COTAA 1/2024
In Quest for TRUTH: Research in Architecture
We are deeply grateful to everyone who purchased our journal at last week’s launch at FAST!
The first issue sold out quickly, and we’ve heard from many who missed the chance to get a copy.
In response, we’re preparing a new print run of COTAA #1. If you’d like to order this printed edition, please email us at cotaa@ozalid.ro by November 15th. Include your full name, the number of copies you wish to order, and your address and phone number.
The new price is 75 RON. Delivery within Cluj (Romania) is free; for other locations, buyers are responsible for shipping costs.
Thank you! We truly value your support!
What lie has become truth in architectural research or practice?
I don’t believe a lie can ever become truth. These are not interchangeable categories. Rather, a lie is the illusion of truth and as such it may be mistaken for truth. Within this invitation to expose the production of an architectural illusion, I believe lies subtly embedded the presupposition of the detached observer – the architectural researcher – who would be able to perform such scientific disclosure as an illuminating operation enacted on an objectified reality. Yet, as Pierre Bourdieu uncannily puts it, in order to have “a true science of the work of art” [read architecture], one must break away from illusio, by “suspending the complicity and connivence relationship that unites any cultivated person to the cultural game.” In pretending to expose an architectural illusion, I would not be simply registering and (dis)crediting a cultural construct, but also expressing the disposition of legitimizing my own position within the same cultural field.
Cristina Purcar
It has been the dominant narrative of Modernity: things are getting better. The emergence and promotion of technological innovation over the period of Modernity has supported our continuously striving for a future in which we humans will unquestionably flourish. Ideology aside, this has been our general trajectory. The assumption of such a future as inevitable, underlies many of the forms of the architecture of Modernity, whose superlative attributes (better, stronger, quicker…) are a response to our confidence in mastering planetary resources and systems. This approach to technological capacity has meant that we have constructed Nature, material and living, as something external to ourselves and in service to us, rather than intrinsic to our own humanity and actions. Though we are gradually coming to recognise this as constructed fact rather than truth, we continue to rely on its mythology to guide our practices.
Kevin Donovan
Architectural research has become more rigorous only in the last decades. For the most, part architectural theory and research has more or less been based on beliefs, on interpretations and generalization of successful projects. The belief that architecture can be based on objective truths, such as in the natural sciences. From Pugin, who believed that there is a connection between religious truth and architectural truth leading to the Gothic renaissance in the United Kingdom, to the modern movement which believed in an architecture that is rationally determined (the house is a machine and the machine is produced by necessity and not by creativity and imagination), and up to the present day where echoes of this belief-based approach to architecture still exists, like the New Urbanism theory and practice, the Danish practice of 3XN who argues that architecture shapes behaviour, or Space Syntax.
Dragoș Dascălu
An architect is only someone who got a university degree in architecture and no major building is to be designed without the lead of an architect. This was certainly not true in the modern epoque. The most prominent figures of architecture that thousands of students have learned from: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius were all autodidacts. Mies did not attend high school, while Gropius studied architecture for two years, but dropped out most probably because of his poor graphical skills, but lately he was appointed dean at Harvard, after leading Bauhaus for a while. Richard Buckminster Fuller was not recognized as an architect by the AIA, despite his designs and realizations. Today, in most countries, an architect is only someone who graduated architecture at university level, and in many cases, this is not even sufficient to be legally entitled to conduct a design process. Period.
Șerban Țigănaș
Can we speak about truth in architecture? Is it not the most volatile subject of the discipline itself? The history of architecture can be seen as a violent change of styles and doctrines that have been constructed by dismissing and belittling the truth of the previous style and doctrine. Whether the Renaissance replaced the architecture of the Middle Ages, modernism replaced historicism or, post-modernism, the myths of modernism – the emerging style needed to reproach to its predecessor’s beliefs, their lack of truthfulness, their compliance with lies. Even a certain contemporary ease with the problem of truth can be seen as a counter-reaction to the need for a fundamental truth that may have characterized the architecture of the twentieth century. Then, perhaps, it is this very play of truth and lie, rather than the existence of autonomous truths and lies, that stands at the core of architecture’s nature.
Smaranda Todoran
Until the full online version will be out, find out more about the selected abstracts here.
ISSN 3061-4236
ISSN-L 3061-4236