BA_DS2.6

Semester One A Mathematical House After the Great Fire of 1666, the government (i.e., the recently restored king, Charles II and parliament) set about rebuilding the City. A team was put together to organise and oversee the work, it was led by the astronomer and mathematician Christopher Wren. He was closely assisted by the maverick inventor Robert Hooke and Edward Woodroffe, who had more experience of the building industry than the other two. One of the most important tasks for the team was the building of replacement parish churches for those that had been destroyed in the fire. The new churches were different to the old medieval ones, they were characterised by their large, auditorium halls and tall towers. Sadly, many of them have been destroyed, but some are still standing today. Our task was to propose a design for a Mathematical House. The form of the House was based on the massing model of a Wren church tower each of us had been given to study. Through a transductive process, we transformed our massing model from a volumetric mass into an organised assembly of habitable spaces. To help formulate a program for the House and imagine its occupant, we travelled back to the seventeenth century, to the time when modern forms of knowledge, including architecture, were just beginning to emerge. In those days, groups of people calling themselves ‘natural philosophers’ began to conduct experiments in the fields of what would subsequently come to be called ‘anatomy,’ ‘mechanics,’ ‘optics,’ ‘statics,’ ‘hydrology,’ and so on. The diverse range of the natural philosophers’ projects was united by a shared method of inquiry, combining empirical research and mathematical analysis. Because of the shared reliance on measurement and number, the new forms of knowledge were often referred to as ‘the mathematical subjects.’ As we designed our Houses, we asked: how have the methods of the natural philosophers impacted on the history of architecture, and what might it mean to be a natural philosopher today? Our answers appeared in the designs we proposed, manifesting as a synthesis of formal statements about aesthetics, functionality, organisation & materiality. Key References: Francis A Yates, Theatre of the World Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture Reyner Banham, ‘ A Black Box, The Secret Profession of Architecture,’ A Critic Writes, Essays by Reyner Banham 3