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E-Publications & Resources » Articles and Lectures on Architectural Issues » Development of Thinking and Theory in Architecture » Page 10
Prepared by Mohammad al-Asad and Dalia al-Husseini, 2003
-Continued-
(1) Suha Ozkan was born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1945. He studied architecture at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, and theory of design at the Architectural Association in London.
Ozkan has undertaken extensive research on the theory and history of architecture, design, vernacular form, and emergency housing, and has published numerous articles and monographs. At METU, he taught architectural design and design theory for fifteen years, and became associate dean of the faculty of architecture in 1978; he was appointed vice-president of the university in 1979. He taught and lectured extensively in North America, Europe, Central-, South-, and Southeast Asia, and throughout the Middle East. He has served as a jury member for many architectural competitions, and as an external examiner for diploma and doctoral assessments at the schools of architecture of the universities of Paris, Lausanne, Zurich, York and Trondheim. He was instrumental in the establishment of the XXI Architectural Culture Centre in Ankara and publication of the centre's journal entitled XXI. During May 2000, he served as a member of the jury for the architectural competition for the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial in Washington, D.C. Ozkan is cochair of the Sustainable Architecture task force of the Hassan Fathy Institute and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat) in support of the Habitat Agenda.
With the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in Geneva, Ozkan served as the deputy secretary general from 1983 to 1990, and has been the secretary general since 1991. On behalf of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, Ozkan has organized two important international architectural competitions, for the Revitalization of Samarkand, Uzbekistan (1991), and the New Museum of Islamic Arts in Doha, Qatar (1997). He also served as an advisor for the architectural competition for the new campus of the American University of Cairo, Egypt, during 1999.
In 2002, Ozkan was elected as a Council Member (Region II) of the International Union of Architects (UIA), and is the President of the Scientific Committee for the International Union of Architects (UIA)'s XXII Congress to be held in Istanbul during 2005. He is also a member of the UIA International Competitions Committee.
(2) According to John Cottingham, Karl Popper suggested that "the problem of induction was irrelevant to scientific knowledge. How scientists arrived at their theories was a matter of psychology not logic. What was important was the testing of a scientific theory once proposed. And here Popper argued that strictly logical, deductive reasoning is applicable: scientific theories cannot logically be guaranteed to be true, but they are capable of being proven false." See John Cottingham, "Popper, Sir Karl Raimond," in Dictionary of Modern Culture, edited by Justin Wintle (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 316. For additional information on Popper, see Stephen Thornton, "Karl Popper," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta (Winter 2002 Edition), forthcoming. (http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2002/entries/popper/)
(3) For information on the architects mentioned in this essay, see Adolf K. Placzek, ed., Macmillan Encyclopedia of Architecture (New York: The Free Press, 1982); and V. M. Lampugnani, ed., The Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia of 20th-Century Architecture, 2d ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).
(4) Joseph Rykwert, "On the Oral Transmission of Architectural Theory," in Les Traites d'Architecture de La Renaissance, edited by J. Guillaume (Paris: Picard, 1988), pp. 31 - 48. Rykwert states that "... masons like all other craftsmen, were always bound into a guild, that the transmission of ideas went on inside it and that was a secret society whose proceedings were therefore inevitably unrecorded.... In later years, ..., the invention of printing weakened the hold of the secret oath on craftsmen, as well as the fascination of the secret."
(5) For an example of an architectural treatise from the Islamic world, see Ca'fer Effendi, "Risale-I Mi'mariyye": An Early Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Treatise on Architecture, facsimile, with translation and notes by Howard Crane (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1987). Also see Gulru Necipoglu, The Topkapi Scroll - Geometry and Ornament in Islamic Architecture (Santa Monica, CA: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995).
(6) For additional information on a number of the twentieth-century architectural movements featured in this essay, see Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, 2d ed. (Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985); and Lampugnani, Thames and Hudson Encyclopaedia.
(7) Concerning the issue of design and construction manuals in the Islamic world, see Necipoglu, The Topkapi Scroll.
(8) The book also is available online on the ArchNet site at http://archnet.org/library/documents/one-document.tcl?document_id=3540.
(9) See, S. Bozdogan, S. Ozkan, and E. Yenal, Sedad Eldem (Singaphore: Concept Media, 1987). An online version of the monograph is available at http://archnet.org/library/documents/one-document.tcl?document_id=3020.
(10) These books are available online on the ArchNet site. They can be accessed at http://archnet.org/library/documents/documents.tcl?publication_type=Book.
For additional information on the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, see their web site at http://www.akdn.org/agency/aktc_akaa.html#2001.
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Bragdon, Claude. The Beautiful Necessity, Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1910.
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Figure 1: De l'Orme's engravings of the "bad" and the "good" architect, from his Le Premier Tome de l'Architecture, 1567.
Figure 2: Shute's illustration of the Doric order, from his First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, 1563.
Figure 3: Shute's illustration of the Ionic order, from his First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, 1563.
Figure 4: Shute's illustration of the Composite order, from his First and Chief Groundes of Architecture, 1563.
Figure 5: Serlio's illustration of vision and eye-level in perspective, from his De Geometrie et De Perspective; Il Primo Libro d'Architettura, 1545.
Figure 6: Perrault's association of entablatures with a human profile.
Figure 7: Piranesi's sketch of an imaginary prison interior, from the series of etchings called Carceri (Prisons), 1744.
Figure 8: Laugier's "primitive hut," from his Essai sur l'Architecture, 1755.
Figure 9: Durand's catalog of plans, elevations, and roof forms, from his Précis des Leçons d'architecture, 1802.
Figure 10: Bragdon's ratios expressive of musical intervals, redrawn from his The Beautiful Necessity, Seven Essays on Theosophy and Architecture, 1910.
Figure 11: Zevi's diagrams of St. Peter's cathedral, redrawn from his Architecture as Space, 1957.
Figure 12: March's definition of architectural relationship in binary diagrams, redrawn from his Architecture of Form, 1976.
Figure 13: March and Steadman's mathematical formulae of plans, redrawn from their Geometry of Environment, 1974.
* All redrawn images are by Suha Ozkan.
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