The Perceptive Professional: Architecture as the Art of Seeing (original) (raw)
2016
Nowadays it is possible to see architects from all over the world struggling to achieve the most contemporary designs in their projects using the most advanced technologies available to capture the attention of the masses, their pairs, or just from a jury. But just take three steps away and try to compare this image with the perspective of history and suddenly the story seems to be much more usual that what one could think in a first place. In this essay, I will talk about why I think working with "the Built" is more about the extension of our own memory in constant evolution, rather than a stylistic construct between then and now, and why those relations are more strong and perdurable. Timeless one could say.
Towards Understanding Visual Styles As Inventions Without Expiration Dates: How the View of Architectural History as Permanent Presence Might Contribute to Reforming Education of Architects and Designers. ---->>> By Jan MICHL / ABSTRACT: ---->>> The main thesis of the article is that there are good reasons for seeing the pre-modernist architectural and design idioms as still valid and feasible visual inventions, in contrast to the modernist view that has considered them as stone-dead expressions of past historical periods. The thesis is backed up by philosophical arguments developed by the late British philosopher Karl Popper. ---->>> The article’s first half discusses the central aspects of the modernist theory of architecture, mainly from the perspective of Popper’s critique of what he called “historicism”, i.e. the belief that the course of history is set and that some people are able to discern its direction and therefore act in a historically correct manner. The present author sees modernism as an approach to architecture based on such a belief, and he criticizes the modernist theory as a train of arguments aimed at promoting a special, beyond-fashion standing of the new modernist idiom, as well as of the modernists themselves. ---->>> In its second half, the article juxtaposes the dismissive modernist attitude towards the past architectural idoms with Karl Popper’s epoch-making claim about the existence of what he called “objective knowledge”. This knowledge Popper describes as knowledge without a knowing subject, a kind of knowledge that exists independently of any person, in a realm of its own, and accessible to everybody. An example of such objective knowledge can be the library of books, containing existing theories, hypotheses, discussions, problems and solutions. Here, according to Popper, belongs also the world of knowledge contained in the existing works of art, including architecture and design. ----->>> In the present author’s opinion, Popper’s claim about the existence of objective knowledge throws a novel light on the problem of creativity in general, and with it also on the modernist attitude towards the past. Popper sees human creativity in any area as an activity fully anchored in the objective world of already existing knowledge, and as impossible without such anchorage. This view is pithily summarized in Popper’s remark, that “…if anybody were to start where Adam started, he would not get further than Adam did …”. ----->>> According to the present author, the key feature of the world of objective knowledge is that every single entity belonging to it exists in the present, in parallel with all other entities. The world of objective knowledge is therefore a permanently present world. It is accessible to, and adoptable by, anybody who has an interest in making its content into his own. Being accessible and public, this world is at the same time criticizable and this criticizability is what makes its further creative developments possible. The claim about the objective existence of knowledge then implies that all works of art, including architecture, although diachronic in their origin, exist in a synchronic dimension, in a permanent presence. In the world of objective knowledge, there is therefore no difference between “architecture of the past” and “architecture of the present”, as both exist in the same temporal dimension, i.e. right now. ---->>> If we accept the claim that there is a world of objective knowledge, and that this world is a foundation of human creativity, it will be obvious that the modernist architects did not, and could not, start from zero, simply because it is unfeasible. Modernists all the time operated within the world of existing aesthetic solutions, existing theories, and existing problems, without temporal borders, that is, just as any other kind of creative enterprise in the past. The modernist assertion, that architectural idioms of the pre-Bauhaus past are not to be re-used in the present, because they are visual expressions of no longer existing past conditions, is then seen as hardly more than a way of denigrating the customary revivalist approach to architecture, in order to secure the status of historical necessity for the innovative modernist idiom. Such attitude to the pre-modernist architecture necessarily collided with how the people, who never shared the modernist objectives, i.e. the majority of the public, perceive the architecture and design of the pre-Bauhaus past. ---->>> The present author concludes that there are no reasonable arguments for why the contemporary schools of architecture and design should keep limiting the education of future architects and designers to the modernist visual idiom alone, as they have been doing since the 1950s.
