This challenge comes at a time when architecture appears to oscillate uneasily between a deconstructive aestheticization of its traditional modus operandi and a reassertion of its liberative capacity as a critical form. It is perhaps a measure of Grassi's professional alienation that his work remains somewhat hermetic and indeed paradoxically removed, when built, from the poetics of craft construction.
This is all the more inexplicable given the care. No one perhaps has made a more judicious assessment of the contradictory aspects of Grassi's architecture than the Catalan critic lgnasf de Sola Morales: Architecture is posited as a craft, that is to say, as the practical application of established knowledge through rules of the different levels of intervention.
Thus, no notion of architecture as problem-solving, as innovation, or as invention ex novo, is present in showing the permanent, the evident, and the given character of knowledge in the making of architecture. The work of Grassi is born of a reflection upon the essential resources of discipline, and it focuses upon specific media which determine not only aesthetic choices but also the ethical content of its cultural contribution.
Through these channels of ethical and political will, the concern of the Enlightenment It is not solely the superiority of reason and the analysis of form which are indicated, but rather, the critical role in the Kantian sense of the term , that is, the judgement of values, the very lack of which is felt in society today. In the sense that his architecture is a metalanguage,.
Greek in origin, the term tectonic derives from the word tekton, signifying carpenter or builder. The corresponding verb is tektainomai. This in turn is related to the Sanskrit taksan, referring to the craft of carpentry and to the use of the 1. Remnants of a similar term can be found in Vedic poetry, where it again refers to carpentry.
In Greek it appears in Homer, where it alludes to the art of con-. In the fifth century e. In Aristophanes it would seem that the notion is even associated with machination and the creation of false things, a transformation that would appear to correspond to the passage from pre-Socratic philosophy to Hellenism. Needless to say, the role of the tekton leads eventually to the emergence of the master builder or architekton. Tectonic becomes the art of joinfngs. With regard to the ancient understanding of the word, tectonic tends toward the construction or making of an artisanal or artistic product.
It depends much more upon the correct or incorrect applications of the artisanal rules, or the degree to which its usefulness has been achieved. Only to this extent does tectonic also involve judgment over art production. Here, however, lies the point of departure for the expanded clarification and application of the Idea in more recent art history: as soon as an aesthetic perspective-and not a goal of utility-is defined that specifies the work and production of the tekton, then the analysis consigns the term.
We call this string of mixed activities tectonic; their peak Is architecture, which mostly through necessity rises high and can be a powerful representation of the deepest feelings.
In his highly influential Die Tektonik der Hellenen The Tectonic of the Hellenes , published in three volumes between and , Karl Botticher would make the seminal contribution of distinguishing between the Kernform and the Kunst-. Botticher interpreted the term tectonic as signifying a complete system binding all the parts of the Greek temple into a single whole, including the framed presence of relief sculpture in all its multifarious forms.
Influenced by Muller, Gottfried Semper would endow the term with equally ethnographic connotations in his epoch-making theoretical departure from the Vitruvian triad of utilitas, fermitas, and venustas. Semper's Die vier Elemente der. On the basis of this taxonomy Semper would classify the building crafts into two fundamental procedures: the tectonics ofthe frame, in which lightweight, linear components are assembled. That this last depends upon load-bearing masonry, whether stone or mud brick, is suggested by the Greek etymology of stereotomy, from stereos, solid, and tomia, to cut.
As Semper was to point out in his Stoffwechseltheorie, the history of culture manifests occasional transpositions in. In this regard we need to note that masonry, when it does not assume the form of a conglomerate as in pise construction, that is to say when it is bonded into coursework, is also a form of weaving, to which all the various traditional masonry bonds bear testimony fig.
The general validity of Semper's Four Elements is borne out by vernacular building throughout the world, even if there are cultures where the woven vertical screen wall does not exist or where the woven wall is absorbed, as it were, into the roof and frame, as in, say, t he North American Mandan house fig.
In Af1. Moreover according to climate, custom, and available material the respective roles played by tectonic and stereotomic form vary considerably, so that the primal dwelling passes from a con-.
Alternatively the basic cell is covered by a vault of the same material, both Traditional Japanese one-story house. It is characteristic of our secular age that we should overlook the cosmic associations evoked by these dialogically opposed modes of construction; that is to say the affinity of the frame for the immateriality of sky and the propensity of mass form not only to gravitate toward the earth but also to dissolve in its substance.
