This is an abstract of the history of the library:

The beginnings of the Werner Oechslin Library reach back to a time when the study of source texts and their validation through checking original documents was only acknowledged to be of peripheral importance, significant at most in narrow fields of specialist research. Today attitudes towards source material research have radically changed. Uncertainty and new focuses within the humanities require that underlying foundations be examined, and this has led to new evaluations and often also to utterly new discoveries. Interest in sources and insight into the necessity of studying them – precisely, too, where thought formulations, scientific models and attempts to develop an integrated grasp and understanding are involved – is nowadays greater than ever before, and continues to grow.

Thanks to patient preparatory work, the Werner Oechslin Library Foundation now offers a tool that can do justice to the demands of source studies, and support interest in academic work based on original texts. Since 1980, large parts of the library have been in Einsiedeln. This resource expanded considerably with the return of Werner Oechslin in 1985, after years of work in Italy, the USA and Germany, when the library was systematically developed and enlarged. At external instigation the decision was made to transform this private library into a public institution, in order to make it available to a larger circle of academics. In 1996 the architect Mario Botta had drafted plans for a new library building project, that were realized in several stages, hampered by numerous difficulties. On June 9th 2006 we could celebrate the inauguration of this unique Library in the presence of Pascal Couchepin (Swiss Federal Council) and 160 guests.

www.bibliothek-oechslin.ch

The hypothesis that Klaus Wassermann is trying to strengthen in his lecture is that formalization resembles language in that we can not have the slightest thought or even any mental operation without formalization. And it is even the other way round, in that any mental operation invokes a formalizing step.

Klaus Wasserman argues that “…we can neither have the idea nor the feeling of formalization without formalization, and we even can not perform formalization without formalization. There is no justification of formalization which could be expressed outside of formalization, hence there is no (foundational) justification for it at all. Would it then be necessary, for instance, to conclude that formalization is  embedded in the life form much in the same way as it is the case for language? That mere performance precedes logics?”

Werner Oechslin studied art history, archeology, philosophy and mathematics in Zurich and Rome. From 1971 to 1974 he was assistant at the University of Zurich. Then, in 1975 and 1978 he taught at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. and in 1979 at the RISD in Providence. After a short period at the FU Berlin 1979/80, where in 1980 he qualified as a university lecturer (Habilitation), he went as professor for five years to Bonn and in 1985 to the Ecole d’Architecture at the University of Geneva. Afterwards Werner Oechslin received a professorship in art history and architecture at the ETH Zurich. In 1987 he taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design as a visiting professor. From 1987-2006 he was head of the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture (gta). Werner Oechslin was member of the Board of Trustees at the CCA Montréal and of the consiglio scientifico during the foundation of the Scuola di Architettura in Mendrisio. Since 2003 he is in the management board of the Internationalen Bauakademie Berlin.

Werner Oechslin’s lecture:

“Now we have already remarked, that even in philosophers define a difference between objects and their impressions on the senses, wich they understand to both exist simultaneously and be similar to each other, this nonetheless is a difference which is not grasped by the vast majority of people, who would never ascribe to the belief in a dual existence and impression, because they simply observe one thing.”

Dr. Keith Lilley joined the School of Geography at Queen’s in 1999 as lecturer in human geography. He began his academic career at the University of Birmingham, gaining a PhD in 1995. Dr. Lilley was awarded a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 1996 and took this up at Royal Holloway (University of London) in the Department of Geography. At Queen’s Dr. Lilley is currently Examinations Officer and has experience working on various teaching committees, at both university and school level. Dr. Lilley teaches modules on urban and historical geography, with a particular focus on urban landscapes in contemporary and historical contexts. This continues a long tradition of teaching historical geography at Queen’s.

Dr. Keith Lilley’s research interests are in historical geography and urban morphology. He is particularly interested in how urban landscapes were shaped during the middle ages in Europe, which brings him into close contact with medievalists in disciplines such as history and archaeology. While Dr. Lilley is one of the very few geographers working in the UK on the middle ages, medieval historical geography has been and continues to be a very distinctive aspect of research in the School of Geography at Queen’s, making contributions that reach across a range of disciplines concerned with the medieval past.

Dr. Keith Lilley’s lecture:

Dr. Lilley offered an innovative interpretation of how medieval Christians infused their urban surroundings with meaning. He demonstrates how the city carried Christian cosmological meaning and symbolism, sharing common spatial forms and functional ordering.

Dr. Lilley argues that the medieval mind considered the city truly a microcosm: much more than a collection of houses, a city also represented a scaled-down version of the very order and organization of the cosmos.

In this lecture, Prof. Hovestadt exposes the cornerstones of architectural problem-thinking by analyzing the Catalogue as organized knowledge, the Matter and the Structure. This lines of argumentation will engage us to to think of actual architecture not as a continuos but as a discontinuos line, like the elements that abound in our times.

Through this analysis we could observe the evolution of the human way of thinking and how diferent answers for the same questions were found.

The second module will revisit different theory of topoi architectural theory. The students will work out conceptual schemas, which will allow them to compare different positions of architectural theory. They will proceed by case studies for example on Palladio’s approaches to spatial grammar and syntax, on the cosmic scope of French Revolutionary Architecture, on Durant’s rationalization as well as on more contemporary approaches like the machine habiter (le Corbusier), The Architecture of Well-Tempered Environment (Reyner Banham), Mechanization Takes Command (Sigfried Giedion) or more recent approaches like parametricism (studio Zaha Hadid), Junkspace (Rem Koolhaas), or The Function of Form (Farshid Moussavi) a.o.

The students approaches in analytically formalizing these case studies will be prepared for synthesis and modalization. They will learn how to make these topoi more readily accessible and reconstructible by a sort of “conceptual cross-breeding” of these approaches. In a final exercise, each student will take one approach and reformulate it according to his or her own attitude, or to a fictitious attitude especially conceived and characterized for this occasion. Like this, the students are asked to produce and represent their own written manifestos.

The module will start with recapitulating the achievements of the first theory module: what is at stake in the concepts of an architectonics of growth and a general theory of stratification? What is the relevancy of concepts such as the plane of consistency, the abstract machine, or double articulation regarding the power of contemporary information technology and the design space that goes along with this kind of technology and infrastructure?

Keeping these aspects in mind, the students will be introduced to a comparatistic way of engaging with architectural history and theory. They will analyze what kind of values certain theories have regarded as elementary, what emphasis have been put where in different theoretic edifices, and what kind of schemes and concepts they have proposed as mediating between these dimensions. Furthermore they will look at how the technological conditions predominant for different times reveal their impact in particular architectural manifestos and theoretical models. Especially, we will be concerned with how the different numerical spaces incorporated in the respective technological paradigms allow for different kinds of conception and construction principles, and also different paradigms of theoretical reflection.

The students will be trained in developing a sense of distinction and comparison between the spaces of potentials and constraints that different “renderings” of such construction principles allow as a design space for architecture. A great emphasis of the course will lie on analyzing the role of technology for architectural theories, as well as the different attitudes taken towards technology therein.

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