interesting because in, you know, our current, the current state of our society, particularly here in the United States, is we're going through and checking who won all the battles and who lost, and then trying to understand a more complete view of the history of things. Now, this class in particular is pretty broad, right?

And we're not diving into any particular project or culture or space in particular. depth, right? So we might not get into, you know, moral relativism of what these buildings are, but we will discuss it, right?

And it's important if we have information about buildings, about why and how they were built, you're gonna notice that most old buildings that we study are built for like a few reasons, right? For religious reasons. for defense of some type, or military reasons, or other sort of political reasons, or to gather people, which is a political reason as well, right? And we'll be looking at these, and you're going to, we can glean at least a little bit about you know, what these people were like, right? We're going to look at it, we're going to try, again, try to be somewhat objective about it, but at the same time, you're going to look at something and be like, oh, those people are terrible, or wow, they were amazing, they did something amazing, right?

It being the time period that we're studying, again, this class mostly covers from sort of ancient Egypt through the Renaissance. Things were different back then, and that is not an excuse, but a warning that the way and the reasons a lot of these things were built don't hold up to our standards of how humans should be treated today. But I want you to keep that in mind for your entire career past this class about what it means to build a building. Because as I mentioned, every one of these buildings took a name. an intense amount of time and thinking and labor, right?

And we want to understand all these buildings within that context. So I'm going to take a step backwards, though, from architectural history. That's what this class is about to some, you know, just this this class. This lecture only has like three or four slides and more words than we're normally going to have.

and talk about some broader things that I think a lot of people take for granted. Oh, and a quick note, just if you're wondering about the images that are on this. Usually the images for this class are going to be pictures of historic buildings and pyramids and temples and things like that.

But as I was making this and I was trying to think, usually these introductory class, I put some like goofy stock imagery of like architecture and stuff. But for this class, I... thought it would be interesting to just ask mid journey right an ai text to image program which i'm assuming most of you are familiar with what i'm just asking them the general questions right so we see like this is what a history professor is supposed to look like and oh maybe i wish i had that much hair and white looks good.

I like the jacket too. And I do have a lot, a lot of books. I don't have a bookshelf behind me, but like, yeah, maybe, but that's what, how AI works. And this is not off topic of what this class is about.

It takes everything on the internet, all the images of what people think history professors look like, and just makes this image. And it's like, it's like painterly. I literally just.

Typed in you can see exactly what the prompt is do it yourself It's kind of interesting and it like they all came back and they looked like paintings for some reason right? And for this one, I just I typed in ancient architecture, right? And that's what it shows which you know when we get into this class I think we'll be able to place some sort of idea of what this is this, you know looks like classic India Maybe, but it's like nowhere descript.

But that's what the internet thinks that ancient architecture is. And that's interesting. At the end of this class, I think you may have a different view of what that might be.

But again, that's a bit off topic. There's only a few slides in here. Let's step back, right? So what is architecture? For most of you, I think this is...

probably your introduction to architecture it's you may have had some you know architectural drafting classes in the past um you may have you you've lived in buildings before uh you've probably seen buildings that you like and um i'm here to tell you though or get you prompt you to start thinking in slightly a different way about architecture than is sort of the typical way as young scholars, your view of what architecture is needs to be more refined than just the general public's idea, than what Midjourney would tell you it is, right? Than what the internet is if you just type in what is architecture. Do that though.

See what it says. And as you go through your schooling, if you continue through an architecture program, you're going to find out how difficult this question is to answer. And it will be literally argued about in front of you. with work that you produce that you say is architecture when a professor is like that's not architecture you might get a professor that says that's not architecture when i went through school and it was a bunch of old stuffy white dudes they were often saying that to us i don't know if they were right or not um but architecture you know broadly we think it's existed a bit longer than civilization itself you and we're going to talk about that at least a little bit throughout this class but the idea that architecture predates civilization and some would argue causes civilization it is one of the causes of civilization of true civilization we'll get into that It's kind of intense.

So maybe like about 6,000 years of things that we would call architecture. But generally, broadly, we would maybe say that it's the conscious planning and design of buildings. So that's where the arguments come in, right? Because, I mean, all buildings that are built today are planned.

Kind of mostly have to be. There is a type of architecture that we... We'll talk about a little bit that we call vernacular, which is essentially a folk style of building architecture where there's no real plans. You just build it based on knowledge, traditional building techniques. And I'm generally arguing with this slide that that's not really architecture, right?

It doesn't involve the planning of buildings. That's maybe a longer conversation again, right? So this is. This is where the difficulties come in, right? And then there's high architecture and low architecture.

