Jorge Otero-Pailos
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816666034
- eISBN:
- 9781452948386
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816666034.003.0002
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
This chapter focuses on Jean Labatut, who was known among his contemporaries as one of the most influential teachers of the mid-twentieth century in America. Labatut’s teachings helped shape ...
More
This chapter focuses on Jean Labatut, who was known among his contemporaries as one of the most influential teachers of the mid-twentieth century in America. Labatut’s teachings helped shape postmodern architecture and promoted the view that the best way to understand this new architecture was to experience it. His success as a teacher rested on the clarity of his message: before architects could create modern buildings, they had to first be able to experience buildings in a modern way. His pedagogy aimed to define this modern experience as a bodily communion with architecture, which was immediately meaningful and did not require intellectual reflection. The chapter argues that architectural phenomenology was formed against the background of Labatut’s teachings.Less
This chapter focuses on Jean Labatut, who was known among his contemporaries as one of the most influential teachers of the mid-twentieth century in America. Labatut’s teachings helped shape postmodern architecture and promoted the view that the best way to understand this new architecture was to experience it. His success as a teacher rested on the clarity of his message: before architects could create modern buildings, they had to first be able to experience buildings in a modern way. His pedagogy aimed to define this modern experience as a bodily communion with architecture, which was immediately meaningful and did not require intellectual reflection. The chapter argues that architectural phenomenology was formed against the background of Labatut’s teachings.
Jorge Otero-Pailos
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816666034
- eISBN:
- 9781452948386
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816666034.001.0001
- Subject:
- Architecture, Architectural History
Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source ...
More
Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source for those architects who first dared to confront history as an intellectual problem and not merely as a stylistic question. This book shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. The book discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, the book contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as this text makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory.Less
Architecture’s Historical Turn traces the hidden history of architectural phenomenology, a movement that reflected a key turning point in the early phases of postmodernism and a legitimating source for those architects who first dared to confront history as an intellectual problem and not merely as a stylistic question. This book shows how architectural phenomenology radically transformed how architects engaged, theorized, and produced history. The book discusses the contributions of leading members, including Jean Labatut, Charles Moore, Christian Norberg-Schulz, and Kenneth Frampton. For architects maturing after World War II, the book contends, architectural history was a problem rather than a given. Paradoxically, their awareness of modernism’s historicity led some of them to search for an ahistorical experiential constant that might underpin all architectural expression. They drew from phenomenology, exploring the work of Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, which they translated for architectural audiences. Initially, the concept that experience could be a timeless architectural language provided a unifying intellectual basis for the stylistic pluralism that characterized postmodernism. It helped give theory—especially the theory of architectural history—a new importance over practice. However, as this text makes clear, architectural phenomenologists could not accept the idea of theory as an end in itself. In the mid-1980s they were caught in the contradictory and untenable position of having to formulate their own demotion of theory.
