It is not uncommon today for an architect to give a public lecture about a building and gloss over the parameters of its program or the specific needs of its users, speaking instead mostly about the building's site — its measure, tendencies, desires, structure, mythologies, meaning — as if the problem of architectural design was primarily one of site response. — Design Observer
Is there such thing as a building that is "sensitive" to landscape, or are they all various forms of aggression?
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Construction is violence, be the building architecture or not.
"architecture, we forget at our peril, is inherently violent. it invariably subtracts from the range of available possibilities, especially the perennially attractive option of building nothing at all. in this sense, construction sites are crime scenes. memories, landscapes, slices of sky, beloved vistas and old neighborhoods are violated even when buildings of distinction take their place. perhaps the most architecture can do is convert aggression into desire, its primitive twin. beauty is an effect of this emotional transmutation." - herbert muschamp
[he took a lot of criticism for his loftiness, but i miss muschamp.]
this line
"Landscape is good; building is landscape; therefore building is good. One hears this three-car train of logic constantly in architectural discourse today. "
leads me to wonder whether this line of logic is related in any manner to the rise of the ecological as a concern (or at least symbol) within modern architecture. Sounds like another version of the complaint re: greenwashing or slapping green fixture/features on a building to not have to defend it. A sort of preemptive strike it's green, it's shaped by site etc...
Or does it go back further and relate more to the long-time (at various points in the discourse) to the privileging of context as source of design inspiration, over some other?
thats a great quote by Muschamp, Steven.
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