The new envelopes are integrally tied to contemporary digital design technologies and specific kinds of software that coordinate and synthesize multiple parameters and all sorts of data into a smooth, frictionless flow. — K. Michael Hays
The history of architecture has been dominated by envelope-driven design. For at least the first 2,000 years it was the correct design of the façade that occupied the Western architect. In the first half of the twentieth century there was a very short period of time when modern architecture shifted the design emphasis to form, rather than surface. After less than 50 years of modern architecture, post-modern architects returned the attention back to the envelope. It was the envelope that was to reveal the meaning of the building. Since then, the new digital architecture has taken the design of the building envelope much further. The emphasis has now shifted to the technology of the skin. High-performance metal and glass skins have replaced the modern and post-modern rectilinear curtain walls hung on Euclidean structural grids. Walls and roof can now form a continuous blobular or folded envelope. The contemporary envelope is considered to be the most important component of a sustainable, environmentally sensitive, building.
Lord Norman Foster’s Swiss Re building (2004) demonstrates the process of allowing the design of the building envelope to determine the form of the building (Figure 53). Unfortunately, it is the most expensive building in London, based upon its recent sale.
Architecture is increasingly becoming lifelike. As the investigation of biomimicry continues, reactive skins may become common. It is a much more sophisticated version of opening a window when the weather is nice.
See also: Biomimicry • Digital
materiality • Facadism • Post-
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Eroticism
Eroticism is not the excess of pleasure, but the pleasure of excess. — Bernard Tschumi
Architecture is the ultimate erotic object, because an architectural act, brought to the level of excess, is the only way to reveal both the traces of history and its own immediate experiential truth. Neither space nor concepts are erotic, but the junction between the two is.
— Bernard Tschumi
Eroticism today is not necessarily linked to explicit forms portraying the sexual attributes of the body or to the representation of erotic acts: eroticism in architecture, as in art and music, is a subliminal, sensual message engendered by the wish to create spaces that interact with human bodies and their senses. It can be communicated by the use of soft organic shapes that are not directly associable with the body but suggest a fluidity of forms similar to that of the body, or by assonances or dissonances between the interior, the exterior, and the arrangement of various features, by apparent contrasts which stimulate our sense of perception to provoke a shiver in us and envelop us, making us feel an active part of the space in which we move.
The main characteristic of eroticism is to arouse desire and attraction, so in buildings and spaces eroticism is expressed by the capacity for attraction and fascination that they are able to provoke, by the desire for both visual and physical penetration that is awakened in people. The tension between transparency and mass, between voids and volumes, the intensity of light and shade, the altering of surfaces caused by the incidence of light or by the passage of people, the capability for transformation and “movement” that a building can express through the use of sensitive materials or changing surfaces: all this gives erotic characteristics to spaces and volumes. Also the relationship with the surroundings is a factor contributing to the eroticism of a building or space and to its “emotional intensity,” whether based on strong contrasts or on a more minimal and enveloping inclusion that becomes evident in a less obvious manner but is none the less communicative. AO
See also: Allusionism • Architectural psychology • Fetishization • Morphogenetic
design • Phallocentrism •Psychological needs • Soft architecture
Further sources: Tschumi (in Ballantyne 2002: 44); Tschumi (1994: 70, 89)
Essentialism
The metaphysical view that in reality there exists not only individual objects, but also essences. — Donald Palmer
Essentialism is a belief in the priority of essences. An essence would be something like a Platonic Form – a definition, a formula, and a set of characteristics that stabilizes objects in the world. The essence of humans is that which they all have in common, “humanity.”
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Essence is part of the Platonic schema that describes reality as existing at two levels, the “particular” and the “idea.” It has been a part of the architectural tradition of all but the brief period of deconstructivism, when all previous constructs about essences were abandoned. Essences were seen as fictions, arbitrarily invented by man and not the product of a divine hand. The new paradigm was to be a new start for architecture, free of any encumbrances from the past. The deconstruction of essentialism posed a dilemma for the designer, as all traditions were forsaken, leaving a vacuum – a tabula rasa. Gone were the primacy of Euclidean geometry, aesthetic norms, contextualism, concern for constructability, and even structural limitations. The architect could no longer rely on an innate understanding of the essence of the thing to be designed, its essentialism. What emerged was mostly an orgy of personal mannerist forms, presented in illegible superimposed graphics. Little deconstructivist architecture was actually built. The critics and the architectural media eagerly received the few buildings that were constructed. They made good copy.
Once the novelty wore off, the way was clear for recognition of a new architectural essence. Essentialism returned in the form of critical theory. Outdated constructs regarding platonic form, purism, and the pre- eminence of the functional imperative, were replaced by an understanding of the universal condition of humanity and its interdependence with the natural world and Gaia, or our earth essence. Twenty-first-century architecture contains the promise of becoming more inclusive, less preoccupied with itself, and more interested in the larger role it plays in the community of man and her earth.
… how to make architecture that … would refuse to acknowledge the stability of the concept of architecture which is buttressed by a grounding metaphysics of essentiality and which in turn allows for the appearance of the timeless self-evidence of architecture’s “essential” features. — David Goldblatt
See also: Critical theory • Deconstructivism (Archispeak) • Gaia architecture •
Green design (Archispeak) • Tabula rasa
Further sources: Goldblatt (in Ballantyne 2002: 159); Palmer (1997: 143)
Ethics
An architect must choose between fortune and virtue. — Leon Battista Alberti
Contemporary architecture’s main task is to interpret a way of life valid for our time. — Sigfried Gideon
The discussion regarding ethics in architecture can occur at two levels. The first comes under the label “professional ethics.” It is concerned with the behavior of the architect. The second aspect of ethics in architecture is more philosophical. It asks the question “What is the appropriate role of architecture in society?” This aspect of architectural ethics is much more difficult to pin down.
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