As the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy was to point out, this is never more evident than in mud brick construction, where the walls tend to fuse with the earth once they fall into ruin and disuse. However, untreated wood is equally. No one has argued more persuasively as to the cosmogonic implications of the earthwork t han the Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti, who in wrote: The worst enemy of modern architecture is the idea of space considered solely in terms of its economic and technical exigencies indifferent to the ideas of the site.
Through the concept of the site and the principle of settlement, the environment becomes [on the contrary] the essence of architectural production. From this vantage point, new principles and methods can be seen for design.
Principles and methods that give precedence to the siting in a specific area. This is an act of knowledge of the context that comes out of its architectural modification. The origin of architecture is not in the primitive hut, or the cave or the mythical "Adam's House in Paradise. As with every act of assessment this one required radical moves and apparent simplicity. From this point of view, there are only two important attitudes to the context. The tools of the first are mimesis, organic imitation and the display of 1.
Traditional construction from the towns of Mzab in Algeria: 1. That this was always central to Pikionis's sensibility is evident from a essay entitled "A Sentimental Topography": We rejoice in the progress of our body across the uneven surface of the earth and our spirit is gladdened by the endless interplay of the three dimensions that we encounter with every step. Here the ground Is hard, stony, precipitous, and the soil Is brittle and dry. There the ground is level; water surges out of. Further on, the breeze, the altitude and the configuration of the ground announce the vicinity of the sea.
There is moreover, as Pikionis reminds us, the "acoustical" resonance of the site as the body negotiates its surface. One recalls at this juncture Steen Eiler Rasmussen's Experiencing Architecture and the remarkable chapter entitled "Hearing Architecture," where he notes the all but imperceptible acoustical character of built form. Similar psycho-acoustical effects have been remarked on by Ulrich Conrads and Bernhard Leitner in a essay in which they comment on the spiritual aura evoked by the reverberation time of the Taj Mahal and, rather coincidentally, on the way in which Mediterranean vernacular forms appear to be suited to the articulation of certain diphthongs and vowels and not others, with the result that such dwellings prove unsuitable as vacation homes for people speaking northern languages.
Corporeal Metaphor The capacity of the being to experience the environment bodily recalls the notion of the corporeal imagination as advanced by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico in his Scienza nuova of In his study Michael Mooney had this to say about Vico's conception of this metaphorical process: In a moment of stirring oratory, Vico held, when the beauty of a conceit overwhelms the spirit as its truth impresses the mind, both speaker and listener are caught up in a rush of ingenuity.
So here, too, analogously to be sure, the first dim seeing of Jove is an event in which body through language becomes conscious, the poetry of a thundering sky evoking in response the poetry of gjants made men, struck dumb with awe.
What occurs is an exchange in metaphor. The physical universe of deus artifex, itself a poem, everywhere written in conceits, becomes in the bodies of clustered men a poet, henceforth a maker of self; the passive ingenuity of the universe comes to life in the mind however unrefined it yet is and the spirit however passionate and violent it may be of man, and man, now standing erect, becomes the artifex of his own existence.
This much is suggested by the psycho-physical impact of form upon our being and by our tendency to engage form through touch as we feel our way through architectonic space. This propensity has been remarked on by Adrian Stokes, in discussing the impact of t ime and touch on the weathering of stone. Hand-finish is the most vivid testimony of sculpture. People touch things according to their shape. A single shape is made magnificent by perennial touching.
For the hand explores, all unconsciously to reveal, to magnify an existent form. Perfect sculp ture needs your hand to communicate some pulse and warmth, to reveal subtleties unnoticed by the eye, needs your hand to enhance them. Used, carved stone, exposed to the weather; records on its concrete shape in spatial, immediate, simultaneous form, not only the winding passages of days and nights, the opening and shutting skies of warmth and wet, but also the sensitiveness, the vitality even, that each successive touching has communicated.
The philosophical alienation of the body from the mind has resulted in the absence of embodied experience from almost all contemporary theories of. The overemphasis on signification and reference in architectural theory has led to a construal of meaning as an entirely conceptual phenomenon. The body, if it figures into architectural theory at all, is often reduced to an aggregate of needs and constraints which are to be accommodated by methods of design grounded in behavioral and ergonomic analysis.
Within this framework of thought, the body and its experience do not participate in the constitution and realization of architectural meaning.
