“Precious moments of intuition result from patient work.”

Work from first day of class – preliminary thoughts….

I’ve officially been trying to write his post for five days now. Having a blog and writing about yourself can be a very self-indulgent exercise and getting down to business and not writing a whole bunch of drivel is difficult at times. In considering the first assignment to consider questions, goals & objectives, outcomes, indicators, critical decisions and next steps I’ve come to realize that a lot of different things interest me about architecture almost to the point of creating more confusion and less clarity about where I want to head next and ultimately end up. The quote in the blog title came from Peter Zumthor’s book “Thinking Architecture.” At first I thought the title was kind of odd but Peter Zumthor has always been one of my favorite architects so I decided to make some time to read it. Immediately it reminded me of an essay/book I read in undergrad by Michael Benedikt called “For an Architecture of Reality.” (Another title that makes you say “huh?”) I think just backing off of from trying to be specific for a moment helped clarify what I want to do next, which is to compile the myriad things I’m interested and see if I can draw connections or conclusions from them. So here we go….

(p.s. I’ve linked all the photos back to their source so you can click through & see more information)

Selexyz-Domincan-Church-Maastricht

The concept of historic buildings containing knowledge is a beautiful idea to me. This is a 13th century church that has been used as “parish, then a warehouse, then an archive, then a giant parking lot for bicycles” since the late 18th century. On a more basic and pragmatic level the re-use of a historic building has always interested me and is something i’d like to pursue with this thesis if possible. Source: InHabitat

While researching a project last fall I stumbled across articles on Environmental & Ecological History. Thankfully Wikipedia now quite carefully cites its sources and several people in the field of Environmental History have given their own definition but one that I find especially interesting is : “As a method, environmental history is the use of ecological analysis as a means of understanding human history … an account of changes in human societies as they relate to changes in the natural environment.” (Hughes, Donald J. (2001). An Environmental History of the World: Humankind’s Changing Role in the Community of Life )

Doing an analysis of a site through its Environmental History would be a really provocative way of examining the unnatural and natural processes that shape an area. I think the logo of the official organization of Environmental Historians is quite appropriate to show here:

Past & Present