Is the suburban house you grew up in architecture, is that the same architecture as the pyramids? Like, those are both architecture. Can we put those in the same category? Is the building you're in right now architecture versus, say, the Taj Mahal?

building you may be familiar with, or the Forbidden City, or is that the same as a Haudenosaunee longhouse? We'll talk about those. Or, you know, Machu Picchu, Inca temple, religious site, or Angkor Wat.

Are all of these things the same, right? An apartment building? Right? So those are all, it gets really mushy, right?

But the other thing I want you to think about, though, is that architecture is not doing, it's not making the building. Our contemporary view, particularly of architecture, is not the making of the building or even the buildings themselves, right? That's not the architecture. the architecture is all that design bit that happened.

It's all of the ideas and thinking and planning and everything that went into making that building. The building itself is a construction, right? And that's sort of a hard switch of the brain from what I think most of the public thinks architecture is. They look at a building and they say, oh that is the architecture.

The architecture itself is arguably just the ideas behind the building, right? And, you know, we won't get into all the platitudes of architects of the past necessarily, but a lot of architects argue about what this is, say, say it's archi-what is the saying, Mies van der Rohe, architecture happens when two bricks come together, right? That's the start of architecture, or it's a defined space. Right?

So at the end of this class, you probably still won't have an answer to this question. In fact, you might be more critical of even asking this question. And I would encourage you to, anytime somebody says something like, that's architecture, to think really hard about what they're saying.

Right? Because it's not quite so simple. Right?

Then there's the other question. What is an architect? Now this is actually easier, a little bit easier to answer.

Today, as you know it, right, and this won't actually apply to most of what we're talking about in this course, a modern architecture is a professional, somebody who has a license, often multiple degrees, like an education, they've been tested, they get paid sometimes, to do the work in the field of architecture, in this broad field which we call architecture. right and as a profession some argue that you know there are people we can point at throughout history as far back as egyptians that were like oh that was the architect of that building but as um the idea of sort of this master of design it goes maybe back to the renaissance and as architect As the profession, as we really understand it, particularly in the United States, it goes back maybe 150 years. It's not actually a really old profession like, say, lawyers, politicians, prostitutes, bakers, farmers.

Those are professions that are much, much older. So when you talk about an architect today and... and legally in the United States, at least when you say architect or you say you are an architect, you have to have a license, which takes a long time to get, right?

It's all the schooling and testing and stuff. Ask your academic advisor about what it actually takes to become an architect. We're not going to really cover that.

As I mentioned, though, like the act of doing architecture isn't the building part. There is there are actions that happen when the primary product of an architect is our drawings today in particular right they're they're digital drawings today but you know and as we can see in this mid-journey we've got a guy and like the i actually think this looks more like an engineer it's like a weird thumb sort of weird mid-journey thing architects do wear hard hats sometimes when you visit a site You do look at printed drawings occasionally, but we spend way more time behind a computer. We do like pens.

Maybe this is what an architect looks like, but kind of not so much. But what architects do do is we produce drawings over and over. We spend hours, days, making drawings of buildings. And those drawings are a set of instructions given. to somebody that actually does build the building, to builders, right?

Construction workers, to contractors and stuff. So we're giving them what we produce are just the instructions, right? And arguably, again, arguably, those drawings are much closer to what the architecture of a building is than the building itself.

I'm talking in loops maybe, right? But I want you to be like thinking about that. Like, what are we doing, right? So those drawings themselves, they're drawings of their ideas, right? They're the drawings of the ideas that the architect has, the manifestation of that.

The building is a manifestation of the drawings. And obviously, in some cases, they're very technical assemblies of pieces. But even that, for the most part, architectural drawings don't go into the amount of detail that people think. Architects are mostly, mostly involved with planning the sizes and the shapes of spaces, what finished materials are, like what that that like very outer layer of material is, maybe maybe an inch into the wall, something like that, and what things look like.

How things are built is not usually actually in the hands of the architect. for those of you engineers, you help us out with that, and builders, they tell us how things are actually built, and we just tell them what we want built, right? And that, again, is very different than what the public probably thinks an architect is. We do walk around with rows of drawings, and we do point at things a lot, and we're in the city, we're always craning our heads and looking around at buildings, and we plan all of our vacations around seeing temples that nobody else wants to see, but...

You know, in general, what architects do is make drawings. And if you're an architecture school now, you're going to learn a lot about that, right? We build models every once in a while, but for the most part, we're making drawings, right? And this is the last slide. We're already almost through your first lecture of this class, right?

So what's maybe more important about what is an architect and what is architecture is, like, what matters to architects? Like, what do we actually care about? And I bring this up because this is sort of what I want you to be looking through, looking for through this entire class.