Man articulates the world through his body. Man is not a dualistic being in whom spirit and the flesh are essentially distinct, but a living corporeal being active in the world. The "here and now" in which this distinct body is placed is what is first taken as granted, and subsequently a "there" appears. Through a perception of that distance, or rather the living of that distance, the surrounding space be-. Since man has an asymmetrical physical structure with a top and a bottom, a left and a right, and a front and a back, the articulated world, in turn, naturally becomes a heterogeneous space.
The world that appears to man's senses and the state of 1. Plan, section through council chamber, and longitudinal section. The body articulates the world.
At the same time, the body is articulated by the world. In this way the body in its dynamic relationship with the world becomes the shintai. It is only the shint ai in this sense that builds or understands architecture. The shintai is a sentient being that responds to the world. Similar spatio-corporeal connotations are evident in Adolphe Appia's disquisition on the interplay between body and form on the stage, in his L'Oeuvre d'art.
Rttual raising and burning of the hashira. Aalto's Saynatsalo Town Hall where, from entry to council chamber, the subject encounters a sequence of contrasting tactile experiences fig. Thus, from the stereotomic mass and relative darkness of the entry stair fig. Semper's theory of tectonics was profoundly rooted in the emerging science of ethnography.
Like Sigfried Giedion after him, Semper t ried to reground the practice of architecture in what Giedion would call "the eternal present," in his study of this title. This search for a timeless origin is directly evoked in the Prolegomenon to Der Stil where, in a manner uncannily reminiscent of Vico, Semper writes of the cosmogonic drive as an archaic impulse continually changing across time fig.
Surrounded by a world full of wonder and forces, whose law man may divine, may want to understand but never decipher, which reaches him only in a few fragmentary harmonies and which suspends his soul in a continuous state of unresolved tension, he himself conjures up the missing perfection in play. He makes himself a tiny world in which the cosmic law is evident within strict limits, yet complete in itself and perfect in this respect; in such play man satisfies his cosmogonic instinct.
His fantasy creates these images, by displaying, expanding, and adapting to his mood the individual scenes of nature before him, so orderly arranged that he believes he can discern in the single event the harmony of the whole and for short moments has the illusion of having escaped reality.
Truly this enjoyment of nature. However, this artistic enjoyment of nature's beauty is by no means the most naive or earliest manifestation of the artistic instinct. On the contrary, the former is undeveloped in simple, primitive man, whereas he does already take delight in nature's creative law as it gleams through reality in the rhythmical sequence of space and time movements, is found once more in the wreath, the bead necklace, the scroll, the circular dance and the rhythmic tone that attends it, the beat of an oar, and so on.
These are the beginnings out of which music and architec-. Although we cannot dwell here on all the ethnographic evidence that may be summoned in support of Semper's thesis, I will cite nonetheless two examples that testify to the way in which t he two basic modes of building, the compressive mass and the tensile frame, have been deployed throughout time in such a way as to create a lifeworld that is cosmogonically encoded.
On t he basis of this cosmic cross axis t he house and its surroundings are divided into a homological hierarchy in which every value is counterbalanced by its opposite. Thus, the attributes of the external world are reversed on the interior; the southern exterior wall becomes the "northern" interior wall, and so on. Associated with dawn, spring, fertility, and birth, the loom, before the "eastern" dty.
It is balanced by the male object of honor, namely the rifle, that is stacked close to the loom. That this symbolic system is rein-. In front of the wall opposite the door stands the weaving loom. This wall is usually called by the same name as the outside front wall giving onto the courtyard tasga , or else the wall of the weaving-loom or opposite wall, since one is oppo-.
The wall opposite this is called the wall of darkness, or of sleep, or of the maiden, or of the tomb. The reason given for the last is that the house is.
A number of signs suggest, however, that. In addition to all this, at the center of the dividing wall, between "the house of human beings" stands the main pillar, supporting the governing beam and all the framework of the house. Now this governing beam which connects 1. Bourdieu proceeds to show how this same symbolic system differentiates In a categorical way between the lower and upper parts of the house; that is, between the sunken, stone-flagged stable regarded as a space of darkness, fertility, and sexual intercourse and the upper dry, light space of human appearance, finished In polished cow dung.
Our second example is drawn from Japanese culture, In which weaving and binding emerge from archaic time as the primary element in a number of agrarian renewal and ground-breaking rites that still survive today throughout the.
