quondam @ archinect/79/7900w.htm
so what then is architecture?
shell 2003.06.26 18:58
Damn, a lot of negativity here.
I like your question about architecture as shell: is it a natural shell and a factor for regenesis or a constantly designed and applied one to achieve a forever lost sense of something and push on through into a forced genesis? My cheesy answer is that it is both. Architecture is a dialectic between these two matters. Architecture is pushing up from the ground and under the skin by various natural forces as much as architecture remains a skin to be tailor-fit to any typography, or the result of a constructive force intended to conform life.
Surface tension, mutual-permeability between form and function, simultaneous extrovert and introvert expressions of form, form designed to be passed through and not merely to contain or shelter, the skin accurately portraying what lies beneath it in some innuendo of form, in ways we still may not recognize or understand yet, the transparency of those forms now emphasizes an architectural surface, that is passable and represents an equalizing regulation of forces operating on both sides not just as a container who’s volume decides form.
Form is defined in the negotiation of opposing forces which collide at a given surface and form architecture, a dualistic surface which both directs it as an extension of the subcutaneous forces or forms a barrier from the forces external which happen upon it. The membrane application.
There is a negotiation between various forces, in everything, where I think this metaphor of the shell and its relation to architecture plays out. Architecture becomes a stage by the parameters your question poses for it.
I would encourage you to illustrate with real examples of which architecture determines either category, architecture that is the result of these forces that push outward and into formation of a shell (a shell that responds to some internal combustion), and those buildings which may exemplify the applied shell and the manufactured architecture which is meant to contain, disperse, organize and control more than just to provide shelter. Economic imbalances playing out against a collective unconscious matriculation of architectural need without our own knowledge of it.
Where does architecture intersect with the diverging forces of the economic machine which coerces form from the outside VS. the breathing, movements, responses of our natural economy under the skin which define architecture of its own accord?
Something is continually exercised and played out there in architecture. But this is metaphoric and you could apply this visual conceit for a criterion of any field as the result of opposing forces, or perfectly symbiotic forces as the body and skin may or may not be.
so what then is architecture?
Stephen Lauf 2003.06.26 19:29
Shell, your answer of "both" isn't cheesy.
I'd say the real shell architectures were those caves some humans used to live in, and beyond that architecture became an applied shell, and going to an(other) extreme, a space station is all shell, but hardly natural.
[Thanks for the encouragement. I enjoy what you wrote.]
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