Alas, The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock once again makes its way into my blog!
My work of the last week has been mainly focused on two tasks: revising my outline and writing (and I mean actually writing) my thesis.
Both are going well (knock on wood!). I feel more confident about my revised outline than my previous one. The ideas for the revisions I chose to make first took root in my mind as I sat writing my introduction. I needed a way to introduce my argument in a clear and structured way and found an answer in a statement by Sigfried Giedion. It read, “contemporary architecture worthy of the name sees its main task as the interpretation of a way of life valid for our period.” Informed by this statement I crafted three questions that I feel explain and really create the backbone of my entire thesis: 1) “What is our period?” 2) “Once we know the answer to 1, how will we define a valid way of life for our period?” And, 3) “How will architect’s understand and reflect this way of life in the buildings they design?”
Following this epiphany I organized my thesis around these three framing questions. Find my revised outline here.
The meat of my thesis, the muscle that is, is still the same. The content is still mostly all there, although I feel dropping (or at least shortening even more) my brief summary of architecture’s historical engagement with sustainability discourse will keep my thesis sharp. That is, as relevant as it is to my topic, it’s not fundamental enough to my argument to deserve its own place in my writing. Along with my summary of sustainable architecture, I’ve chosen to omit my discussion of which design principles should be abandoned, and which should be kept. Again, although these are relevant discussions to my topic, I feel my paper is more effective without devoting an entire section to them.
Ok, that’s all for now.
So long!