Choose two of the building pairings below as your potential subject.Describe how these concepts are manifest in the building’s form.

Otto Wagner, Post Office Savings Bank, and Gottfried Böhm, Züblin Headquarters, Stuttgart

Word count: 1500-2500

First
Choose two of the building pairings below as your potential subject.

The Paper
A. This part of the paper is based on the material in your outside sources (see below for more on this). Begin (or end) this section by describing the primary concepts of each building. By concepts we mean the primary motivations of the architect that are at play in this building.

Describe how these concepts are manifest in the building’s form. Your descriptions may encompass materials, ornament, form, siting, planemetrics, volumetrics, lighting, texture, circulation, i.e., any of the many considerations that went into the design and relate fundamentally to the primary concepts.

B. Follow up with a “think piece” segment in which you compare the two buildings. Ultimately, the question of the comparison is this: is there a continuity over time between the ideas reflected in these projects; and in what ways do they represent a divide or change that has occurred over time.

Illustrations
In order to demonstrate your points, you will need to use illustrations, including drawings, photographs, and perhaps diagrams or sketches of your own.

Evaluation of the paper text
The paper will be evaluated first on the quality of your initial discussion of each building. It should demonstrate that you have gained a knowledge and understand of them.

Secondly, it will be evaluated on the quality of your reflections on those features and qualities in the comparison. This section is more editorial in nature.

The technical aspects of the paper will also be evaluated.

Sources, bibliography and notes
B. Bibliography. Limit your sources to two for each building/architect. These may be articles or monographs on the specific building or architect. Do not use general works of no specific relationship to your topic, and do not use articles that are primarily pictorial and contain little text.

For many subjects the best sources are to be found in periodicals. The best source to find journal articles on your subject is the Avery Periodical Guide, which is available in Bird Library online under the heading of “Databases.” Searching online on your search engine, also often turns up useful articles. They should, however, be professional or scholarly pieces, not, for example, blogs or museum or institutional item descriptions, and, of course, not encyclopedias or other such general works.

For each source, be sure to indicate the particular pages or chapters you used; these specific references should be included in intext notes or end- or footnotes, and indicate those passages of your sources that relate specifically to that segment of the paper. A bibliography is required at the end of the paper. Any of the accepted formats is acceptable, i.e., MLA, Turabian, Chicago Manual of Style.

Subjects to choose from:

Otto Wagner, Post Office Savings Bank, and Gottfried Böhm, Züblin
Headquarters, Stuttgart

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