The Architect as an Archivist

In this lecture I intend to point out the role and the tasks of the architecture in the modern western societies. As we live in societies subjected to rising social control and approbation due to both the huge process of acculturation and the role of the media, the architect is no more one artist on the service of a single sovereign or prince like, for example, in the Renaissance. He is rather embedded in collective practices that are normally unified and coordinated by unitary and institutionalized organisms like states, cities or international organizations. Therefore he works within a social enterprise that is collectively acknowledged and evaluated. In order to understand his role we have hence to deal firstly with a social dimension, which is properly a normative dimension, i.e. a space in which both moral and esthetic canons are collectively examined and approved. However, as in modern societies this collective dimension is superseded by institutionalized organizations such as cities and states, the modern architect faces social interests that are endorsed by already institutionalized organisms. His work is therefore subjected to an approbation that is determined by the historical identity of such organisms and he has to confront his genius with this fact. The esthetic work is determined by the “ideology” that underlies the institutional design and transformations of a state or a city. With this lecture I aim to explain the role of the architect in this kind of relational environment without disregarding his leading nature of artist.

The article examines how the concept of the addressee of architecture has transformed throughout the twentieth century, demonstrating how the mutations of the dominant means of representation in architecture are linked to the evolving significance of the city’s inhabitants. It presents the ways in which the reorientations regarding the dominant modes of representation depend on the transfor-mations of architects’ conceptions of the notion of citizenship. Through the diagnosis of the epistemo-logical debates corresponding to four successive generations – the modernists starting from the 1920s, the post-war era focusing on neorealist architecture and Team 10, the paradigm of autonomy and the reduction of architecture to its syntactics and to its visuality in the 1970s and the reinvention of the notion of the user and the architectural program through the event in the post-autonomy era – it identifies and analyses the mutations concerning the modes of representation that are at the heart of architectural practice and education in each generation under consideration. It traces the shifts from Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s fascination with perspective to Alison and Peter Smith-son’s Cluster City diagrams and Shadrach Woods’s “stem” and “web”, on to Peter Eisenman’s search for logical structures in architectural components’ formal relationships and his attraction to axonometric representation, and finally to the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Bernard Tschumi’s concern with uncovering the potentialities hidden in the architectural program.

2020

Contemporary research on cities has shifted its focus from analysing formal features to aspects related to change and interaction dynamics. Seeing a city with its architecture as a system of mutual interactions and connections enables us to consider and analyse the relation­ships, processes, heterogeneous meanings and interpretative possibilities. Thanks to this approach, we can explore diverse narratives focusing on architectural objects, shaped by, among others, changing social, political or economic conditions, as well as those resulting from the implementation of various conservation concepts. The article presents these issues primarily with reference to creating contemporary narratives and, at the same time, reinterpreting architectural heritage important for the local community. It is a particularly interesting and current issue, given the fact that, in contrast to other fields of art, the analysis of architecture is still dominated by an approach which defines objects in a st...

2010

In the field of conservation practice concerned with the preservation of cultural heritage values in the build environment, there is an urgent need for a renewed discussion of how we intend to preserve the valuable environments including their historical buildings and structures for the future. Not all of the buildings and structures that we have selected as valuable cultural heritage today have the same needs in the practice of preservation and some of them will need more attention in the future debate on the possible reuse of it, both now and in the future. These environments are in the current practice, defined as everything you find on a site within a delimited selected area. Written sources and guidelines for the preservation of the environments of preservation value, written by the public authorities or professionals, describe the environments as places that tell us a story, and they indicate the importance of this story to be preserved. For the future possibility of this stor...

