Actually both Vitruvius and Mumford do insist that architecture is something beyond mere shelter. For both it is some official public edifice. Vitruvius said it began when a collapsed wooden seating at an outdoor theater was replace by stone seating and stage and Mumford said it began when a ruler established a citadel, a combination fortress and temple complex. Thus there was some intentional symbolic function involved beyond a mere building or shelter that would be expressed by the structure and it would have a public instead of private purpose. Mumford said it was a mnatter of power, again, to evoke respectful terror. If you want to pursue any notion of architecture, I think you need to acknowledge the historical --or genealogical -- use of the term.
Some would say the Egyptians were the first to really construct architecture when they imitated their reed structures in stone. Going from mud, reeds, twigs, to cut stone does seem to suggest something more than a desire for durability. Neither Vitruvius or Mumford would accept a manger or some other silly object as architecture but they would accept the outdoor theater, the plaza, and maybe the mound. Your requirement for a written language would exclude architecture in Central and South America. wc ________________________________ From: Frances Kelly <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2009 10:15:21 PM Subject: RE: Architecture and Philosophy Frances to William with thanks... It seems reasonable that the historical identity of architecture would be an initial starting point in defining architecture in theory, even if much of its history might now be a speculative interpretation. It may be that the first mobile case of quasi architecture outside of a cave was the holding up of a cape as a tent to protect the wearer. If a cape as a tent is in fact and in deed made to be like a cave, then the historic criteria would be based mainly on iconicity and its similarity, rather than on indexicity and its contiguity or on symbolicity and its arbitrarity. My instinctive tendency in considering theory is clearly exposed to lean in the direction of biotics and semiotics and linguistics and logics, rather than historics and anthropics and praxics and epistemics, because it seems to me that the one thing that all architecture may be found as would be as a sign, whether mainly iconic or indexic or symbolic, or mainly in combination of this tern. To support this leaning or bent of mine, the most technically and scientifically advanced architecture after all seems to have occurred in those societies that were highly literate, but further whose linguistic literal language system lent itself easily to typesetting and printing, so that scientific information about the tech and techne and technics of building edifices could be communicated to other persons in other places at other times. This is not to imply that out of literacy will necessarily flow intelligence, but it does suggest that records of fact and law can be kept. You wrote... Our ideas of architecture, what it is, stem from Vitruvius' 10 books of architecture. I suggest the Loeb Classical Library editions. Another source to look at would be Louis Mumford's The City in History. He says architecture began with the notion of a citadel and buildings expressing power, and evoking "respectful terror". However architecture is defined in theory, its historical definition is a starting point.
