REVIEWING AND REDEFINING

This week, we came to class with three printed potential research questions. All of them were too vague and too broad, which was expected so early in the research development. However, they spurred more ideas, questions, and commentary on how to improve my own ideas and the ideas of others. We pinned up our three preliminary questions and took an hour to write commentary and questions on each others' work. Below are my questions and their comments.


I felt like this exercise was very helpful to see how my ideas come across to others, what ideas I'm assuming to be true, and where I need to explain my process further. The next step was to read about literature reviews and consider what I need to read about to answer my research questions. I found multiple books discussing the history and thought behind medieval churches having some underlying symbolism and meaning contributing to their geometrically practical plans and forms. It seems that there is a lot of research over that topic, so I'm trying to narrow down my scope. I could study a specific time period, a specific region, a certain type of form, a type of building or a specific denomination of religion. Additionally, what lens will I look at it through? Anthropology, history, psychology, socially, or some combination of many? I think I have more reading to do before I decide in what way I want to narrow down my topic.  As of right now, I have seen a lot of research on 'architecture of the Latin middle ages', 'Greek architecture', and 'Islamic and Iranian architecture'. Right now, I'm going to read more to figure out what "gap" there is in the existing research, and how to narrow down my subject. 

Those are all my jumbled thoughts this time, I will update with more reading notes and ideas another time. 


Citations:

Hiscock, N. (2007). The Symbol at Your Door: Number and Geometry in Religious Architecture of the Greek and Latin Middle Ages (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315236872

Hiscock, N. (2000). The Wise Master Builder: Platonic Geometry in Plans of Medieval Abbeys and Cathedrals (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315197357

Shatha Malhis, Narratives in Mamluk architecture: Spatial and perceptual analyses of the madrassas and their mausoleums, Frontiers of Architectural Research, Volume 5, Issue 1, 2016, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2015.11.002.

Damadi, Mojtaba. "Characteristics of Islamic and Iranian architecture." International Journal of Advanced Research in Engineering and Applied Sciences 9, no. 2 (2013): 1-13.

Ramzy, Nelly Shafik. "The dual language of geometry in gothic architecture: The symbolic message of euclidian geometry versus the visual dialogue of fractal geometry." Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture 5, no. 2 (2015): 135-172.
 

Comments

  1. Hello! I really enjoyed your questions last week, so it is cool to see how things have developed since then with the literature reviews. I think there's so many avenues, as you have pointed out with the cultures stated above you have researched, it will be interesting to see what sect you will end up studying and how the process comes about. I appreciate you looking for a gap in research where you could question something that has not been fully answered.

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  2. I would love to see more of the historical scope between geometry and religion. I personally like your first question the best even though it's currently pretty broad and would need to be fleshed out a little more. I do think you would probably have to narrow it down to a more specific time period and/or region, but I'm interested to see what you come up with.

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  3. Hello.

    I decided to read your blog and comment on yours again because I am just so interested! I concur with your struggle to effectively narrow the scope of the questions, but I think you are definitely going about it the right way. I am glad you chose to include your former questions for reference, as well as cite the research you have been doing. I think the idea of looking for a gap in current research is important, and something that I will consider in my own research in the future. Looking forward to more posts!

    Best,
    Maddox

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  4. I really enjoyed reading your questions and your post. I think that studying these topics are going to be interesting because religious architecture has so much tradition tied to it. I also liked how your questions were all similar and tied together in a way, my questions this week were similar in this way and seemed to have a common theme as well. I am really looking forward to reading your future posts and research!

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  5. Virginia,
    It sounds like you are doing a good job already in finding what parameters you will use to further break down your inquiries to hone in on a particular design topic. Another parameter that you can use to hone in your topics on could be, who would be able to take your research and be able to use it to morph today's architectural style if not change it completely. To go back to the most impactful origin of architectural history to study why the forms and symbolism were what they were at the time, would be interesting to see if those same design standards are repeated in more recent architectural design styles. ~Alex White

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