In contrast to the Western monumental tradition with it s dependence on the relative permanence of stereotomic mass, the archaic Japanese world was symbolically structured through ephemeral tectonic material, knotted grasses or rice straw ropes known as shime-nawa, literally "bound ropes" fig. As Nitschke and others have shown, these Shinto prototectonic devices exercised a decisive influence on the evolution of Japanese sacred and domestic architecture through its various incarnations, from the earliest Shimmei shrines dating from the first century through to the seventeenth-century shoin and chaseki versions of Heian wooden construction.
Due to t he relative perishability of untreated wood, Japanese honorific structures were everywhere subject to cyclical. On these occasions a new shrine is built on the adjacent site of a previous shrine, this sacred domain having lain dormant over the intervening twenty-year period fig.
Aside from the evident differences separating stereotomic and tectonic construction in archaic building culture, two common factors may be seen as obtaining in both of these examples. The first is the primacy accorded to the woven as a place-making agent in so-called primitive cultures; the second is the universal presence of a nonlinear attitude toward time that guarantees, as it were, the cyclical renewal of an eternal present.
This premodern seasonal perception of the temporal finds reflection in the fact that as late as a century and a half ago the. The bound rice straw, apotro paic signs and talismans of Shinto culture. Confirming the preeminence that Semper would give to textiles as the first cosmogonic craft, Japanese building and place-making practices seem to have been interconnected throughout history.
Thus, to a greater degree perhaps than in other cultures, metalinguistic forms and spatio-temporal rhythms are bound up with the act of building in Japan. That this culture is quite literally woven throughout is further substantiated by the dovetailing interrelationship of every conceivable element in the traditional Japanese house, from the standard tatami mat of woven rice straw construction fig. Representational versus Ontological The concept of layered transitional space as it appears in traditional Japanese architecture fig.
This difference fi nds a more articulated reflection in the distinction that Semper draws between the ontological nature of the earthwork, frame, and roof and the more representational,. In my view, this dichotomy must be constantly rearticulated in the creation of architectural form, since each building type, technique, topography, and temporal circumstance brings about a different cultural condition. As Harry Mallgrave has suggested, Semper remained somewhat undecided as to the relative expressivity of structure and cladding, hesitating between the symbolic expressivity of construction as a thing itselfrationally modulated from both a technical and an aesthetic standpoint-and a symbolic elaboration of the cladding irrespective of its underlying structure.
According to this last rubric, cladding is conceived as an overriding decorative or metalinguistic means for enhancing form so as to represent its status or latent value. Mallgrave posits a reconciliation of t his split in which first the symbolic the representational and secondly the constructional the ontological are alternatively revealed and concealed. He writes: Konrad Fiedler, in an essay that took its starting point in Semper's theory, suggested a peeling away of the dressing of antique architecture to exploit in modern works the wall's purely spatial possibility.
This suggestion was taken. The two teminl side by side; the one occupied and the other dormant. The history of architecture is now to be analyzed as a "feeling for space" RaumgefOhl. This dialogue between the constructive and the nonconstructive would be denied by Adolf Loos in his somewhat biased interpretation of Semper's Bekleidungstheorie, which may explain why structure and construction play such a.
In his essay entitled "Das Prinzip der Bekleidung" The Principle of Cladding Loos stresses the primacy of cladding over all other considerations.
Loos's habitual application of thin marble revetment on the grounds that it was the cheapest wallpaper in the world, since it would never need to be replaced, tended to remove him, as his work would suggest, from Semper's initial preoccupation with the articulation of the frame and its infill. Like the dissimulating rhetoric of the Gesamtkunstwerk to which he was so opposed, Loos embraced an atectonic strategy in that his spatially dynamic Raumplan could never be clearly expressed in tectonic terms.
Indeed, this masking of the actual fabric so that its substance cannot be discerned is perhaps the sole attribute linking Loos to his rival, the Secessionist architect Josef Hoffmann. The fact that Loos revered tradition makes this affinity all the more paradoxical, particularly since the aura of tradition emanating from.
At the same time, as Mallgrave remarks, Peter Behrens's dismissal of Semper as a positivist will prove quite decisive for modern building culture in that, strongly influenced by the counterthesis of Alois Riegl, the central preoccupations of German architects will shift away from the tectonic to the abstractly atectonic, bordering on the graphic, thereby assisting in that transformation which Robert Schmutzler will call the crystallization of the Jugendstil.