The text of this call for papers considers the new environmental situation of the world by taking care of the dialogue between the artificial intelligence and the real social, real cultural experiences of the spaces produced after the COVID pandemic. As Professor Rainer E. Zimmermann insisted upon in his key speaker lecture in Barcelona in ARQUITECTONICS 2017 (1), the virtual world and the virtual users of this world have different abilities than the subjects with presential social interaction behaviors, and because of that, the dialogue between both dimensions of the human life is essential today. Also, for this same reason, Professor Josep Muntañola has accepted to participate in the coordination of the new master course in the UPC about THE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR ARCHITECTS & DESIGNERS. So, a New Sense of Place (2) is developing towards the liberation of the Heidegger obsession by architects in the last century, as Richard Sennet has very brilliantly analyzed in his last book (3), and this is analyzed in the volumes 32 and 33 of the ARQUITECTONICS SERIES (2) and (4). But this new place has not yet to be built, and we are inside an uneasy "INTERREGNE" between nature and culture subjected to ignored constraints. Looking for answers in front of this coming situation, 75 years ago, in 1948, the MOMA Museum of New York held, with the coordination of Lewis Mumford, a singular Symposium with the title WHAT IS HAPPENING TO MODERN ARCHITECTURE? that has been analyzed in recent conferences in our network, and it will be one of the topics of this 21st conference in June 2023 (5).
The Body of Culture: Architecture and Presence In The Universe of Technical Images
PEP/COPPE/UFRJ, 2022
According to philosopher Vilém Flusser, the emergence of historical consciousness in the Western world was a product of a culture based on linear writing. This culture shaped by linear writing is the only one that can really be called “historical”—the cultures that preceded it were prehistorical, and our current culture, shaped by the technical images produced by apparatuses like smartphones, computers and tablets, is posthistorical. This increasingly abstract culture has engulfed almost all the media that made up the “body” of the previous culture, but while drawings, photographs, books, films and music have all become digital, architecture seems to be one of the last points of resilience of the material world. However, to which extent are the ways in which we relate to our buildings and cities—and especially the way we analyse and value these objects—still based in historical criteria? In the increasingly abstract universe of technical images, is the materiality of architecture an ahistorical presence connecting different worlds, or a problem to be overcome? This thesis will explore these questions with the intention to devise strategies to help contemporary architects to structure our existential space in terms that can be understood and appreciated in this new era, shaped by gestures that seem to lack any historical precedent.
2019
The relations between literature and architecture are so complex that, from an epistemological and methodological perspective, a great variety of approaches can be adopted in order to study them. And, actually, the rather chaotic bibliography that already exists on the mapping of those relations is a reflection of this complexity, crystallized variously within the fields of architectural theory, urban theory, semiotics, and literary theory. Firstly, sometimes authors from the discipline of architectural theory use expressions such as "architecture as a language", or "architecture as a (literary) text" or "the city as text", to create a kind of loose "analogy" between the two disciplinary fields. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of textual poetics or narratology, we can find similar, vague metaphors such as "narrative as a space", "narrative spaces", "the space of language", the "architecture of the text", or even "textual space". There seems to be another, second, family of approaches, that tends to establish a parallelism or a quasi-structural correspondence between space and narrativity, architecture and narrative, or building and narrativity, that goes beyond mere metaphors. The cases of Philippe Hamon's studies on the French realist novel or of Paul Ricoeur's famous article on "architecture and narrativity" immediately come to mind. In this paper I will argue that there is another, third, epistemological possibility of relating literature and architecture that is deeper, more significant, and may prove rather fruitful if we would wish to extract design or creative principles from such a comparative procedure. I would like to call such an approach a functionalstructural correlation that focuses on the roles and the conceptual content of the elements used to construct the above relation. The aim of the paper is to outline this possibility by organizing and typifying the bibliographical field under three distinct epistemological models usually at work when investigating the relation between literature and architecture, or between narrativity and space. Those models are conceived of as ideal types, in Max Weber's sense. In the exposition, I will specifically analyse the spatial literary theories of Gérard Genette, Elrud Ibsch, Genealogy and Prehistory of the Relations between Space and Narrative/ Language Postmodern theory played a major role in revisiting the problem of the relation between architecture and language, long after the early discussions and musings about the "architecture parlante" of the 18th century. Charles Jencks, George Baird, and Geoffrey Broadbent were some of the protagonists of those debates during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This era was exactly the heyday of semiology or semiotics. What Jencks and others tried to do is simply copy and transfer some models from linguistic