Construction

"As our bodies morph into cyborgs, the buildings that house them are also transforming. Increasingly, telecommunication systems replace circulation systems, and the solvent of digital information decomposes traditional building types. One by one, the familiar forms vanish. Then the residue of recombinant fragments yields up mutants."(Mitchell, chapter 4)

Modernist approaches to architecture can be described as to trying to solve problems as far as possible by means of analysis, generation of data, fulfillment of emergent objective requirement, and at the very end of all scientific methods filling up the gap to a complete building by free association. Every part of that way is a true one, every building can justify itself out of the time, the requirements and the process. No elements are borrowed from previous solutions.

This approach actively and consciously analyzes and deals with the many factors which have or could have the potential to be regarded in design. The contrary is a sort of deceiving by just producing or collaging familiar forms, which while recognizeable as buildings by everyone at the same time do not at all represent and serve the activities which occur in and around them; in an objective way this are bad solutions.

The weak part in the modern or objective approach is the part of free association. It evolved more out of an emergency situation: buildings as artifacts cannot be generated entirely out of logic. There are too many contradictory requirements, too many ambiguous requirements which can be fulfilled by not only one solution but by many. At this point the association comes in and completes the fragment to a complete artifact. It is this point when many modern buildings get into a situation of being not more understood, or can only be understood as the free expression of a single individuum, the artist.

It is here where all talking about methods, browsing, blueprint wants to come to: being measures to improve free association in architectural work to some kind of a common association, or common sense association, and to make possible an active construction of contemporary criteria for architecture and an active construction of solutions.


Other Chapters:

1 Venice I
2 Venice II
3 Venice III
4 Browsing
5 Blueprint
7 Bigness
8 Lille
9 Literature

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