Non-tactil experience

At what point can architecture exist only as an image?  If a building can only be experienced from afar, such as a skyscraper, then how is it different from the picture of a building? How is the photo, the movie, post card of a building any different from a real or actual building? Is it the empathized act of experience that we relate to (we can't be there but can imagine ourselves there), or it's physicality of location?  As in all art how much of it's acceptance depend on it's authenticity?

Anti-government ideologies, the Shrinking Middle Class and the Death of Architecture: Part II

Architecture is a public act (we can get into this later) and key to it's enjoyment, its definition, is its ability to embody the human condition  One of the main differences, for example, between mere building and Architecture is its ability to mean something to the community which experiences it.  The richer that connection - the stronger its beginning , as the ancient Greeks would say, the more significant the physical material becomes.

The physical mass however, isn't simply a means to an end, a corporal mass that because transcended during the some mystical act of "architectural transmigration" where suddenly bricks become meaning. The physical parts of Architecture's essential characteristics, its phsyical construction never leave it and in fact enabling its ability to mean. 

It is both of these essential qualities of Architecture that are threatened by anti-government attitudes, the individualism which replaces it and the diminished middle class.

Anti-government ideologies, the Shrinking Middle Class and the Death of Architecture: Part I

The coupling of anti-government and pro-business ideologies of the American right are leading to qualitative change in the nature of American Architecture.

The reasons for American anti-government sentiments are many; the roots even older than the idea of America itself.  The firs seeds were sown with idea of discovery, of beginnings that the new continent, the "new world" embodied. Far away from Europe, the Americas were separate, special and, if not free from autocratic rule, had to at least go-it-alone for long periods of time.  Government was far away and not tangible.  Second, like the Pilgrims, many of the first colonists who came settled specifically because of religious freedom, using America as a place of refuge from governmental persecution. Many also settled for economic freedom because Europe also lacked economic freedom. Next with the revolution, those social sentiments became manifest in a revolt against government (government, at least as the world at that time knew it).  Replaced with a quasi Anti-government, anti Autocratic, form of government, democracy, each citizen (at least in theory) being of equal voice controlling their local community. After independence, the idea of one larger government again was tested.  However, the idea of a federal, centrally localized government was still very much in doubt and hotly contested with the presidency switching from one camp to the other (only ending with Lincoln). Much to Jefferson's dismay, slowly, but eventually Hamilton and the Federalist's ideas of a Federal community held the majority. All the while, however, the Southern politics of class and regionalism fired the  anti-government furnace by continuing to use the ideas of the revolution as a vehicle to argue and perpetuate oligarchical power.

Signs and Meaning in Architecture

In order for a "Mere Building" to become Architecture, must it mean something? How much does the generic office tower mean, which even at its worst, most would still consider it Architecture, albeit BAD Architecture. In the end what does the Sigrum's building really mean to the non-architect?  Does a building's size, or use, or cost automatically make it architecture? Does the purpose of its construction, does its builder's intent affect how we view it?  To broaden our investigation further, what distinquishes the questions of Architecture from that of other art?

Hegel and the Architectural Present

Is there a hegelian Spirit of an Age? Does the concept of Kunstgeschichte or that ideas belong to their time due to some common rational ( determanistic?) movement have merit or is some other force at work?

The notion that ideas (and by extension works of art) are products of a specific time and cultural need, or force is attractive because it allows us to give them rational justifcation and order. Artworks are "products" of the ideas and currents of an age is simply the extension of the self as creator to the scale of the society. But in all actuality there could be no egocentric order to it. As much as the we would like to find the common thread and predictability or at least "road map" to why a culture acted and created in a certain that was to some dgree controlled by us, it may be a projection of man's desire to find order in it. The abstraction of order projected upon the world around us, is fundamental to the human condition. From man's first attempt at demarcating space, to the development of religion, science and philosophy, the application of the abstraction of order has followed man's metaphysical need to understand his place in the universe. Anywhere there is a complexity of ideas, current events, biology, news, human psychology etc there is an organizing superstructure of order- even if that order may not fit neatly into the categories in which we want to place them.

However could the organzing principals themselves determine the outcome? Could it be that ideas are determined by pure coincident, morphological process (such as with languages) or event based causality and not some rational abstraction? Could Hegel's concept of history really be a response to the rational determinism of the 17th century?

Form

Historically, Architecture has been described, and by extension defined, by its meaningful form. A temple was recognizable as a "temple" both by its superficial form and the physical experience of its spaces. The design of a building's edifice, color, form, site, urban context, materiality, plan and spaces etc. were all deliberate attempts by the architect to communicate meaning to its users and the larger community in which it interacted.

Modernism has freed Architecture from the Ideology of Style. In doing so it has allowed contemporary culture to represent itself more specifically through uniquely expressive and diverse forms. But without a common typological or ornamental stylistic vocabulary, contemporary architects are reduced to using materiality, iconography and more fundamental formal-spatial gestures to invest meaning within buildings. However, this reliance of an underlying form takes more planning, skill and effort to use successfully than the historic formulaic decoration that quasi projected socio-functional type of "house", "bank", "office", "apartment building", etc, or the cultural function "threshold", "base", "ceiling", "roof", "etc". Contemporary Architects must now develop these on a per project, situational basis.

When combined with the current methods of Architectural production (design through construction) the resulting buildings have become progressively less meaningful. Consequently, I would argue that contemporary Architecture is at once both more rich and less "architectural" than buildings of earlier eras.

The Unnecessary

Architecture is messy. It is the turbulent balance of the useful and useless.