He went on to note that a given expression may be at variance with either the order of the structure or the method of construction, citing as an example the concealed flying buttresses of the Baroque. However, when structure and construction appear to be mutually Interdependent, as in, say, Paxton's Crystal Palace of , the tectonic potential of the whole would seem to derive from the eurythmy of its parts and the articulation of its joints.
Even here, however, statical capacity and representational form can be said to diverge, albeit imperceptibly, since Paxton's modular cast-iron columns of standard diameter are brought to sustain different loads by varying their wall thickness.
In a subsequent essay dealing with Josef Hoffmann's masterwork, the Stoclet House, built in Brussels in fig. At the corners or any other places ofjuncture where two or more of these parallel mouldings come together, the effect tends towards a negation of the solidity of the built volumes. A feeling persists as if the walls had not been built up in a heavy construction but consisted of large sheets of thin material, joined at the corners with metal bands to protect the edges.
The visual result is very striking and atectonic in the extreme. There are many other atectonic details at the Stoclet House. Heavy piers have nothing of adequate visual weight to support but carry a thin, flat roof as at the entrance and over the loggia on the roof terrace.
In this connection it is equally significant that windows are set flush into the fa-. Similar weightless effects can be found in a great deal of German architectural 1. In this unique work, tectonic and atectonic patently coexist; in the first instance, the ontologically tectonic, pin-jointed steel frames that run down Berlichingenstrasse, in the second the representationally atectonic corner bastions, of in situ concrete that, while supporting their own weight, pointedly fail to carry the oversailing cantilever of the roof fig.
It is ironic that this architectonic ambivalence should emerge in Behrens's symbolization of technological power, particularly since he envisaged architecture as serving power throughout history-the thesis advanced in his essay "What Is Monumental Art? Perhaps this psycho-cultural ambivalence arises directly out of his rather willful Kunstwollen attempt to render the factory shed as a kind of crypto-classical barn in order to signify what Ernst JOnger would later call the Gestalt of the worker-the "will to power" of the workers who had already been transformed from an agrarian labor force into a highly skilled proletariat, indentured in the service of the industrial Kartel.
There is perhaps no twentieth-century philosopher who has responded more profoundly to the cultural impact of technology than Martin Heidegger, and while there can be little doubt that there are reactionary aspects of his thought,. The first of these concerns the topographic concept of the bounded domain or place, as opposed to the space endlessness of the megalopolis. This was first broached by him in an essay entitled "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" of What the word for space Raum, Rum, designates is said by its ancient meaning.
Raum means a place cleared or freed for settlement and lodging. A space is something that has been made room for, something that is cleared and free, namely within a boundary, Greek peras. A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.
Space is in essence that for which room. That for which room is made is always granted and hence is joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location.
Accordingly spaces receive their being from locations and not from "space. The space that is thus made by positions is space of a peculiar sort. As distance or "stadion" [in Greek] it Is what the same word stadion means in Latin, a spa-. Thus nearness and remoteness between men and things can become mere distance, mere intervals of intervening. What is more the mere dimensions of height, breadth, and depth can be abstracted from space as intervals. What is so abstracted we represent as the pure manifold of the three dimensions.
Yet the room made by this manifold is. But from space as extensio a further abstraction. What these relations make room for is the possibility of the purely mathematical construction of manifolds with an arbitrary number of dimensions. The space provided for in this mathematical manner may be called "space," the "one" space as such.
But in this sense "the". For Heidegger the problem with technology does not reside in the benefits that it affords but in its emergence as a quasi-autonomous force that has "stamped" the epoch with its Gestalt. It is not primarily the environmentally degrading aspects of industrial. For Heidegger the rootlessness of the modern world begins with the translation of the Greek experience into the edicts of the Roman imperium, as though the literal translation of Greek into Latin could be effected without their having had the same experience.
Against this misunderstanding that culminates for him in the productionist philosophy of the machine age, Heidegger returns us, like his master Eduard Husserl, to the phenomenological presence of things in themselves.
In this analysis of the thing as matter, form is already co-posited. What is constant in a thing, its consistency, lies in the fact that matter stands together with a form. The thing is formed matter. The tectonic presents itself as a mode by which 1o express these different states and thereby as a means for accommodating, through inflection, the various conditions under which different things appear and sustain themselves.
Under this precept different parts of a given building may be rendered differently according to their ontological status. In fabricating equipment-e. It disappears into usefulness. The material is all the better and more suitable the less it resists perishing in the equipmental being of equipment.
