Reading Analysis 1 - Zumthor
Elaine ZiYi Cui
Professor Valery Augustin
Discussion Session 1
September 10, 2014
4. Zumthor relates architecture to music in his essay. He then says, “The human ability to invent melodies, harmonies, and rhythms amazes me” (11). In your opinion, is music an apt metaphor for architecture? How so?
The philosopher Goethe says that “architecture is frozen music” (Goethe). Indeed, many terminologies, like texture, harmony, and repetition, apply both to architecture and music. Moreover, architecture can indubitably be related to music in various aspects.
In the essay, “A Way of Looking at Things”, Zumthor is amazed by human’s inherent ability to invent melodies, harmonies, and rhythms (Zumthor 11). In fact, architects and musicians share the fundamental qualities to invent and create. They are both capable of using their aptitudes from their specialized fields in generating new designs or melodies
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Architecture and music incite feelings, invite awe, or just serve as sources of inspirations for different people to satisfy different needs at different moments. In the essay, a nail or a worn-out doorstep from a building might catch Zumthor’s attention (Zumthor 16). Same in a musical piece, a note or a sudden interlude might arouse the listener’s personal insights. While the buildings and melodies provide utility, they are also constrained by technical practices. For instance, a set of music notes is not merely consisted by unsubstantiated imagination but rather by finding and fulfilling the artistic expression through the rational and objective music structures. These structures or disciplines include considerations of cadence, rhythm, counterpoint, harmony, form and many more. The architects, as well, must meet functional and technical requirements in order to coincide the actual proportions of the building (Zumthor
This paper will analyze Improvisation In a Persian Garden (Mary Catherine Bateson), Seeing (Annie Dillard), and Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination (Leslie Marmon Silko). Going through the Purpose, audience, context, ethics, and stance of each author’s piece.
A human being begins from one of the smallest cells in the body. We then, grow and evolve into extremely complex mechanisms made up of individual parts, such as the brain, the bones, and the heart. However, no matter how complex, a human is only one work, with individual parts working together to make it functional. Similarly, a work of art is composed of individual elements collaborating to create the overall work. Beginning with the colors chosen, to the way the artist swipes their brush in specific directions creating distinct textures, the work would not be complete without its most minute component. The same concept can be applied to musical pieces. A great musical work would not be complete without the original combinations of musical instruments, voices, lyrics, and meaning. Two examples of this idea are “Classical Gas” by California Guitar Trio and “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin.
Ultimately, it is apparent that Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and Modeste Moussorgsky’s “Pictures At An Exhibition” share similarities such as the instruments used and influences, yet share differences like the background of the composers and time these pieces were composed. “Carmina Burana” and “Pictures At An Exhibition” are both beautifully composed works and will continue to intrigue the mind of all who listen to them.
Second plane is the expressive one. Copland now discusses the notion of meaning in music. In his view, music has a meaning but this meaning is not concrete and sometimes it cannot be expressed in words. This plane explains why we get moved or relaxed by music. It is more difficult to grasp and requ...
In Steven Connor’s ‘Ears Have Walls: On Hearing Art’ (2005) Connor presents us with the idea that sound art has either gone outside or has the capacity to bring the outside inside. Sound work makes us aware of the continuing emphasis upon division and partition that continues to exist even in the most radically revisable or polymorphous gallery space, because sound spreads and leaks, like odour. Unlike music, Sound Art usually does not require silence for its proper presentation. Containers of silence called music rooms resonate with the aesthetics and affects on the body of a gallery space; white walls, floorboards to create optimum acoustics, and an ethereal sense of time and space. When presented in a gallery space, sound art’s well-known expansiveness and leakiness can be more highly articulated.
The proliferation of graphic scores emerging in Europe and America from the mid-1950s has had a profound impact on musical thought, broadening links between performers and composers, audiences and art forms. Exploration of notational methods based on graphics flourished rapidly and diversely during the fifties and sixties, primarily as a trend amongst young radicals. So many composers producing scores of this kind used a personal vocabulary of symbols – often creating different notation systems for each work – that the effectiveness of their approaches in realising a sonic concept can be assessed only on a case-by-case basis. But the significance of early graphic scores does not depend entirely on how they sound; rather it lies in their capacity to accommodate or even to generate new forms, techniques and mediums, and to challenge notions of what constitutes a musical composition. In addition, these works demonstrate that notation can extend beyond instructional functionality to allow for prominent interpretive and aleatoric elements, and can harbour an intrinsic aesthetic value of its own, apparent before a single note is sounded.
