Landscapes of architectural education -architecture, knowledge and existential wisdom

The very essence of learning also in any creative field is embedded more in the student’s sense of self and his/her image of the world than in information and facts. The promoters of a professionalist education seem to entirely dismiss this essential mental and existential perspective. This area of learning can appropriately be called personal growth. Education and learning in any creative field has to aim at the student’s individual and unique self, and the content of education is bound to be more existential than factual, related more with experiences and values than information. The essence of learning is the gradual construction of an inner sense of goal, responsibility, ethical stance, and a combined sense of humility and pride. In my view, this polar attitude is most difficult to acquire. Paradoxically, the essence of learning is essentially “un-learning”, or forgetting the learned facts. One must be able to forget them when they are many and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again.Peer Reviewe

L’architettura degli animali

Le costruzioni animali sono di solito viste come prodotti affascinanti del mondo biologico, ma umanamente privi di significato. Tuttavia, i nidi animali, i dispositivi di cattura e altre costruzioni sono così vari e ingegnosi nel loro uso di materiali, forme, principi e tecniche di costruzione, e così superbi nelle loro prestazioni funzionali, che superano le qualità delle costruzioni umane. Le costruzioni animali sono il prodotto di milioni di anni di evoluzione e adattamento, e questi processi comprendono anche una scelta estetica deliberata. Nell’attuale era di crisi ecologica possiamo sicuramente imparare modi sostenibili di costruire dagli architetti animali

From Frame to Framing

A constructivist aesthetic, emphasizing clear articulation of the structural frame, became the architectural ideal for young Finnish architects of my generation in the early 1960s. This architecture developed as an intellectual opposition to the prevailing post-war tradition of neo-functionalist architecture, which had turned excessively pragmatic and unclear in its philosophical foundation

Funcionalisme ecològic de l'arquitectura animal

Peer Reviewe

The Space of Time

We do not live in an objective material world. We live in mental worlds in which the experienced, remembered and dreamed, as well as the present, past and future, constantly fuse into one another. We transform time and space through imagination and dreaming, into the specific human mode of existence—the world of possibilities

Context and Continuity - Universal Versus Situational in Architecture

In Poetics of Music, Igor Stravinsky, the arch-modernist of music - whom one would expect to have fought for the cause of liberating music from its classical rules - surprisingly reveals a suspicion of modernity and a deep reverence for tradition

Architecture as Experience: The Fusion of the World and the Self

The complex phenomenon of architecture consists of too many irreconcilable and conflicting categories of thought, intention, emotion, interaction and action to be condensed into the framework of a single theory of architecture. Besides, art and architecture are constituted in their mental encounter and experience instead of the material works themselves. Works of architecture and art are encountered and lived rather than understood intellectually. Architecture is commonly understood, taught, practiced and evaluated primarily as a visual art form. However, we encounter buildings and environments through our entire sense of being. Perceptions interact with memory and imagination to constitute an experience with meaning and temporal duration. Art and architecture are essentially relational phenomena as they express our being in the world instead of themselves or their authors. The interest in architecture as experience also directs our attention to such diffuse and neglected experiences as atmospheres, ambiences, feelings, moods and attunements

Point of Arrival: Cranbrook Educational Community

The proposed arrival plaza, Point of Arrival, creates a visual and symbolic termination for the new entrance road to the center of the Cranbrook Educational Community. The concept integrates aspects of landscape architecture, sculpture, architectural design and a scientific instrument

Space, place and atmosphere. Emotion and peripherical perception in architectural experience

Architectural experiences are essentially multi-sensory and simultaneous, and a complex entity is usually grasped as an atmosphere, ambience or feeling. In fact, the judgement concerning the character of a space or place calls for categories of sensing that extend beyond the five Aristotelian senses, such as the embodied existential sense, and, as a result, the entity is perceived in a diffuse, peripheral and unconscious manner. Paradoxically, we grasp an atmosphere before we have consciously identified its constituent factors and ingredients. «We perceive atmospheres through our emotional sensibility – a form of perception that works incredibly quickly, and which we humans evidently need to help us survive», Peter Zumthor suggests. We are mentally and emotionally affected by works of art before we understand them, or we may not understand them intellectually at all. Sensitive artists and architects intuit experiential and emotive qualities of spaces, places and images. This capacity calls for a specific kind of imagination, an emphatic imagination. Atmospheres are percieved peripherally through diffuse vision interacting with other sense modalities, and they are experienced emotionally rather than intellectually. The studies on the differentiation of the two brain hemispheres suggest that atmospheres are perceived through the right hemisphere. Somewhat surprisingly, atmospheres are more conscious objectives in literature, cinema, theater, painting and music than in architecture, which has been traditionally approached formally and perceived primarily through focused vision. Yet, when we see a thing in focus, we are outsiders to it, whereas the experience of being in a space calls for peripheral and unfocused perception. One of the reasons for the experiential poverty of contemporary settings could be in the poverty of their peripheral stimuli

Eroticism of Space

The erotic dimension of architecture has been the subject of literary and scholarly studies since Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), an illustrated amalgamation of a dream-like love poem and a treatise of the secrets of ancient architecture, attributed to the Franciscan friar Francesco Colonna (1433-1527)