Biennale Architecture
Out There: Architecture Beyond Building
by Aaron Betsky
The 11th Architecture Biennale, entitled Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, points out what should be an obvious fact: architecture is not building. Buildings are objects and the act of building leads to such objects, but architecture is something else. It is the way we think and talk about buildings, how we represent them, how we build them. This is architecture. More generally, architecture is a way of representing, shaping and perhaps even offering critical alternatives to the human-made environment. In this world it is not enough to keep the rain out, create room for office cubicles, or fit into a context that either changes continually or becomes artificially frozen.
In fact, buildings are not enough. They are the tombs of architecture, the residue of the desire to make another world, a better world, and a world open to possibilities beyond the everyday. In a concrete sense, architecture is that which allows us to be at home in the world. That could mean producing homes, offices or other places where we live, work, gather or recreate. However, the production of such buildings has become so defined by codes –financial codes, building codes, life and safety codes, computer codes, codes of appearance and behaviour– that architecture has very little to do with the way they finally appear.
In isolated situations, such as when a rich person wants a house or a museum wants a cultural artfact, we can find instances of architecture that sensually and sensibly shapes our environment in such a way that it allows us know where we are.
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At the same time, fabulous spaces are possible. We can see them in film and in art, where visions of other places unfold in front of our eyes. We can inhabit them in the highly defined spaces that cocoon around us, whether they are the private interior or in hotel rooms, or in the clubs, the restaurants and the boutiques that have become our gathering spaces. We can watch them grow around us in the carefully planned landscapes that have become our last true public spaces.
These images and spaces are worth looking at not just because they are beautiful, but because we are confronting design challenges for which buildings are not enough. How are we going to figure out how to do sprawl right, for instance? If our cities are bleeding out into concatenations of human dwellings that reach across the landscape without any concern for either the environment or social coherence, how can we create an architecture that uses the landscape wisely, frames a relationship to that world and to each other, allows us to be at home and connects us to a larger social, economic and physical fabric? How can we be at home at all in a world in which the continual movement of goods, people and information continually erodes all sense of permanence from any place? How can we construct a physical order that can become a stage on which we can live our lives in concert with others if the constructions that allow us live and play our roles are increasingly invisible results of communications and computer technologies?
Maybe we need to see architecture first of all as way of figuring out what we need to build –and what to unbuild. How can we make spaces that make sense and are sensual? Can we construct literal stages or notional moments of coherence? Can we reveal, appropriate and domesticate those forces, usually of a technological nature, that control our daily lives in such a way that we can feel at home in our modern world?
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