By contrast the temple-work, in setting up a world, does not cause the material to disappear, but rather causes it to come forth for the very first time and to come Into the Open of the work's world. The rock comes to bear and rest and so first becomes rock; metals come to glitter and shimmer, colors to glow, tones to sing, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of stone, into the firmness and pliancy of wood, into the hardness and luster of metal, into the lighting and darkening of color, into the clang of tone and into the naming power of the.
This essay contains further insights that are of pertinence to the tectonic. The first turns on the related but etymologically distinct notion of techne, derived from the Greek verb tikto, meaning to produce. This term means the simultaneous existence of both art and craft, the Greeks fai ling to distinguish between the two.
It also implies knowledge, in the sense of revealing what is latent within a work; that is to say it implies aletheia, or knowing in the sense of an ontological revealing. This revelatory concept returns us to Vico's verum, ipsum, factum, to that state of affairs in which knowing and making are inextricably linked; to a condition in which techne reveals the ontological status of a thing through the disclosure of its epistemic value.
In this sense one may claim that knowledge and hence beauty are dependent upon the emergence of "thingness. Of this last Heidegger writes, "World-withdrawal and world-decay can never be undone. The works are no longer the same as they once were. It is they themselves, to be sure, that we encounter there, but they themselves are gone by. Measure and boundary are two terms by which he tries to articulate this relationship.
His thinking in this regard, combined with his later emphasis on dwelling, caring, and letting-be, have led a number of commentators to see him as a pioneer of "eco-philosophy. He considered that neither nature nor history nor man himself would be able to withstand the unworldliness of technology if it were released on a planetary scale. The notion of mediating instrumental reason through an appeal to tradition, as an evolving matrix from within which the lifewortd is realized both materially and.
This seems to be particularly relevant to the practice of architecture in that the metier has no hope of being universally applied in the sense that technoscience achieves such an application. One has only to look at the spontaneous megalopolitan proliferation of our times to recognize the incapacity of the building industry, let alone architecture, to respond in any effective way.
Where technology, as the maximization of industrial production and consumption, merely serves to exacerbate the magnitude of this proliferation, architecture as craft and as an act of place creation is excluded from the process. This Geschick as Heidegger calls it embodies not only a material condition, specific to a given time and place, but also the legacy of a particular historical tradition that, however much it may be assimilated, is always in the process of transforming itself through what Hans Georg Gadamer has characterized as the "fusion of horizons.
As Georgia Warnke has written: "it is not that Gadamer no longer identifies the dialectical or dialogical process with the possibility of an advance on the part of reason; it is rather that Gadamer refuses to foreclose this advance by projecting a point of absolute knowledge at which no further dialogic encounters can develop that rationality.
It is, by definition, unstable and specific in a fragmentary sense. Unlike technoscience that regards the past as a series of obsolete moments along the ever-upward t rajectory of hypothetical progress, the so-called human sciences cherish the lived past as an Erlebnis that is open to being critically reintegrated into the present. As Warnke puts it: The way in which we anticipate the future defines the meaning that the past can have for us, just as the way in which our ancestors projected the future determines our own range of possibilities.
Thus for Gadamer, Vico 's formula entails that we understand history not simply because we make it but also because it has made us; we belong to it in the sense that we inherit its experience, project a. The way in which such transformations are at once, however imperceptibly, transformed in their turn means that neither a hypostasized past nor an idealized future carries the conviction that they once had in the heyday of the Enlightenment.
The past decade has witnessed a notable turn in philosophical orientation in the Nordic countries. For the first time, the North has a generation of philosopher. The essay argues that the axiomatic definition of the tectonic "Poetics of Construction", as it has been advocated en recent decades, is focusing too one-sidedl.
Sprawling Places. Theme parks, suburban sprawl, anonymous functional places such as airports and parking lots are real human spaces, contends Kolb emeritus philosophy, Bates Col. Constructional Theory in Britain, ss. Unlike spoken and written theories, the constructional 'theories' explored in this thesis are drawn essentially from 'practice'. While occasionally drawing upon. However, untreated wood is equally r;;;: o J l e.
Through the concept of the site and the principle of settlement, the environ- ment becomes [on the contrary] the essence of architectural production.
From this vantage point, new principles and methods can be seen for design. Prin- ciples and methods that give precedence to the siting in a specific area. This is an act of knowledge of the context that comes out of its architectural modifica- tion.
