Ajay Manthripragada (AM): It's a big question. I'm interested in the way you're phrasing the term "canon" without the article "the." You're saying "canon," as opposed to "the canon" or "the canonical." I'm wondering if that indicates something about an interest in its redefinition or rethinking.
AM: Figures in other disciplines (literature for instance) have been unabashed about defining the canon by definitively selecting a group of works. It tends to be more nebulous in architecture—the canon is implied and rehearsed over many iterations and repetitions of certain examples in academia, and, for my set of interests, in the discipline of formal analysis. There's a kind of reciprocity between the definition of the canon and formal analysis. They support each other.
AO: I recently encountered Audrey Bennett’s essay, describing the history of the golden ratio from its origins in Africa to its use by the Bauhaus. The golden ratio (that celebrated, geometrically-derived divine proportion) was presented in my early architectural education as a Western (specifically ancient Greek) invention. According to Bennett, its origins are much older and applied throughout different cultures and regions from informal Sub-Saharan communities to Napoleonic Italy. Her analysis of the golden ratio is an example that shows how each generation’s understanding of the canon is heavily influenced by how their predecessors conceived and shared knowledge; possibly reduced or misremembered. Perhaps through rethinking the tools and framework of our studies, we might begin to notice forms that are shared across cultures and see ideas that are lost or misremembered by previous generations.
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