for those friends that are following my serialized facebook delivery of my current article The Instrumentality of Appearances ... here is the next chapter: Architecture and the Societal Efficacy of the Built Environment Now we can start to appreciate that the appearance of the built environment means something and indicates something about its functional quality. While adherence to aesthetic criteria is no guarantee of functionality, it at least gives a first indication, sufficient to justify its further approach and exploration under the presumption (hypothesis) of its functionality. In contrast, a building or urban field that fails to meet the specific aesthetic criteria (ordering principles) of its time is at least raising suspicions about its functionality. This applies to both technical and social functionality. However, architecture – in distinction to engineering – is primarily concerned with social functionality. This social functionality of the built environment is not only indicated and revealed by its appearance but crucially depends upon its legible appearance. This is so because appearances do not only work via beauty vs ugly (indicating functional vs dysfunctional), but the appearance might also relate (more or less)vital information about which specific function types and interaction scenarios might be encountered within an urban field and within the spaces and buildings that come into view. However, this is not a trivial matter that can be taken for granted. ‘Social functionality’ of the built environment here means its fitness for purpose, i.e. the efficient facilitation of social processes, the efficient hosting of satisfying and productive social interaction events. This requires more than efficient spatial organisation, i.e. room sizes and adjacency relations. The social functionality of the built environment requires first of all that the potential, relevant participants of all the different specific interaction events can find each other in specific locations and can self-sort into constellations conducive to the event pattern in question. In order for this to happen potential participants need to be able to orient themselves successfully and efficiently within the built environment. A key criterion for this is the visual articulation and legibility of the built environment. This insight leads us to reject the common place opposition between appearance and performance or representation and operation. Instead we arrive at the formula performance through appearance or operation through representation. This also motivates my thesis: all design is communication design. The concept of social functionality - proposed here in distinction to technical functionality – leads us to reflect more generally about what the built environment does for society at large. The most important contribution of the built environment (and thus the essence of architecture’s task) is not physical shelter (as is often presumed) but its indispensable contribution to the build-up of social order, its contribution to the construction/evolution of sociality and society itself. The built environment, with its complex matrix of territorial distinctions, is a giant, navigable, information-rich interface of communication. Society can only exist and evolve with the simultaneous ordering of space. There is no and never has been a human society without a built, artificial habitat, just as their does not exist a human society without language. Both are required to make social cooperation possible. The elaboration of a built environment (however haphazard, precarious, and initially based on accident rather than purpose and intention) seems to be a necessary condition for the build-up of any stable social order. The gradual build-up of larger, structured social groups must go hand in hand with the gradual build-up of an artificial spatial order; social order requires spatial order. The social process needs the built environment as a plane of inscription where it can leave traces that then serve to build-up and stabilize social structures, which in turn allow the further elaboration of more complex social processes. The evolution of society goes hand in hand with the evolution of its habitat – understood as an ordering frame. The spatial order of the human habitat is both an immediate physical organizing apparatus that separates and connects social actors and their activities, and a material substrate for the inscription of an external ”societal memory.” These ”inscriptions” might at first be an unintended side effect of the various activities. Spatial arrangements are functionally adapted and elaborated. They are then marked and underlined by ornaments, which make them more conspicuous. The result is the gradual build-up of a spatio-morphological system of signification. Thus, a semantically charged built environment emerges that provides a differentiated system of settings to help social actors orient themselves with respect to the different communicative situations constituting the social life-process of society. The system of social settings, as a system of distinctions and relations, uses both the positional identification of places (spatial position) and the morphological identification of places (ornamental marking) as props for the societal information process. Compelling demonstrations for this formative nexus between social and spatial structure can be found within social anthropology, attesting to the crucial importance of cross-generationally stable spatio-morphological settings for the initial emergence and stabilization of all societies. Only on this basis, with this new material substrate upon which the evolutionary mechanisms of mutation, selection, and reproduction could operate, was the evolution of mankind out of the animal kingdom, and all further cultural evolution, possible. Thus, the built environment, as the cross-generationally stable, material substrate of the cultural evolution, acts functionally equivalent to the DNA as the material substrate of the biological evolution. The importance of the built environment for ordering and framing society remains undiminished. However, what, in former times, was left to the slow evolutionary process of trial and error has, since the Renaissance, become more and more the domain of competency and responsibility of the specialized discourse and profession of the discipline of architecture. During the Renaissance a consciously innovative theory-led design discipline equipped with a compelling system of drawings (including perspective) displaced the former tradition-bound building. I call this the big bang of architecture. I consider the Gothic era effecting the transition from tradition bound building to architecture proper. Since then an accelerating succession of architectural styles – Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Historicism, Ecclecticism, Art Noveau, Modernism, Postmodernism, Deconstructivism, Parametricism - has taken charge of the innovation of the built environment in its adaptive coevolution with the historical transformations of European and then World society. In the most general abstract terms the evolutionary trajectory of world civilization has been an increase in the overall level of societal differentiation or complexity. Each major historical (epochal) transformation implied adaptive transformations in the morphology of the built environment which in turn required aesthetic revolutions, the relearning of the aesthetic sensibilities and values of both designers and end-users.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 19:50:27 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015