Moving with purpose
Aristotle wrote that everything has four causes–its maker, material, form, and purpose (sic). His example of this was a statue of Pericles–the four causes were then the sculptor, the bronze, the idea of Pericles, and to honor Pericles.
My complaint against the critical method of architecture, which relies on form for form's sake, is that we end up with an architecture which seems incomplete and without meaning. I think the melodramatic overacting we see in that perspective is an attempt to make the form compensate for a purposelessness.
Architecture from a critical perspective yips like a chihuahua–it's loud because it knows it has little weight. A bigger dog doesn't need to bark, and rarely does. It commands respect without needing a bark.
Critical architecture is like Jack Nicholson's Joker (from Batman)–he's all about the show, but ultimately much less scary than Heath Ledger's Joker. Heath Ledger's Joker barely speaks, but we hang on his every word.
You get the idea
Projective architecture, on the other hand, is complete.
Can projective architecture bring substance back into our architectural diets, forcing junkspace to retreat?
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ReplyDeleteI believe your analogy of critical architecture as a chihuahua is misguided. Critical architecture does not yip or seek out attention. In fact, by existing outside of social context and seeking only to improve its own rules of form and constructibility, it lives more like a monk, private, introspective, and outside of daily life. We do not have to agree with its beliefs or methods, but we can learn quite a bit from its dedication to its self-critique. If either of these two types of architecture is the loud, yipping dog, it is projective architecture. It touts its simple idea and how "cool" it is. BIG is guilty of doing this in many of their works and as a result have become part of pop-culture architecture.
ReplyDeleteI would flip flop the jokers too, Ledger is far more complex and calculated while Nicholson is purely id - irrational and attention seeking.