In creative thinking, just as in architectural thinking, the context provides the necessary paths for the design. That said, conceptual thinking and theoretical ideas provide more than a mere context for architectural design, in that they help the architect make order out of chaos and create a pattern of order through their intuition and expressions of a culture. Within this explosion of creativity, art can help in the exploration of new means of expression, new materials and new forms, and in this sense, can enhance creative approaches in architectural education and architectural design. Since architecture as a discipline is about the creation and production of space, it has inherent spatial, social and cultural bonds, and as such, is a representation of values, meanings and identities. The concept of representation assumes many meanings. Represent as a noun is picture or sign, while to represent is to convey, to express, to correspond to. 1 In Lefebvre's model, the process of representation is defined according to three concepts or interrelated modes, being spatial practices; representations of space; and spaces of representation. Spatial practices can refer to social space that embraces the production and reproduction of social practices in particular locations. It embodies a close association within a perceived space between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks that link the places of work, 'private' life and leisure). 2 Representations of space refer to the conceptualized space that leans towards a system of verbal (and therefore intellectually worked out) signs, 3 and this is the dominant space in any society. Representational space is lived directly through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of 'inhabitants' and 'users', and tends towards coherent systems of non-verbal symbols in the form of signs and codes that overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects. 4 In this regard, architecture is a continuous act involving the taking possession, to some degree, of the abstraction of codes, signs and meanings. It mingles with art in a bid to be creative, to be different, and to be new and unique. Just as art, in itself, it is an attempt to bring order out of chaos, the principles of art help architecture not to portray , but to evoke the ideas lost within the chaos of daily life. Accordingly, it focuses on the abstract world of art to realize the truth, and in this respect, architecture is about combining the rational and the irrational. In this sense, space is not only a rational entity, nor is it something that exists at the level of the surfaces that define architecture, or a physical entity that can be measured by dimensions. It is about creating something rational out of many irrational relations and inputs, and about the meanings attributed to spaces within the system of spatial relations within the built environment. Since it is about the patterns of lifestyle, culture, tradition, individuals, beliefs and values, it can be considered intangible, meaningful, conceptual , perceptual and cognitive. In this regard, space is not something confined solely to architecture, being constituted out of some social, cultural, mental and physical processes. It is about the spatial practices, both rational and irrational, that give meaning to a place, which is why architecture is always in search of the genius loci. " How spatial organisation in some sense is a product of social structure " , " how space is socially produced and reproduced " and " how social relations are spatially produced? " have emerged as the most important discussions related to spatial theory over last two decades, having highlighted the significance of space and time as an associate entity rather than two distinct subjects. Studies of time-space relationships in several disciplines, but especially those of geography and history, have begun to emphasize the significance of both spatial and temporal dimensions in social theory, and in this respect, any conceptual framework for understanding spatial consciousness can only be constructed by exploring the relationships between social processes and spatial form. Having roots in ancient history, architecture as a discipline has always been about form, space and order, although the method of designing and producing form differs totally between the ancient and modern times. Form no more follows function, nor is it produced for a specific function. Instead, it is produced in line with the symbolic and conceptual meanings attributed to the form based on a specific social activity. Accordingly, it can be argued that each form of social activity defines its space, meaning that social space is made up of a complex network of individual feelings and images about and reactions towards the spatial symbolism that surrounds the individual. 5 Social space changes with changing social relationships, mental images and the spatial behaviours of individuals in everyday life, and is therefore complex, heterogeneous and perhaps discontinuous, but totally different from the physical space. 6 As a result, we can say that architecture is a social art, and so to understand the spatial form of a building or a city it is necessary to define the social space with reference to some social activity with the symbolic qualities of that form. Yet form is a narrative of meanings generated through explorations of programmes and uses of space, being sometimes decomposition of meanings, and at others, a re-composition of meanings driven from history at different times, like a juxtaposition of layers of a different context. The desire is not for architecture that communicates directly one meaning, but rather for material and spatial forms that produce multiple associations and ambiguous situations. 7 4 3

Branded Spaces: International Conference on Contemporary Branding, 15-16 September 2011, Karlsruhe, Germany, 2011

The Language of Architecture and the Narrative of the Architect: An Essay on Spatial Orientation and Cultural Meaning in Architecture, 2018