Located in once the bombarded Berlin, a new language of architecture emerged. It appears with multiple contradictions, yet not confliction, from itself to the surroundings and within its own construction. That is the Berlin Jewish Museum, submitted by the young Daniel Libeskind in a competition to provoke the unsavory history of Berlin very soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Western tradition in building museum is twisted by its expressionistic form, not merely to house the remains, the relics, the display of art, it stands by itself naked, untreated to house the ghost of German Judaism, a rare opportunity to visit an empty building for its such high profile budget. The challenge is to excavate the memory that was already there but suppressed by the medium of contemporary architecture, uncanny. This essay is to analyze the capturing of a spiritual existence from a part of the bygone Berlin, and the museum’s capacity to address one of the most profoundly tragic events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, in the use of light, material, and structural methods of construction. Moreover, this study is an attempt to evaluate the Libeskind’s response to the concept to reveal the implication in its shape, and its spatial quality. This project is also a chance to examine the interdisciplinary character of architecture in combining social-cultural relationship, psychology, history, theory, music, material methodology, vision, etc. To be able to do that, the architect’s background and his operations of process to the problem will be shortly studied, then his solution in dealing with the res...
My composer is known as an influential minimalist and has written a variety of works such as opera, musical theater, symphonies, chamber music, and film scores and much more. This composer’s identity is none other than Philip Glass. The major focus in this paper are to give a moderately brief background on Philip Glass, examining his style of music along with how others view it and describe one of Philip Glass’s musical pieces. The background or bio about Philip Glass has information primary associated with events surrounding his career. When we reach examining Philip Glass’s style of music, people’s opinions on his music and who he sounds similar too is discussed. The final part of paper basically discuss one of Philip Glass’s works and how it serves as an example to his other music.
By analyzing the structure, the reader encounters the imagination and individuality prized by the Romantics. In addition, an examination of the literary devices presents the reader with the personal connection Romantic writers longed to have with nature. Lastly, the content of these pieces proved to be intertwined and demonstrated the desire to spread creativity and inspiration to others. As said by Michelle Williams “Everything’s connected, and everything has meaning if you look for it”
are contributors and participants of architecture unlike in other arts like paintings, plays, music etc.
Remarkably, unlike in the description of art or music, the notion of atmosphere remains largely unaddressed in architecture. Atmosphere, can be argued, is the very initial and immediate experience of space and can be understood as a notion that addresses architectural quality, but the discussion of atmosphere in architecture will always entail, by definition, a certain ambiguity. After all, atmosphere is something personal, vague, ephemeral and difficult to capture in text or design, impossible to define or analyse. Atmosphere, Mark Wigley says, “evades analysis, it’s not easily defined, constructed or controlled”.
...hools of Music and Visual Arts, edited by Steven Johnson, 57 - 74. New York: Routledge, 2002.
The book as a description of modern architecture, its styles and influence succeeds but falls short as a prescriptive methodology. His work is still recalled for the need by modernists to categorize everything into neat little boxes, not necessarily for the sake of uniformity, but for sake of some ambiguity. The ambiguity may be the triumph of this book as post modern architecture era is supposed to create more questions than the answers.
However, architecture is not just the future, after all, buildings are intended to be viewed, traversed and lived by us, people. Despite this, many architects today rarely think deeply about human nature, disregarding their main subject matter in favour for efficiency and an architecture of spectacle. In this there seems to be a misconception that underlies much of architecture, that is, human’s relationship with the city, the building and nature. In much of today’s architecture, people are treated with as much concern much as we treat cars, purely mechanically. The post-modern search for the ‘new’ and ‘novel’ has come to disregard the profound affect design has on our lives, impacting our senses, shaping our psyche and disposition.
In Laugier’s Essay, he concludes an architectural Order as the following, “…only the column, the entablature, and the pediment may form an essential part of [the building’s] composition. If each of these parts is suitably placed and suitably formed, nothing else need be added to make the work perfect” . Laugier later takes his readers deeper in thought about these three components of an architectural Order. He explains tha...