December 2009 Archives

Architectural Manifesto

Designing with Time. 

'There are two ways to build. One way is to strive for absolute perfection and then wage a desperate and invariably losing battle to preserve it. The other is to accept that perfection is not just unattainable but also unnecessary, thereby making time's passage an ally instead of an enemy' - Arrol Gellner 

Architecture is not a static object. - A building over its life occupies more than a topography, it occupies a timeography, a period over time in which it is affected by forces which change it. Once an architecture is born (built) it begins its life in its perfect state then begins to change due to the forces acting on it. The inevitability of change is a reality that architects rarely embrace on the design table. Change in buildings usually takes the form of decay - where the original design state degrades and no longer resembles its intent.  Decay is a term which describes change that is either unanticipated or was not embraced as a future model of existence for the building. Buildings are built for the present. They are designed to be and to look, as they do the day they are "born".  A building designed only for the present - is not designed for a real context - but a fictional one.  (le corbusiers  building and how it looked after time-oliver).

Few buildings today embrace change, anticipating the forces that will act upon it and using these to evolve the building aesthetically or formally-through design. A building of this kind is never finished, it navigates between different states of being. It matures, it changes, but it does not decay.

Cities are, even more so, agents of time. A city is never static - it is constantly evolving, growing, regenerating itself. I reject any notion of a city that is designed as an artifact, rather than a system for inevitable growth or adaptation.  The design of a city should therefore be more of a choreography, an orchestration of change, not a final vision in-the-making. 

In our current context, change is becoming increasingly noticeable. The acceleration of technology, the rapid expansion of cities, the diminishing timescales of style in fashion, music, and even architecture which were once transforming over centuries, are transforming our surroundings and our lifestyles in decades - to a degree noticeable several times over within our lifetimes. 

Perhaps human beings are not very good at thinking along long timescales. The general attitudes toward oil consumption and surmounting evidence on global warming and its effects are good examples of an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude toward the future. I propose that we as designers reconsider the way we view design - understanding it in the fourth dimensional context in which it exists, and examine a possibility for architecture far deeper and richer in its experience than the sum total of a rendering can offer. 

--- i think i've distilled my interest into this one topic which can help simplify my project to a focus (and away from meaning through architecture and my interpretations of civilization being at the foreground) This single theme ties both the crawling city and the archive together to a single interest or investigation and sets up the reasoning for why to choose an post-civilization archive as a program precisely as a program which both organizes (programmatically) and is precisely intended for changes over time and long timescale thinking about architecture. I will steer the project more in this direction.