Earlier in this course, we were introduced to the concept of an autonomous architecture through the methods and ideology of the Italian Tendenza. The concept was vague to me, but intriguing. I really did not know how an autonomous architecture would work or why a person would want to remove the historical context. In the essay, “From Deep Structure to an Architecture in Suspense: Peter Eisenmann, Structuralism, and Deconstruction,” by Patin, I was able to get a better grasp on why (or at least, how) an architect would remove his architecture from himself and the societal context imposed upon his architecture.
I will play the polemic and say that the act of removing any need for human response and context reminds me of the quickening changes in architecture and technology. We move ourselves further and further away from the need to respond or interact on a one-to-one basis. Some students spend the first two years developing a niche and continually manipulate, distort and violate whatever initial truth was in that personal discovery. In a respect, we spend our studios in search of our own House 1, 2, etc. The process is a similar process. We create from what we cast away as often as we are create from what we cleave to in architecture. I suspect the same is true for practicing architects. I’m not sure there is an art or beauty in that and I’m not sure there needs to be.
A self-described cynic and someone we’ll probably discuss in our workshop on star-architects, REM Koolhaus said in an interview for Wired Magazine that:
“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming.”
Perhaps what we see today- this act of withdrawal- is less about architecture and more about human expression. Despite the movement toward removing the individual- maybe what we infused was the human aspect and what we removed was architecture.
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