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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.
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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.
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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.
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