This essay analyzes whether architecture is a language in the sense of being capable of telling its own story, and how to assess the communicative value of the architects’ guiding story that inspired their architecture. The chapter argues that architecture’s ‘language of forms’ is like a language insofar as architecture consists of traceable but in themselves meaningless unities that are built into recognizable patterns, and insofar as it has a syntax of rules and conventions that prevent form combinations from becoming arbitrary. It is unlike a language insofar as its patterns and structure lack the semantic quality of making referential statements on the outside world. The same goes for music. The essay suggests that three basic relationships between humans and their world open up three distinctively orientated spaces: being-part, being-initiating, and being-at-a-distance. These correlate to mood space, movement space, and open space respectively. The language of architectural forms, then, appeals to the tactile-emotional, mobile-goal oriented, and visual-contemplative sensitivities of humans instead of translating narratives into architecture. The only story at the architects’ disposal is the story of their own taste and style. Architecture can do without the personal story of the architect’s taste and style but this story has the added value of making explicit what is already visible, thus functioning like the decoration that illustrates the point. The larger frameworks of reference of cultural traditions that left their mark on architecture tend to be equally or more helpful as ‘guiding stories,’ in cueing and experiencing architectural spaces as meaningful, as the ‘dry landscape garden’ of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto can exemplify.

AMPS CONFERENCE 17.1 Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World. Stevens Institute of Technology, AMPS, PARADE, Architecture_MPS. 17—19 June, 2019 Education, Design and Practice – Understanding skills in a Complex World., 2020

Architecture is faced with a crisis today: it concerns the loss of novelty and the search for a highly technological, sustainable function, though disconnected with humanity and environmental reality. Can young architects still conceive of and create spaces communicating the complexity and novelty of life? How could architecture be taught and perceived before the built work? I aim to explore how architectural education could respond to the development of a perception of what life is, within the spatial and social complexity of architecture. For this purpose, I would like to use the case study of a small village of the Cyclades; my argument is that studying big architectural drawings and maps, reading architectural descriptions of village landscapes or city areas, or applying sociological and anthropological principles to places is not enough. Only in these ways, students/young architects cannot acquire a profound understanding of what place is or how life evolves in it. Through narratives connected either with the reality of the village landscape or urban reality, I realized the value of metaphor as a natural language sharing a communal way of living connected with the natural and built environment. Consequently, metaphor, narrative and fiction are presented as tools. They offer students/young architects a broader and deeper understanding of what the world they will design for really is, and alleviate them from the preoccupation of what this world should be, as required by contemporary social and political commandments. They equip architects with a way to interpret the local tradition or urban structure into a contemporary way of living and innovation, without responding to architecture and dwelling through form and fashion – instead, they force them to tap more into the social and ethical function of architecture, a “meaningful regionalism” related with humans and the environment.

Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, 2018

This essay analyzes whether architecture is a language in the sense of being capable of telling its own story, and how to assess the communicative value of the architects’ guiding story that inspired their architecture. The chapter argues that architecture’s ‘language of forms’ is like a language insofar as architecture consists of traceable but in themselves meaningless unities that are built into recognizable patterns, and insofar as it has a syntax of rules and conventions that prevent form combinations from becoming arbitrary. It is unlike a language insofar as its patterns and structure lack the semantic quality of making referential statements on the outside world. The same goes for music. The essay suggests that three basic relationships between humans and their world open up three distinctively orientated spaces: being-part, being-initiating, and being-at-a-distance. These correlate to mood space, movement space, and open space respectively. The language of architectural forms, then, appeals to the tactile-emotional, mobile-goal oriented, and visual-contemplative sensitivities of humans instead of translating narratives into architecture. The only story at the architects’ disposal is the story of their own taste and style. Architecture can do without the personal story of the architect’s taste and style but this story has the added value of making explicit what is already visible, thus functioning like the decoration that illustrates the point. The larger frameworks of reference of cultural traditions that left their mark on architecture tend to be equally or more helpful as ‘guiding stories,’ in cueing and experiencing architectural spaces as meaningful, as the ‘dry landscape garden’ of Ryoan-ji in Kyoto can exemplify.