The Immeasurable
This week’s readings have brought me to one of my all-time favorite, albeit, a little cheesy, architecture quotes.
“A great building, in my opinion, must begin with the unmeasurable, go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must, again, be unmeasurable.” – Louis Kahn
If only we could dive into the hearts of the people and invest ourselves entirely to their innermost sincerities… then … maybe then…. We can perform a worthwhile architecture! That was my Giancarlo impersonation… (this, in the spirit of me, should be considered a lighthearted and admittedly embellished satire, ok) The bottom line, for me, is that we (as students, as architects, as ANYBODY) don’t truly understand space. If we did there wouldn’t always be arguments and new manifestos and Gehry calling everything crap. We need to all admit that now. Personally, I find that truth to be the most exciting part about this profession, there’s no rules and equations for success. There are ‘unmeasurable’ qualities to what we call architecture that make or break it, period. We can plan the perfect park, detailed to the tee, and we show up a year after construction and it’s filled with nothing but meth-heads and anarchists preaching to no one. We don’t KNOW. We ain’t got the answers, Sway. Back to Giancarlo, I would have to agree that understanding and investing into the study of society, culture, and politics, the ‘why’, is a critical part of successful architecture. Should we choose to operate in a vacuum, at least in the venture of ‘public’ architecture, it should be considered our duty to investigate the existing realities to a degree. Now … for the attack on capitalism … utopia is dead! It’s an illusion, at least on this earth. However, architecturally speaking, this shouldn’t mean that we can’t operate at a high level, but it also doesn’t mean that we should assume a role that includes social savior. I, myself, intend on pursuing architecture as a means to inform this world. Not everything will be a success, not everything will be even good, but hopefully I can find moments to covertly insert the ‘immeasurable’.
What intrigued me right away about your post was the quote at the beginning and your first image of the rendering of a project, then the actual execution. There is a vast gap between the ideal rendering and the actual building on the right. Trying to find the balance between the measurable and unmeasurable is difficult, but part of what makes this profession so enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteI think your last sentence is what keeps this thought from being really depressing, we always will need to stay realistic, but the hope that we can insert the immeasurable into the world every now and then is key.
ReplyDeleteHow do we design for the adaptation of the human special preferences? How Sway? You ain't got the education!!! Our education teaches us how to design with a purpose, a specific need or want of client that has every intention of that said design to successfully create the desired idea. In society now, I don't believe that those ideas or intentions are always met, especially in public spaces. How people interact with a space is completely up to the people. People adapt spaces to their needs and use them how they see fit, that's what makes architecture unique in its study and implementations.
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