Landscape Theory: Readings of the Athenian ground

The seminar includes a theoretical introduction to the concept of landscape as a philosophical concept. The text of reference is Georg Simmel's "theory of landscape" which even if written in 1913, organizes the concept of landscape as an extendable concept that can intrude other fields. The landscape in Simmel's approach is an architectonic notion that investigates in the same time a viewing system and a constructive procedure.

Objectives

The course aims to an introduction of architectural theory while in the same time some practical tools of design are investigated. Its objectives are formed through a series of lectures. The students are asked to participate in an obligatory seminar discussing their own theoretical projects before producing them and while they are working on them.

Prerequisites

None

Syllabus

This seminar is concerned with a theory of the Athenian Landscape as a system of seeing. The Athenian Landscape is firstly organized as a system of hiding the narration of its past. Athens is one of the rare modern cities where its invisible burried part is by its constitution much more important than the one that is programmed to happen as a regulation of the modern future of it. The future is immediately related to this past and is charged with the mission to promote it. In this sense a conflict occurs in the underground space of Athens that is constructed between two different values. The one is represented by the operating schools of archaeology that are based in Athens and provide material to organize sometimes the city’s recent history. The emptying of the Acropolis from its otoman city center is only a part of this ambitious program to reinstitute a new city because of the glory of a forgotten past. At the other side modern urbanism comes together with its own theory of the ground that supposes that the ground is a neutral surface able to host an extendable grid of infrastructure.The ruin and the infrastrcture form then two opposed poles of understanding the city that also distinguish firmly the West, as a reference to an idealised history of Europe, to the North as a system of expanding a homogeneous culture of the everyday to the globe. Keywords: Athens, Theory, Ruin, Infrastructure, Locality, North, West, Debt, Planning, Architecture, Theatre, Deconstruction, Post-democracy, Internet