The origin of architecture is not in the primitive hut, or the cave or the mythi- cal "Adam's House in Paradise. As with every act of assessment this one required radical moves and apparent simplicity. From this point of view, there are only two important attitudes to the context.
The tools of the first are mimesis, organic imitation and the display of 1. The tools of the second are the assessment of physical relations, for- Traditional construction from the towns of mal definition and interiorization of complexity.
I have in mind 3. In this work, as Alexander 6. This ser- 8. That this was always central to Pikionis's sen- sibility is evident from a essay entitled "A Sentimental Topography": We rejoice in the progress of our body across the uneven surface of the earth and our spirit is gladdened by the endless interplay of the three dimensions that we encounter with every step. Here the ground is hard, stony, precipitous, and the soil is brittle and dry. There the ground is level; water surges out of mossy patches.
Further on, the breeze, the altitude and the configuration of the ground announce the vicinity of the sea. There is moreover, as Pikionis reminds us, the "acousti- cal" resonance of the site as the body negotiates its surface.
One recalls at this juncture Steen Eiler Rasmussen's Experiencing Architecture and the remarkable chapter entitled "Hearing Architecture," where he notes the all but imperceptible acoustical character of built form. Against the rationalism of Des- cartes, Vico argued that language, myth, and custom are the metaphorical leg- acy of the species brought into being through the self-realization of its history, from the first intuitions deriving from man's primordial experience of nature to the long haul of cultural development running across generations.
In his study Michael Mooney had this to say about Vico's conception of this metaphori- cal process: In a moment of stirring oratory, Vico held, when the beauty of a conceit over- whelms the spirit as its truth impresses the mind, both speaker and listener are caught up in a rush of ingenuity, each making connections that were not made before, their spirits fused by the freshness of the language, their minds and fi- nally their wills made one.
So here, too, analogously to be sure, the first dim seeing of Jove is an event in which body through language becomes conscious, the poetry of a thundering sky evoking in response the poetry of giants made men, struck dumb with awe. What occurs is an exchange in metaphor, the image of providence in a thunder- ing heaven passing into the bodies of awestruck men. The physical universe of deus artifex, itself a poem, everywhere written in conceits, becomes in the bod- ies of clustered men a poet, henceforth a maker of self; the passive ingenuity of the universe comes to life in the mind however unrefined it yet is and the spirit however passionate and violent it may be of man, and man, now standing erect, becomes the artifex of his own existence.
This much [s sug- gested by the psycho-physical impact of form upon our being and by our tendency to engage form through touch as we feel our way through architec- tonic space. This propensity has been remarked on by Adrian Stokes, in dis- cussing the impact of time and touch on the weathering of stone. Hand-finish is the most vivid testimony of sculpture.
People touch things ac- cording to their shape. A single shape is made magnificent by perennial touch- ing. For the hand explores, all unconsciously to reveal, to magnify an existent form. Perfect sculpture needs your hand to communicate some pulse and warmth, to reveal subtleties unnoticed by the eye, needs your hand to enhance them. Used, carved stone, exposed to the weather, records on its concrete shape in spatial, immediate, simultaneous form, not only the winding passages of days and nights, the opening and shutting skies of warmth and wet, but also the sensitiveness, the vitality even, that each successive touching has communicated.
The philosophical alienation of the body from the mind has resulted in the absence of embodied experience from almost all contemporary theories of The overemphasis on signification and reference in ar- chitectural theory has led to a construal of meaning as an entirely conceptual phenomenon.
Experience, as it relates to understanding, seems reduced to a matter of the visual registration of coded messages-a function of the eye which might well rely on the printed page and dispense with the physical presence of architecture altogether. The body, if it figures into architectural theory at all, is of- ten reduced to an aggregate of needs and constraints which are to be accommo- dated by methods of design grounded in behavioral and ergonomic analysis.
Within this framework of thought, the body and its experience do not participate in the constitution and realization of architectural meaning. Man articulates the world through his body. Man is not a dualistic being in whom spirit and the flesh are essentially distinct, but a living corporeal being active in the world.
The "here and now" in which this distinct body is placed is what is first taken as granted, and subsequently a "there" appears. Through a perception of that distance, or rather the living of that distance, the surrounding space be- comes manifest as a thing endowed with various meanings and values.
Since man has an asymmetrical physical structure with a top and a bottom, a left and a right, and a front and a back, the articulated world, in fum, naturally becomes a heterogeneous space.
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