Towards a Humble Architecture: Ambiguity, Inevitability, and the Search for a Unified Form
Onen, Isben
Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, TU Wien, Austria
Abstract:
Despite its omnipotent presence the architectural artifact is a vulnerable whole. Composed of overlapping ideas and a complex material language it is open to interpretation and interference. Everything is also something else in the sense that a load-bearing wall is also an idea-bearing member of an intricate structure. The tension of this blurredness The blurred tension within creative act marks a point of no return: “Two regions become blurred and there is a river near a river and two volcanoes grow together.” Following Neruda’s verse, there is tension when the immaterial confronts the material, when structure is now near construction, and—remembering Kahn—form and design grow together. This threshold is the driving force of the architectural object. As a mediator of tensions, form belongs to the spatial realm as it does to the material. But form must be freed from all stylistic attributions and material dictations so that it may gain a structural standpoint that also belongs to the realm of the idea. To study form, in the manner of an abstract medium like music, in which it is settled under idea, and incorporating its ephemeral qualities to the spatial realm could lead to a reconsideration of architectural form. Thus, form can manifest a timelessness, a transcendantal and non-temporal quality, and, yet, a traceability.
Such an effort would make it possible to understand the ambiguity and inevitability of creative act and trace the lifespan of a unified form. Having its abstract and material connotations unified, a new understanding of form would lead to a new appraisal of architecture as “humble.” At a time when technology has enabled highly extravagant and exaggerated tangible forms, architecture would escape the fallacies of formalism and would become, in Tzonis's words, "non-opporessive" and humane.
Keywords: Form, Idea, Order, Music, Humbleness.