Analytic Models in Architecture

Description

Analytic Models in Architecture documents Yale School of Architecture student work from the undergraduate studio course "The Analytic Model: Descriptive and Interpretive Systems in Architecture," taught by Emmanuel Petit from 2005 to 2014. The projects are organized according to a set of ten conceptual categories that emphasize varying strategies of formal analysis: Aggregation, Cinematics, Condensation, Diagrammatics, DNA, Fluid Interlocking, Fragmentation, Morphology, Seriality, and Thickened 2-D. Five critical essays focus on particular aspects of analysis in architecture: Anna Bokov illustrates an episode in the history of the Soviet avant-garde, emphasizing the influence of the analysis of classical and archaic monuments on the development of the fundamental design principles in Constructivist and Rationalist architecture. Matthew Claudel reveals agency as the crucial qualifier of formal analysis and discusses the deep fractures in the profession caused by parametric software. He traces the historical transformation of the tools and concepts of analysis, and speculates on possible adjustments for renewed pertinence in the discipline's digital age. Kyle Dugdale draws an analogy to Homeric analysis, exposing the web of deceit that underlies the ostensibly dispassionate analytic exercise, arguing for analysis as a subversive means of controlling architecture's history. John McMorrough asks what constitute s architectural analysis after close reading is over and finds in the fabricated, the political, the green, and the expressive four impulses to redefine the relation of analysis to the discipline. Emmanuel Petit reviews the different ideologies that concepts of analysis have occupied in architectural theory throughout modernity. Leeland McPhail ('15) was the assistant editor and designed the book to the guidelines of MGMT.Design.

Architect and associate professor at Yale School of Architecture from 2005 to 2014

"This is a very refreshing book. It is so rewarding to see a book focused squarely on models and analytical models, to boot. When I was teaching design studio a few years ago, I liked to see analytical models as well as study models. And along those lines, these sorts of models ideally carried over to their design projects in the form of study models that distilled the main ideas, formal gestures and structural elements of their designs. Covering a selection of the roughly 900 models created by students in Petit's studio course 'The Analytic Model: Descriptive and Interpretive Systems in Architecture' at Yale from 2005 to 2014, there is plenty of model photos to contemplate." --John Hill, A Daily Dose of Architecture"