11212 ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY AND THEORY: ORIENTATIONS

Assignment 2 Research Project ESSAY QUESTIONS Doc. 11212_13_13

This document outlines the EIGHT questions that are available to students for Assignment 2, the RESEARCH PROJECT. Students should read ALL the essay questions carefully prior to the lecture in Week 7, Tuesday 09 April. Information on the Research Project will be provided in this lecture. As already noted in previous documents, tutorials in the 2 nd half of the semester will be devoted to each of the individual essay topics, and new tutorial groups will be based on the essay topic each of you has selected . Students will most likely be moving to different tutors ONE tutor addressing ONE of the Research Questions and thus potentially different timeslots (although all tuts will remain between 11.00 a.m. and 1.00 p.m.) Further information on the location of the tuts for each question will be pro vided in Week 9. The tutorial discussions in Weeks 9 12 will address the ongoing development of your particular essay topic. Please note that tutors will NOT read drafts of the essays, but will discuss with the group issues that YOU raise about the nature and content of the particular essay topic. Further information about digital submission requirements for this assignment will be provided in a subsequent document. In the mean time, please note the following: As indicated in the Subject Information document, the submission date for Assignment 2 is Tuesday 21 May, by no later than 5.00 p.m. (Students may, of course, submit their essay before this date as they see fit.) Work submitted after this date and time WITHOUT a formally-approved extension or a formal Special Consideration will be penalised as per the DAB Generic Subject Information Booklet. Essay length is 2500 words, excluding quotations. Submission requirements (as previously) include a cover sheet, and full bibliography and intext referencing complying with the UTS Harvard referencing system. You will need to locate and read a number of sources books, chapters, academic papers, etc via the UTS Library and its databases. For your essay you will need to refer within the text to at least 10 academic sources. Websites etc may be useful too, but, if used, these will be in addition to the 10 sources noted above, AND you will need to provide information on the website(s). Do NOT use Wikipedia; you cannot identify the writers, etc, and you have no way of referencing the information provided.

Question 7 ON AFFECT: Emotion / Change / Desire / Audience? When we visit and experience buildings, be they contemporary or historical, buildings of our own culture or those from quite different cultural backgrounds, there is a possibility though no guarantee that we will in some ways be affected by these buildings. The term affect has two common, and potentially interconnected, meanings. On a base level it may be defined as producing an effect or change in (the person experiencing the building), while at what might be termed (from an architectural perspective) a higher level, the term implies triggering feelings or emotions in or impressing the mind of the experiencer. While an intellectual impressing of the mind might automatically suggest a positive reaction, the notion of triggering emotions may be either positive or negative, different people experiencing the same building in quite different ways, thus receiving quite different stimuli and expressing quite different views from the perspective of liking or disliking the building, in whole or part. Utilising a range of sources to investigate the notion of what constitutes affect, you are asked to develop a sound critical analysis addressing the following issues: (i) is experiencing a building inherently individual and personal or does it rely upon extant agreements or assumptions among specific groups, sub-cultures, professions, etc? In either case, to what extent does the analysis, interpretation and response inevitably depend upon the experiencers prior knowledge, prior education, prior experience, prior expectations, and/or taste and how? (ii) given that positive responses to buildings are or so we assume desirable to architects, how do architects build into their designs qualities or spatial effects, etc, that will trigger positive emotions in their audience; and how do they know that such effects will work in the ways that they intend? and (iii) is, from an architects perspective, the audience for architecture already pre-established such that reactions, positive or negative, from architecturally illiterate people are irrelevant, with only those from the architecturally educated being taken seriously, since only they can offer intelligent and informed views?