Martin Pot: Architecture: place, atmosphere and agency.
Architecture: place, atmosphere and agency. “What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture’” Manfredo Tafuri, Our living world, or more precise our immediate environment is a – sometimes unintended – composition of natural and artificial materials and active connections; the artificial often defined […]
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Architecture: place, atmosphere and agency.
“What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture’” Manfredo Tafuri,
Our living world, or more precise our immediate environment is a – sometimes unintended – composition of natural and artificial materials and active connections; the artificial often defined as ‘architecture’ where at the same time it is often confused with ‘building’. The latter is static, the first is not. Both organize and shape space; space however does not exist within itself, it is the individual human who experiences space. At the same time the level of agency and interaction with this space is limited – sometimes even restricted – while increasing technology serves primarily the built environment as such, not the one who uses or experiences. Consequence is that we encounter problematic situations where this unilateral ‘agency’ meets users that experience the absence of a sense of (spatial) privacy or the option to protect one’s identity.
Architecture does not imply building per se.; the following text starts to define ‘architecture’ as the adaptation of space to human needs; i.e. the ways and means to modify and design our immediate – artificial/built – environment. Or, as phrased by Peter Sloterdijk: “Architecture of modernity is the medium in which the explanation of human habitation in man-made interiors is expressed in a processual manner” .(trans.mp) For now; note the term ‘processual’.
For a small number of years now the discussion on the basics of architecture – in particular its limits and periphery – seem to intensify in a broader direction, incorporating some involved disciplines that have not been subject for discussion in this before. Increasingly it seems acknowledged that not only architecture shapes our environment; it should incorporate the developing digital/analogue technologies and changing social frameworks. This is all the more significant since this touches on societal – or maybe primarily philosophical – issues, in particular focused on our dwelling that for the last decades have caused confusion where it meets the role/ position of the architect. Only recently several scholars in the Netherlands referred to this dilemma by signaling two ‘visions’ at Dutch Universities of Architecture; one that emphasizes the social questions where the other focuses on the more fundamental disciplinary issues. Should we qualify architecture as the adaptation of space to human needs both ‘visions’ may hardly be considered a contradiction.
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