Architecture Is An Art Fuelled By Ideals
Posted: Saturday, April 10, 2010
by Lucica Finley
http://www.formicon.com/
Architecture is an art fuelled by ideals. It's rational and irrational, it strives for lightness but obeys the laws of heaviness and freely submits to all the limitations imposed by environment, climate, geology, technology, planning, finance, psychology and arbitrary delays. I've named these limitations more or less at random, there are plenty of others and they're all very important.
Michelangelo used to say that an artist who hasn't tried his hand at architecture is lacking something. I think the opposite is also true, that an architect who hasn't tried his hand at music and poetry – disciplines that hone human sensibility to a fine edge – is also lacking something. Architecture embraces many forms of expression, quite apart from the ones it harbours and nurtures within itself. Architecture is simultaneously content and container, both a substratum and, in some ways, a model created in the human image and shaped by human imagination.
Whether you choose architecture, painting, music or poetry, art is one and indissoluble, and architecture is the most important, the most primeval of the arts. It has features of all the others and, with the help of the gods, fashions them into a single entity.
Architecture implies the connivance of human beings?
J-F.Z.: Everything leads us to believe that architecture is static. But is this really true? To someone walking forwards or backwards, to the right or to the left, the forms of a building are continually changing. As you draw closer its façades get bigger, while the dome that once stood so proudly above now slowly shrinks behind. Moving to the right you see porticoes, on the way back to where you were before, you see screens and gardens. It's a continual revelation of façades decorated with bands of light and shade, shadows cast by the sun, windowless walls and walls with openings. A feast of contrasts, a costume ball decreed by a master of ceremonies, that obeys the laws of the master's art. Yes, it moves, the light comes and goes, there are changes, but it always retains its sovereign dignity. You think of it as static, but with human connivance it walks, slides, jumps, fizzes with life. Without that connivance, only the sun itself can assume the task – which it performs with masterly skill, but more slowly than we can – of animating the building. The shadows it casts slide across the façades with the austere composure of an animated descriptive-geometry project.
Where decoration is perfectly integrated with structure?
The art of building is a reminder that nothing is sufficient unto itself, that loving and creating beauty is something different, just as heaviness, the weather, the laws of mechanics, pass judgement in their own way on an architect's creation, which is subject to constant, inevitable criticism. Architecture has to stand the test of time, but it also has to fight criticism, indifference, oblivion.
As regards contemporary Islamic architecture, far too many architects believe the problem can be solved with cosmetic recipes like green roof tiles, painted terracotta and other dubious materials where the end justifies the means. Fake Provençal arches that are all the rage in Anfa, tarted-up materials, concrete beams camouflaged under wood cladding, structures hidden by sheets of concrete. Good old concrete! How often it is despised in well-to-do circles where aesthetic problems can be solved with a certainty that ignorance all too often bestows! Consoles suspended from balconies are obviously "unnatural": they should support, not be suspended, and they have an opposite role. They should be decorative, not structural. And yet architects put arches under balconies when the balconies are finished, to say nothing of false columns, false piles, false marble, false wood, everything except the one thing that now seems unimportant in our society: the truth.
This kind of thing should lead us towards an architecture that is wholesome, honest, beautiful, direct, unevasive. Why put a traditional tiled roof over a modern sash window with an aluminium frame? Why build concrete arches whose shape has been historically determined by the use of brick and stone? And all for some garish modern dwelling. This isn't decoration any more, it's pastiche, sloppiness, ignorance.
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Top-level comments on this article: (1 total)Welcome to SearchWarp,Nice article, good luck :)
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