What is Why should Architects

care?
Architecture?

Asad Zafar Haider

How this lecture will go

Not terribly…I hope

1. What architecture can not be
2. A different kind of definition
3. Why any of this matters
4. Y’all lying to me about how great this was
What architecture can not be
Possibilities

Let’s assume for a second that we have a good definition for what a building is.

Then, Is architecture just a building that is…

 Artistic?
 Beautiful
 Useful?
 Designed by an architect?
 Engineered?
 Something else?
 Architecture isn’t just beautiful buildings (I)

 What about buildings that are considered ugly

when made but later regarded as beautiful?
Do they suddenly become architecture?
 Described as “useless and monstrous…a
giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a
gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its
barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-
Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les
Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe…like a blot of
ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column
of bolted sheet metal.
 What about buildings whose beauty no one
cares about or were never made with beauty
in mind?
 Architecture isn’t just beautiful buildings (II)

 If some people think a building is

beautiful, then is it architecture only
to them?
 Walt Disney Concert Hall, by Frank
Gehry
 We’re assuming that ”beauty” can be
easily defined.
 Good luck with that. Let me know if
you find an answer.
Architecture isn’t just useful buildings either (I)

 Not all buildings are useful:

 Some have very little use like celebrity homes have very
little use.
 Antilia, the private residence of Mukesh Ambani. Worth over
2 billion Dollars
 Are Such buildings only a little bit architecture?
 Or does any amount of use make something an
architecture?
 What about buildings that are made to be useful but turn
out to be useless?
 Architecture isn’t just useful buildings either (II)

 What about buildings that are

made to be useful but turn out
to be useless?
 Bird’s nest Stadium, Beijing,
made for the 2008 olympics
Architecture isn’t just stuff made by architects (I)

 Most homes in america aren’t

individually designed by architects. Are
they not architecture?
 Who is an architect anyway? What if I
design a building? It will be terrible,
but will it not be architecture?
 If an architect designs something else,
is that also architecture?
 Architecture isn’t just stuff made by architects (II)

 If an architect
designsor creates
something else, is
that also
architecture?
 Michelangelo
helped design St.
Peters Basilica.
 He also painted
the Sistine Chapel
Ceiling and the
Last Judgment
 Architecture isn’t just structural engineering. I
think.

 Structural engineers make many things like planes or ships or engines. Are those architecture? They might be said to have
architecture, but does that make them architecture?
 What about basic things made without structural engineering in mind? Basic stuff can be made by non-architects.
 What about things that turn out to have bad structural engineering? Leaning tower of Pisa. Collaapsed buildings. Tacoma
Narrows.
 BUT for buildings to stand at all, they must follow some principles of structural engineering, even if the creator doesn’t
know or hasn’t deliberately followed them.
Could architecture be artistic building?

 I’m deliberately coming to this last, because the answer to this isn’t a flat NO
 I actually am not sure of the answer, but there are good reasons to doubt that it is YES
 Think of architects who don’t see themselves as making beautiful things. Or at least things that look a certain
way––i.e. don’t care what their buildings look like.
 That can’t happen in art. What makes one piece of art clearly different from another is how it looks (or
sounds, feels or even smells).
 The biggest issue though is that defining what art is is possibly harder than defining what architecture is.
Until we do that, we’re stuck.
 Fortunately, this doesn’t matter today. We can get where we want to go without opening this can of worms
Summary of part one

Architecture can’t be only or a combination of:

 Beauty
 Usefulness
 Design by an architect?
 Engineering
 Anything else I can think of

And probably not art either. But never mind that.

A Different Kind of Definition
A Clarification

 So far, we’ve just been throwing around the term Architecture.

 It can actually mean two things:
 Architecture is what certain things are: architectural objects. I will refer to the from now on, as “buildings.”
 Architecture is what people do to help create “buildings.” I will refer to this and only this from now own as
“architectural practie.”
 Obviously, they are related, and alone, they aren’t architecture by themselves.
 For now, just keep this in mind.
Structural engineering, Redux

We’re doing to change direction a little bit and return to structural engineering.
 We’ve already established that buildings can’t be reduced to structural engineering
 But the approach that we’ve used isn’t necessarily bad
 The basis of that approach is asking “What do all buildings have?”
 The question we should be asking is slightly different:
 “What must all buildings have, without which they would not be buildings?”
 The easy answer to that, as we have seen, is structural engineering.
 But we’ve also seen that it is a problematic answer.
 Can we fix that somehow?
 Breaking down Structural Engineering

 Please laugh at the title. I made a lot of effort on

that joke.
 Even more than my outfit.
 The problem with the structural engineering
approach is that it is too crude.
 We need to break down what we mean by structural
engineering
 Obviously, there is the fancy physics stuff;
 Wedges and arches, possibly as much as 6000 years
ago (~4000 BCE)
 Tuned mass dampers