Architecture and urban design - to paraphrase Leon Krier - is the materially and intellectually permanent interpretation of Culture. Architecture reflects culture, but also creates it, due exactly to this material permanence. Sometimes the ambiguous nature of non-verbal communication is the reason why a building or an urban fragment absorbs and disseminates other than the original cultural intentions and becomes the site of different human events.
Since
we know that architecture is positioned in the 'grey zone', between
applied science and applied art, we have to promote discipline and intellectual
rigor, as inevitable prerequisites of creation in both fields, even
if we equate to or prioritise poetic truth over scientific reality.
Dr. Thomas Kuhn, in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions', defines paradigms as 'some accepted examples of actual scientific practice, which include laws, theory, application and instrumentalization. They should be sufficiently unprecedented and sufficiently open-ended.' Architecture as a discipline seems to contain these two characteristics, since most of our building is supposed to be 'sufficiently unprecedented' and the design process must be 'sufficiently open-ended'. Dr Kuhn obviously failed to mentioned architecture among the sciences, but had he done so, he would have categorized our field as one in the 'pre-paradigm' stage - like psychology in its early days, when Dr. Sigmund Freud and Dr. Karl Jung established their respective theories based upon detailed analysis of self-observation. Accordingly, these observations were descriptive, interpretive, but not yet normative.
This non-normative status of our discipline will hopefully prevail, since the undefinable and unmeasurable aspects of our built environment are the ones which elicit wonderment and awe, while the quantifiable is anticipated and only noticed in its absence or incorrect presence (such as the wrong size or temperature). We might not be far from the truth if we use exactly the absence or presence of the unmeasurable, as a distinctive qualifier between building and architecture.
It is difficult to imagine any school of architecture in the world which would not aspire to go beyond the perfection and comfort of a building, to attain the ability to produce architecture - to reflect and invent the best of the present and weigh its presence in the future. The 'present', however, seems to be an extremely illusory concept, transmuting itself as we speak into 'past'. So the comprehensive and operative application of the values of the past is called upon to assist in the invention of the future. Furthermore, we have to obtain the competent ability to include the measurable requirements into the newly modified environment, but transcend and coagulate them to the intangible magic of architecture.
Author
Dr. Peter Magyar
Director and Professor
Florida Atlantic University School of Architecture