Right? These are the things you should be paying attention to. And you're going to hear me say these things probably again and again, at least in some form or another, if not explicitly when I point out a building, when I talk about it. The first bit are the politics of the building, of the architecture, of the space, whatever we're talking about.

It's politics. And when I'm talking about politics, I'm not necessarily talking about the government, which... you know, how this class is landing, it's going to be hard to like, when you hear the word politics, obviously, in an election here in the United States, it's hard not to think of that. Now, I'm not saying that it's devoid of that, not at all. But again, I want you to have a slightly broader view of what politics means.

And the politics of architecture are sort of broader than just, you know, who people are voting for. or not voting for, right? And I like to divide it sort of into these three bits, right? Politics are the relationships, it's all about relationships between people and people, so that includes communities, families, hierarchies of power, which is where probably government comes in closest, but not necessarily, right?

It also has to do with, you know, who has power over who, what people have power to do, what agency they have in the world, right? And that is that that has an interplay with architecture, right? Next is the relationship between people and buildings, right? And I just told you in the last slide that architecture is not the buildings themselves, and really I just don't, you know, I don't have a better word. And this is just easier to remember, but it's people and the architecture, you could call it, but also people in physical buildings, too.

And that relationship is is a lot of what we focus on. Right. So that has to do with symbols and icons.

Like what do what does, you know, a building mean to us when we see it? Is it a symbol of something for us? Right.

For those of you in Milwaukee. Nearly the symbol of the city now is the Quadraci Pavilion, which is the big white turkey on the lake at the art museum. The Calatrava, as it's called, which is the name of the architect.

For those of you maybe in Madison, it's the Capitol Building. Capitol Buildings are always symbols of something, right? And how they're built and everything about them is all symbolic and iconographic. We're going to talk a lot about that, right?

uh, ownership, right? We can, we can own buildings and own space and own land, right? That's a complete construct, right? Which makes it a political construct. Uh, and then also we use buildings for shelter.

They protect us from something, right? Um, they provide us with safety, both physically and psychologically, right? And the psychological part is super important, too, because it's more than just a shell, usually, hopefully, right?

And then the last one is a bit more abstract. And again, for lack of better words, it's the relationship between buildings and buildings. Like when buildings are together, you know, obviously humans need to like sort of perceive this.

But when you put more than one building. or a building in its relationship sort of to itself, there are spatial and formal relationships that are there whether humans are there or not or whether the intended humans are there, right? We all live in places that are much older than ourselves for the most part, right?

I live in a 110 year old hundred and 11 or 12 year old house. Many of the buildings that you're in are 50 years old, 100 year old. We're going to be looking at buildings that people still occupy that are 500 years old, 1,000 years old, right?

And they were not designed for what they need, but there's still relationships of space within them, right? When you get multiple buildings together, we usually call that an urbanism, right? When things are close enough together that they produce another space, right?

That space in itself gets designed, right? And it produces a city, right? When we get enough buildings together, it becomes a city.

And that arrangement of buildings is political in itself, right? And I put environment in this as well. I know that's sort of the building.

and its relationship to nature, right? Or to the, I think environment's a better word, but we're not going to use the word nature, but the environment, right? And multiple buildings to the environment and what those buildings do to the environment, whether the environment is one that is completely a human construct or whether it's an animal construct or a plant construct or a climactic construct, there's also that relationship. So that set of politics, every time we look at a building, and when you start designing buildings, every time you do it, you need to, I want you to go through those thoughts and think about what all those relationships are.

Those, you know, that's sort of the meat of it, right? Who are these people? Why did they build it?

What were the power structures? What did these buildings mean to people? And why are there... three pyramids, right?

Like why is that building lined up with that building? And why is there a view that way and a view that way? Why is it built out of what it's built out of, right? The other thing that architects really care about and that we care about in this class too is sort of a simpler and probably the more accepted definition of where architecture comes in. And that's shelter in space.

Again though, I want you to think of this sort of broadly, right? A lot of people, again back to that question, like what is architecture, say that this is where it starts. And you know, maybe is a cave architecture if, you know, it causes shelter, is you know, a hollowed out log. You can argue it a lot of different ways.

But these things do matter to us, right? And it matters for this class and it matters as you think about architecture, buildings, the act of building, the politics of space, right? So we have physical and psychological protection from the elements, animals, and often from each other, right?

So we often think about like this idea that our buildings protect us from the outside and that's true because we're kind of really fleshy we can't just like be outside today it's too hot for all of us in the midwest it's too cold for much of the year um there's not tons of dangerous animals around here but there's bugs and things that we we generally try and keep out um and then we we separate ourselves out right like We divide ourselves into groups, clans, tribes, nations, neighbors, and then we make that division physical, right? And you're saying like, oh, yeah, of course. But remember, that's just completely a human contract. We could just live together without walls between us, right?

