Minoan Architecture and Urbanism by Quentin Letesson & Carl Knappett

Minoan Architecture and Urbanism by Quentin Letesson & Carl Knappett

Author:Quentin Letesson & Carl Knappett [Letesson, Quentin & Knappett, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-06-05T00:00:00+00:00


8

Minoan Group Design

The ‘View from the Bridge’

Clairy Palyvou

8.1. Poly-Parametric Problem Solving

The aim of this chapter is to address the so-called Minoan Palace as a design object. To detect and unfold, in other words, the design logic that produced this hybrid configuration standing somewhere between a large building and an urban compound.

As a starting point, it is pertinent to emphasize that the production of built space is a dynamic process involving poly-parametric problem solving. It requires formulating the tasks, checking requirements versus constraints, evaluating tolerance and capacity, and finally making choices and decisions based on optimization. Planning and designing architectural space, in other words, is a nebulous task, notoriously difficult to capture, describe, or teach for that matter.1 In Rowe’s (1982: 18) lucid account, it has ‘“wicked problems”: they have no definitive formulation, no explicit “stopping rule”, they have more than one plausible explanation, and their solutions cannot be strictly correct or false’. Moreover, this procedure does not take place once and for all. It is re-enacted every time one interferes with a work of architecture, even if only to whitewash a wall or block a door. Since buildings, as a rule, survive their original creators and users by several generations, such interventions are frequent and vary in scale, in compliance with the life cycles that the building will serve till it exists no more or has become the object of archaeological investigation.2

With such variety of intertwined and obscured parameters at play, one wonders: what sort of answers do archaeologists expect to find from the surviving remnants of the architectural palimpsest they are dealing with? Is it because of the innate difficulties in capturing and analysing the dynamic process of architectural production that we have lingered for too long over the static data of the end product (see chapter 1)?

The situation however is not that hopeless, for ‘architecture is not the field of creative freedom some have imagined it to be, but a system of rules for giving society what it expects in the way of architecture’ (Eco 1997: 194). The architect or master mind, in other words, is but the agent who works to satisfy the needs of the commissioner within the norms imposed by their common social framework. In tradition-oriented societies, typical for the prehistoric era, this system of rules is based on ‘already worked-out solutions, codifications yielding standardized messages’ (Eco 1997: 194) shared by all the members of the community.3

It is this elusive system of rules that archaeologists are after, in the hope that it will reveal the underlying system of the lifestyle of the era in question, which is the ultimate goal of any archaeological research. The two systems are directly related for the task of architecture, as Giedion (1971: xxxiii) defined it long ago, is to serve and interpret as best as possible a way of life valid for a period. To arrive at this system of rules, however, one has to reverse the process of architectural creation and unwind its life cycles. The tools for such an undertaking can be none other than those used to guide the production process.



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