What is Architecture?
The building on the left is the seminal modernism architecture, Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier. On the right is an ordinary French mansion. What makes Villa Savoye a seminal work and not the mansion?
You may believe in an esoteric nature of the “form creation.” If so, then both of the below buildings should be considered as equally valuable. However, the one on the right -Abbots Way House by e-architects- rarely gets an attention. The truth is, this particular style is old; even Villa Savoye looks old today. It is valuable only because it represents an ideology or ways of seeing which lasted for a while in the contemporary history.
Wes Jones explains that “architecture distinguishes itself from building by the degree and character of the thought given to it during design,” but who is to say which degree and character of the thought should be more appreciated? Le Corbusier might have spent days thinking about the ideal machine for living, but equal amount of thought -perhaps related more directly to the occupants’ daily lives- might have been placed in the design of the French mansion. Allegedly, the important question is not the quantity of time spent on the thought. The “degree and character of the thought” is something more profound; or is it? There seems to be no reason why machine for living should be respected more than the immediate needs of daily lives.
As Peter Wyeth argues in The Matter of Vision that our sensitivities to how things appear is mostly, if not all, influenced by how we want to produce our self-images. For this reason, architecture always have to stay away from the banality of “daily-lives.” In order for the discipline to substantiate its worth, architecture is destined to continuously invent something different and new. Architecture, therefore, is a REFLECTION of how we want to be seen, today. It does not project the future (it may project the ideas of the future), nor does it recreate the past. It does not somehow lead humanity to the right direction either. It is nothing more than what people want to add in their bags of self-images.
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