Of Discipline, Disciples and Disappearance

Abstract

The text of this article is organized in two parts, the first on architecture as a discipline, and the second on the architect practicing it. The two parts mirror each other. References are made to the treatise De Architectura of Vitruvius in Ancient Rome, and to several important moments of the history and theory of twentieth-century art and architecture. The notion of venustas, beauty, appears all through the text, in dotted lines, suggesting that the disappearance of this old ideal might have left room for new expressions of beauty. Is this ideal differently understood and recreated today by the architect, or are we now confronted with its absence, as if we contemplated an empty frame left after the painting has been removed?

Keywords:

• architecture
• art
• venustas
• Vitruvius
• Le Corbusier
• Peter Reyner
• Banham

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stefania Kenley

Stefania Kenley has been an artist and architect since 1986 and has taught architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, the Architectural Association School of Architecture, the University of Greenwich in London and the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. In 2005 she obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Paris VIII, with her thesis From a Pastiche to the Original, Traces and Trajectories of the Independent Group (1952-1956), directed by Professor Jean-Louis Cohen. In 2011/12 she gave a series of lectures on modern and contemporary architecture for art history graduates at the University of Paris IV - La Sorbonne, in Paris.