Visionary Architecture
People need shelter, whether it a cave or a tent, a mobile home or a spaceship. Not having a roof over one’s head is a terrible thing, as the sight of streams of homeless refugees crossing our television screens every night brings home to us. This explains why architecture is one of the oldest and most important arts devised by humanity. And even its mythical originator, Daedalus, was a visionary architect, not only building the Cretan labyrinth but envisioning flying machines to escape the embroilments of this earthly life. His art became a program for his successors. When architects cannot build, or are prevented from doing so for whatever reason, they concoct architectural fantasies or write manifestos. A demiurgic ambition to reshape the world in accordance to their ideas has characterized architects since time began. Their activity combines a free play of imagination with a desire for order and meaning, spontaneity with a love of experiment and a scientific testing of new materials, forms, and functions.
Architecture is generally distinguished from its visionary, utopian, or fantastic cousin, the ideal city, science-fiction projection, or urban utopia, by drawing a sharp line between reality and fiction. According to this definition, what is actually built cannot be visionary. The distinction, I believe, is obsolete. By now, almost everyone will have realized that human imagination contributes materially to the construct or image of reality that we hold in our minds, and hence, that is no longer possible to draw a clear distinction between imagination and reality. Living in a period in which borderlines are being transgressed in every field, we should be prepared to question accepted aesthetic categories as well, to rethink them in terms of process, and to define them flexibly. In situations of political, economic, or cultural crisis, visionary thinking is especially important, because it enables us to challenge hidebound conventions and to open a path for innovative approaches and solutions.
Visions of even the most daring kind have at times been given real shape. If in the past these were usually castles or palaces, in the modern era they often take the form of theatres or museums, research institutes or skyscrapers. Or they have been the private aesthetic dreams of compulsive outsiders like Ferdinand Cheval, or of experimental creators of a ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ like the Austrian architect Gunther Domenig. Frequently, political, economic, or personal difficulties prevent the execution of some carefully planned project, which is then relegated to the realm of fantasy. In this case, we speak of an ‘architectural vision’ rather than of ‘visionary architecture’.
This is all that I understood from what Visionary Architecture is all about and there's just something missing; specification of style and era; which I have yet to comprehend.
All for Architecture History 2
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment