Research Meaning in Architecture...

RESEARCH 'Meaning in Architecture' (A collection of essays edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird)

During a strip to the library, I discovered this book and thought it would be extremely useful with discovering meaning in the work i am doing at the moment. I had hoped it would provide some answers about architecture as an art form, but was sadly disappointed. I picked a section called 'semiology and architecture' hoping I could find some form of revelation to spark the next step in my work. What I got instead, was a few confusing, very vague ideas about how we assign meaning to architecture. What I will do then is take the quote from Charles Jencks' essay from the architect Hannes Meyer (the least confusing man in the work of literature) 'My poem is meaningless, it just is. My painting is meaningless' and I will take from it this; we assign meaning to things ourselves, that is where meaning comes from. So I shall assign my own meaning to my practice at current- and will continue to focus on the idea of fantasy.

Harrie Fuller: 'fantasy is a way of escapism because what you're seeing isn't real, therefore the meaning is unspecified and that's what you wrote says, people can look at it and give it their own meaning however they find it relevant'
When discussing this lack of productivity in this book, Ms. Fuller, a peer on the course said this in response, and it perfectly explains my feelings on the subject.

RESEARCH 'The Book of Drawings + Sketches Architecture' (Chris Van Uffelen)

In this book, Van Uffelen, an author and art historian, tells us the story of hand drawings in architecture, which have been around for thousands of years, but are used today for the generation of ideas and decision making. While they are less technical than the digital aspect of architecture, they are more about the creation of art, which links them more to my practice. The rest of this introduction talks about this interplay between the technical and the creative, and while my pieces are not exactly technical, the process with which I create them can be; each line is quite precise. 'The development of architectural style no longer relied on realised buildings as a requirement for a positive critical reception.' This quote from the section of the intro 'Rationality, Decoration and Propaganda', is extremely relevant to my practice; I do not work with realised buildings, yet I strive to make the textures and details as realistic as possible,