BENV1015 History of Design Thinking, Term 2, 2024

Assignment 2 Brief

Weighting:                        40%

Duration:                           3 weeks

Due Date:                          Week 8, Wednesday, 17 July, 5pm

Submission Location:     Moodle (Turnitin - Similarity Report available)

Late Penalty:                    5 percentage points per day

Assessment Details

You will produce drawings with text that analyses the traditional principle of the human analogy, considered in terms of design, as well as a beholder’s sense of affinity with a building or an interior. The assignment includes 3 tasks, each comprising text and accompanying sketches.

Purpose

The assignment develops your knowledge of historical design ideas and communication skills corresponding to the course learning outcomes below. It aims to give an appreciation of the   implications of past movements, practitioners, and projects for current challenges.

Learning Outcomes Assessed

CLO1: Analyse and critique a range of significant historical design ideas and practices within their social, cultural and technological contexts.

CLO2: Reflect on historical design approaches and their relationship to your profession.

CLO3: Communicate historical design ideas through text and visuals.

Acceptable Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Assessment

You may use standard editing and referencing software, but not generative AI. Examples of software permitted - Microsoft Office suite, Grammarly.

If the use of generative AI such as ChatGPT is detected, it will be regarded as serious academic misconduct and subject to the standard penalties, which may include 0 fail for the assessment.

Assessment Requirements

It is expected that you work on 1 task per week. Each is worth 1/3 of the 20%. Sketches are to be made free hand.

Word limits: 250 words/task. The main discussion text must be typed, not handwritten. Annotations can be handwritten or typed. Annotations on sketches do not contribute to the word count.

Page limits: 2 sheets of A3 paper/task.

The text should be in essay format (full sentences and paragraphs). You are encouraged to add thoughtful annotations. These may explore relationships between buildings and lecture themes, rather than simply labelling parts. This assignment requires the text to be documented with footnotes and a bibliography. The sketches should be thoughtful aligned to the well-researched and argued text.

Task 4: Michelangelo’s Capitoline Palace

By referring to Watkin’s book and additional sources, make a series of sketches, with accompanying texts, to explore the ways in which architects compose the exterior of buildings. In specific terms, you will focus on the rhythmic interplay of forms. Analyse Michelangelo’s scheme for the Capitoline palaces, noting the relationship between the larger and smaller orders. Does such interweaving enrich the exterior of a palace? Comparisons can be made with other Renaissance buildings. These could avoid the interlacing of parts, as in Alberti’s Rucellai Palace.

On the other hand, the relevant examples could, like Michelangelo, employ a giant order. Examples include Alberti’s San Andrea and Palladio’s Loggia del Capitaniato. Your drawings and texts should consider the relationship between the orders. The distinctive nature of an order is also significant. For instance, an order in a building can be a pilaster or a column, the latter either attached to a wall or standing in front of it. Your analysis of the disposition of the parts across a façade should refer to classical notions, such as the human body’s role as a type, which informs the proportions of all aspects of a building, including the windows, doors and details.

Reference (essential)

D. Watkin, A History of Western Architecture (6th  ed.) London: Laurence King, 2015. (Earlier editions can be used, as they include the basic chapter on Renaissance architecture).

References (not essential)

J. Ackerman, “Michelangelo’s Theory of Architecture”, ch. 1 of The Architecture of Michelangelo, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1970.

B. Boucher, Andrea Palladio. The Architect in His Time, New York, London and Paris: Abbeville Press, 1998

J. Ackerman, Palladio, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966

Task 5: Piranesi and E-L. Boullée

The task involves you selecting images from the lecture or books. On two sheets of paper, include

your own interpretive sketches of two eighteenth century drawings. Choose these historical examples from Piranesi’s famous series of etchings, titled Carceri (Prisons), or E-L. Boullee’s projects, such as his monument to Newton and the interior of the National Library. Discuss these images, by referring to

the inclusion of human figures. How are these people related to their accompanying spaces or

external forms? Is there a critique of the classicism’s regard for an analogy between the scales of the body and architecture? Can the illustrated human figures in drawings by Piranesi and Boullee add to  the evocation of vast, sublime architectural forms?

Please note that there are many texts on Piranesi’s drawings.

References (not essential)

S. Kostof, A History of Architecture, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 253-67.

E.L. Boullée, ‘Treatise on art’, in Boullée and visionary architecture, ed. H. Rosenau, London: Academy, 1976, 81-116.

Task 6: The stair hall of Garnier’s Paris Opera

Write an essay that addresses Garnier’s belief that the people attending the opera will empathise

with the lively forms of his Paris Opera. You may explore the designer’s fascination with the themes

of ritual, as well as dressing as an adornment of people and a building. For Garnier, human beings and built forms are not dull but have a vivid personality and wit. He explored this in the Paris Opera,

where visitors would be attired in an appropriate manner. Their building was also well-dressed. Opera goers are brought together, to gossip in a scintillating manner, within the building’s most sumptuous    interior. This is the splendid stage-like setting of the stair hall.

Accompanying drawings combine the text with illustrations of the Paris Opera. In these sketches, you could reflect on the ways that citizens would dress. Try to convey the idea that their presence was

taken into consideration in the dressed surfaces of the stair hall.

References (essential: one of these)

D. Van Zanten, Designing Paris: the architecture of Duban, Labrouste, Duc and Vaudoyer, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1987, 83-98; or

D. Van Zanten, 'Architectural composition at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from Charles Percier to Charles Garnier', in The architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, ed. A. Drexler, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T.

Press, 1977, 254-88.

References (not essential)

C.C. Mead, Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, Cambridge, Mass. and London: M.I.T. Press, 1991.

D. Watkin, Charles Robert Cockerell, London; Zwemmer, 1974

P. Kohane, “Order and variety in the work of C. R. Cockerell”, Fabrications, 10, 1999, 100-111

Feedback Strategy

Initial feedback is provided in tutorials. Feedback for the completed assignment will be given within 2 weeks of submission in the form. of rubric ratings and written comments, accessed in Moodle.

The aim of the tutorials is for your tutor to provide general comments each week on drawings for tasks leading to the assignment in class.

Criteria for Success

The assignment is assessed on the following criteria:

•    Rigour of Analysis (30%)

•    Reflection (30%)

•    Visual Communication (20%)

•    Written Communication (20%)