It's easy to Google this article recently published in the Guardian. Make sure you have read it before this first session where we will go through it.
In this course we start from today and work steadily backwards; it is an education in itself to see how passionately ideas are picked up and then discarded in support of the architectural project. By 'the architectural project' I mean some overarching imperative that comes to the fore to prop up what is basically a 'soft' subject: Architecture viv-a-vis Building. Eventually, having some awareness of these shifting historical parameters will probably colour your opinion of Schumacher's advocacy of parametricism itself. We shall see.
Patrik is one of our alumni, I have very good friends who taught him, and I remember his muttering away to my predecessor on the subject of fractals all the way through an external examiners dinner some time in the later nineties. Rowan Moore I would count as a friend, at least on Facebook, and because he kindly commissioned me (during that same period) to write for his book Vertigo: The Strange New World of The Contemporary City (1999) on the subject of Las Vegas.
I'm not going to go over the issues we might discover here in advance of the session, lets see how that develops organically (!)