and semiotic theory into architectural discourse. Jencks's argument in favour of a triple articulation (form-function-technic) of architecture, in direct relation to the famous semiological triangle developed by Ogden and Richards, is such an attempt (Jencks and Baird, 1969: pp. 13-17). And despite Gillo Dorfles's hesitation on the epistemological validity of such transfers, due to the complexity and "stereognostic" texture of architectural codes and their irreducibility to those of common spoken languages, people like Broadbent and even Christian Norberg-Schulz went on. They wanted to investigate how meaning was created by architecture, how signifiers were related to signifieds, how material buildings created "symbol-milieus" (according to Norberg-Schulz's catchy phrase) (Jencks and Baird, 1969, pp. 40-48, 51-56, 223-226), and they wanted to know whether architecture is a language or speech, following Saussure's famous dualism (Terzoglou 2018, pp. 121-123). The quest for meaningful form was a kind of heroic dimension of postmodernism, despite the fact that the protagonists themselves were supposed to nurture suspicion towards "grand narratives". This fervour attracted the attention of famous semioticians such as Umberto Eco, who started addressing the specific problems of a semiotics of architecture. Eco significantly added a flavour of scientificity to the whole debate. In his article on the architectural column, he claimed architecture's double function, the signified one being types of possible functions, but, most importantly, introduced the problem of the specificity of architecture as a discipline. The fact that when addressing spatial contexts we have a mixture of synchronic and diachronic "languages", an array of hybrid morphological and historical features that persist in time, makes the semiotic analysis of architecture not an easy task (Eco 1972, pp. 98, 113-115). My point of view, developed in a recent article, is that facing architecture, if we aspire to adequately analyse it from a semiotic perspective, we have to adopt an interdisciplinary methodological stance, merging literary theory, modal narratology, architectural theory, urban theory, and semiology, at the least (Terzoglou 2018: pp. 123-124). Juri Lotman's idea of a "semiotic continuum" could be useful for such an endeavour. Moreover, Lotman introduces the concept of "the space of the semiosphere" (2005, pp. 206-208), which is diachronic, related to cultural memory, and therefore more relevant to architecture, which addresses, basically, social values, cultural hierarchies, existential distinctions, and collective memory, through the articulation of space within a temporal continuum or framework. Note Ideal Type Two: Critical Epistemological Models There seems to be a different family of approaches, a second ideal type that articulates the relation between space and narrativity, architecture and narrativity, or building and language. This second type tends to establish a parallelism beyond mere, vague metaphors: a kind of quasi-structural correspondence between the two disciplines, architecture and linguistics, or architectural theory and literary theory. I claim that this second type of relations is based on an external comparison between two fields of inquiry, based, however, on abstract concepts. This comparison is no longer a collation but a sort of abstract but strict analogy or correspondence, making use of expressions based on "like", "such. .. as", or "between" to institute a parallelism or homology among distinct disciplinary frameworks. I would like to call such approaches, from an epistemological perspective, critical or representational conceptualisms. "Critical" because they transcend mere empiricist epistemologies using only vague metaphors, "representational" because they tend to assume a kind of one-to-one correspondence between the elements comprising each discipline, and, "conceptualism" in order to account for the fact that this family of models actually makes use of concepts in the articulation of the comparison between the disciplinary matrices at hand. Therefore, if I could compare the second ideal type with the first, the differences are striking, but, however, there is one, common element in both of them: the relation between the two parts of the comparison, architecture and language, or space and narrativity, is always assumed to be external. That is, it is presupposed that those disciplines are already readymade entities, so to speak, and then they come into contact or dialogue. To give some examples of this second ideal type, I will briefly analyse the major works and articles by Gérard Genette, Philippe Hamon, and Paul Ricoeur. Genette, in his 1966 article on the relation between space and language, already notes that "il y a toujours de l'espace dans le langage.. .. Tout notre langage est tissé d'espace " (Genette 1966, p. 107) [there is always space within language.. .. All our language's tissue is spatial]. Since language spatializes itself (1966, p. 108), we would expect why poets such as Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Proust, Claudel, and Char are obviously fascinated by place and space, claims Genette (1969: p. 44). Therefore, in his other seminal text from Figures II, on "Literature and Space", published in 1969, Genette tries to unravel the complex relation between the two concepts. The interesting feature of this article is that it somehow avoids the pitfalls of the general and vague metaphors pervading the 1966 article, inaugurating a methodology resembling ideal type two. Genette asks the crucial question of whether "space" is only one "subject" of literature among others, therefore just an object of representation for the temporal mode of existence of literary narrative (Genette 1969: pp. 43-44). If that were the case, then space would be something passive and external, and literature would only speak about space, in a kind of empiricist