Name: Building Bad, Part 2: How Architectural Utility is Damaged by Expression
Author: Jonathan Ochshorn

Course Info

8 video lessons (59 Mins)
Published
2023
4.30

Preview Course

Browse Course Chapters

1.

Introduction

2 mins
2.

Purposes and Principles of Architectural Expression

8 mins
3.

Modernist Abstraction

7 mins
4.

Problems with Contemporary Abstraction

9 mins
5.

Expression of Structure

9 mins
6.

Expression of Accessibility

7 mins
7.

Expression of Sustainability

13 mins
8.

Conclusion

1 min

What You Will Learn

Describe how the formal quality of a building may reinforce the owners’ or users’ wealth, power, or status.
Describe the five points of architecture advanced by Le Corbusier.
Explain how defamiliarization reflects the idealization of capitalist freedom.
Describe how competition may be maladaptive in both avian and human species.
Describe the change in control layer theory from the use of monolithic walls of brick or stone to the use of layered, optimized, and relatively insubstantial membranes and insulative materials.
Describe three ways in which structural expression may damage the functionality of buildings.

Course Description

Part Two of “Building Bad” provides an examination of why and how dysfunctional forms of artistic expression can damage the utilitarian functionality of buildings. The first course, Part One of this series, explains how architectural utility is constrained by politics and economics.