Phenomenology of Regionalism?
"In this way, Critical Regionalism seeks to complement our normative visual experience by readdressing the tactile range of human perceptions. In so doing, it endeavors to balance the priority accorded to the image and to counter the western tendency to interpret the environment in exclusively perspectival terms."
- Kenneth Frampton
As I was wrestling to wrap my head around Critical Regionalism, this quote from Frampton really stuck out to me. I feel like regionalism is pushing users back towards a wholistic phenomenological experience instead of fixating on formal architecture pornography. I thought of the Blur Building by Diller Scofidio and how the space completely removes access to the visual sense and forces the user to engage other senses. Their website notes:
"There is only an optical “white-out” and the “white-noise” of pulsing nozzles. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for visual fidelity in high-definition with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition. In this exposition pavilion there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself. It is an experiment in de-emphasis on an environmental scale. Movement within is unregulated."
I feel this example might epitomize the topic?
I'm always compelled by concepts of phenomenology. Its hard to argue against the user experience being the most pivotal part of architecture. In context to critical regionalism, it seems to me that a place is an experience and should emote those feelings of participating in your locality. The most interesting part of architecture to me is the curiosity to explore materials and ideas within a set of parameters. This is what critical regionalism is to me, a set of rational parameters as a base point for what architecture can be. A foundation for exploration towards outcomes of place, user, economy and environment.
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