And that's where the psychological part comes in, right? The idea of privacy, right? that we don't want people to see what we're doing. We have doors, hallways, bathrooms. These are all these are all inventions, right?

These are all inventions essentially by architects to fulfill some psychological want or need of a culture, right? Like always think of that, right? that a bathroom is an invention for it doesn't like you don't need a bathroom at all right you don't actually do anything that couldn't be done in a much more public way but our culture doesn't allow that right or we don't we don't like want that uh i mean thankfully i mean as far as i'm concerned because i'm part of this culture but other cultures maybe would find that weird sort of lastly in this same thing about about culture and and space right space being not the built that but the whole the void of it right shelter is the physicality of it that that's keeping something separated and space being the space right is and i mentioned this before and a lot of what we're going to talk about falls into just a few of these categories.

Things are designed and built for defense. And again, that defense could be as small as just the defense for privacy sake, but in a lot of cases, it's to stop people from killing each other, protect people, right? We build walls, castles, palaces, et cetera.

Worship, and we're going to talk about worship, you know, we're going to be looking at a lot of... what we call ecclesiastic spaces, like spaces of spirituality or religion. Because for so much of history, that was, along with defense, defense and worship, that was the only thing that could get enough people together and gather, get enough people motivated to give up something, money, food. People didn't always willingly give up their freedom, but people gave up, I don't know, their morals to enslave other people, to build massive, long-lasting, intricate things. It's defense and worship, right?

That's why, you know, we have French villages made out of wattle and daub, which is essentially dung and... Hey, for most of the buildings. And then you have an intricately carved cathedral that took 300 years to build.

Right? Like, think about where the importance to a culture is. Right? And then lastly, like, one of the other main things, like, to this day, one of the most important things to this day is we design things and build things to gather people. Again, we're sort of dividing each other up.

Think about this, right? You live in a house that's of a certain size to have a certain number of people living in it, and that certain number of people always seems to fit the group that you are a part of. It's your family, it's your dorm mate, your roommates, your significant other, even your kids someday, all the old people at the... you know, at the old people house, the old people home, or barracks, or gathering people that continues through worship, right?

So we have churches and mosques and synagogues and temples, and the gathering of people is one of the highest callings for a lot of architects, right? Museums, we hold things, right? Again.

There's always exceptions to the rules. There's warehouses. There's, I don't know, missile silos. I guess that goes along with defense.

A lot of things. But these are the main things that architects care about. These are the things that we're going to talk about. These are the things, again, that every project we look at, every project you look at for the rest of your lives from this moment forward, you can think through and look at the building.

sort of start to make these judgments, right? And if not, you can at least try and figure them out, right? And you won't always be able to. And that's all the way back to that first slide, where sort of the interest and the use and the reason for studying architectural history can can sort of come in, come alive and become a way in which you you sort of operate within the world right um and it's broad right even look at the mid journey thing i just said shelter what is shelter yes four scenes only one of them looks like it maybe could possibly exist in our world right maybe they Right?

So again, at the end of this course, I do want this class to be, you know, it's not just this like theory mumbo jumbo, what one of my good Russian friends just calls water. It's kind of thin. These esoteric conversations, we're going to have plenty of those. But I do want this to be sort of practical.

I want you to be able to, at the end of this course, to look at architecture, think about architecture, and think about the people that were associated with it, and how those buildings, how that architecture, how those spaces, how that shelter has affected everybody since the time it was built to now. All the way to yourself, where you're like sitting looking at a screen, looking at a picture of Encore Watt and like, oh, this building's now affecting me because it's taking up my time and I have to take a quiz about it. Not what the builders intended, but that's what happens, right? And with that knowledge, with that sort of power, you'll be able to eventually, for those of you that do become designers, become architects, how you can start to think about how you can affect people from the time you build something. time you design something into the into the future right you can imagine uh if not realistic at least a fantastic future right moving forward because you have sort of this ammunition of everything that's been built before you right so i'm going to leave it at that the next lecture uh we're mostly going to cover egypt and sumeria I think so.

That's all I want to say for today. And that's again, this lecture is going to be a little bit different. We're going to start actually looking at some architecture and some buildings, starting with the next full lecture. And until that time, start thinking about how this stuff is affecting. your life today.

Look at the buildings around you. Look at the buildings you interact with and see if you can start making these things matter to you. Okay.

I'll see you all next week.

Transcript for:Introduction to Architectural Thinking

Transcript for:
Introduction to Architectural Thinking