Humanities in Architecture

"This study gathers and interprets the earliest extant references to architects in ancient Greek philosophy, as found in select works of Plato and Aristotle.  Throughout this review, Plato and Aristotle [are] shown to consistently present architectonic agents as exemplary civic and intellectual leaders, acting in awareness of their own (and others’) limits, with knowledge of the most appropriate archē, and with a view to the most comprehensive aims—the common good. This discloses an alternative and more accurate etymology of architects: not as master-builders but as leaders and makers of beginnings (archai). The aim of this essay has been not only to rediscover the discursive beginnings for a renewed philosophy of architecture, but to suggest how these philosophical 'archai' might help present-day architects reimagine the full relevance of their still contested role."

The paper explores Tati's use of new film media in 'Playtime' in ways that reveal more fundamental modes of social, mimetic and situational mediation as performed in the film by architects, and architect-like characters, and by the architectural settings which Jacques Tati devised.

ATMOSPHERE 10 explores Fabrications. Fabrications implicate diverse artifacts and modes of making, together with the places, practices, contingencies and intentions that enable and contextualize making. In other words, this symposium will examine not simply what, how and why we make, but sites and situations of making. The aim is to explore how cultural and environmental circumstances become meaningful catalysts of design, building, teaching and research. This theme encompasses manifold concerns beyond the digital: complexities of urban and social fabrics; intricacies of environmental skins; potentials of building sites and workshops; as well as the stories and arguments through which we craft shared understandings of our fabricated world.

Abstracts due Nov 1, Symposium Feb 1-3, 2018 University of Manitoba, Winnipeg.

Keynote Speakers include: Brian MacKay-Lyons & Philip Beesley
http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/architecture/atmosphere/2018/brian-mackay-lyons.html
http://umanitoba.ca/faculties/architecture/atmosphere/2018/philip-beesley.html

Lisa Landrum's paper "Modus Operandi of an Architectus Doli: Architectural Cunning in the Comic Plays of Plautus"  appears as Chapter 15.  Also in the book are essays by Karsten Harries, Marco Frascari, David Leatherbarrow, Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, and other colleages and former students of Alberto Perez-Gomez including: Ricardo L. Castro, Tracey Eve Winton, Robert Kirkbride, Paul Emmons, Indra Kagis McEwen, Santiago de Orduña, Caroline Dionne, Lily Chi, Louise Pelletier, Lawrence Bird, Lian Chikako Chang, Natalija Subotincic, Stephen Parcell, Graham Livesey, Juan Manuel Heredia, Anne Bordeleau, Peter Olshavsky, and David Theodore.

Paper summary/excerpts: "At least five of Plautus’ twenty extant comedies involve what classicists call an architectus doli, an “architect of trickery.” … Plautus’ elaboration of the cunning slave character has long been considered one of his most original contributions to Latin drama; but the “architect” terms associated with these slaves (and with Jupiter) were likely transposed from the now largely lost Greek comedies that Plautus adapted and translated into Latin. These five imported “architects” were generally ignored in early studies of Plautine inventiveness. They eventually gained attention, however, in an important 1952 study on The Nature of Roman Comedy. Since then, Plautus’ architectus figure has been interpreted in a variety of ways within classical scholarship: as a euphemism for the play’s lowly agent of intrigue; as a proxy for the scheming playwright; and as a media-reflexive figure associated with other craft imagery used throughout Plautus’ plays to qualify and vivify not only acts of scheming and plot construction, but also moral edification. Yet, there are further interpretations to be made and important questions to be asked…This essay cannot answer these questions in full, but it will initiate an interpretation of Plautus’ architectus doli with such questions in mind. By lifting this Roman dramatist up out of the footnotes of architectural scholarship (where he is sometimes merely credited with providing the earliest extant use of the Latin term architectus), the following study prepares the grounds for discovering how the cunning agents and agencies of Plautus’ comedies meaningfully illuminate the modus operandi of architects..."