Berrin Terim |
Berrin Terim is a full-time lecturer at Clemson faculty since Spring 2016 and she teaches history, theory and design. She is currently enrolled in the PhD program at VirginiaTech Washington Alexandria Architecture Center, where she has thought graduate level design studio and Topics in Design Methods course. During her masters, she has assisted in teaching design courses and visual communication classes. In 2010, she received College Creative Achievement Award from Penn State University. After completion of her bachelors, she practiced as an architect in Izmir, Turkey.
Berrin’s research in architecture focuses on representation. Her early studies centered on cosmological perspectives, particularly exploring the dichotomy between perception and de- centralized point of view constructed by the intellect. Her dissertation work is focusing on anthropomorphism in architectural design, through the role of metonymy. Her research is exploring this framework through the narrative of the fifteenth century Florentine architect Il Filarete’s treatise on architecture. Berrin has presented her work in international conferences. |
reading Filarete from the margin |
...although there is something of the good to be found in it, it is nevertheless mostly ridiculous, and perhaps the most stupid book that was ever written...[1] With these words, Vasari inevitably banished Filarete’s treatise on architecture to the margin of architectural discourse. Written in the fifteenth century, precious copies of Filarete’s manuscript have been circulated through the libraries of notable patrons but it has been condemned in the Renaissance tradition of architecture treatises. As the court architect of Francesco Sforza, Filarete explicitly stated in his dedication that he was writing to educate patrons and others on ‘modes and measures of building’, however, his method of teaching was quite unorthodox. Composed of twenty-four books with no particular distinction between each, the treatise was structured around a love story between the patron and his architect, simultaneously designing and building a city together, which was referred as their metaphorical child. In order to teach how to raise this child Filarete wrote the whole work in a narrative form. The tradition of writing on architecture had pursued a definitive structure with a didactic tone on the subject matter. It was not common to read architecture as a story. Because of this reason, until the late nineteenth century, Filarete’s book was regarded as a romance, fantasy or fiction of Utopia rather than a work on architecture. With the 1965 English translation, John Spencer successfully brought Filarete’s work to the center of the Renaissance canon by claiming the narrative form is “peripheral” to the work, a mere rhetorical preference to entertain the reader. By dividing the subject-matter of the book from its poiesis and only assigning the former as the ‘central’ aspect of the work, Spencer suggested a forced choice of reading this historic work in its contextualized framework. However, I argue that reading Filarete from its marginal position opens up a more important theoretical horizon to discuss architecture. By humbly accepting Vasari’s negative lens as the eye to read the text through, one can realize that the book is an end in itself and it is undertaking the premise of teaching architecture as an enactment. Through narrative, the book becomes the only place where such architecture can exist, therefore it displays a complete whole which is no longer about architecture, but it is architecture itself. [1] Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. Gaston Du C. de Vere, vol.1, pp. 457-62. |