In an attempt to discover some useful architectural designs to enhance the quality of new-build social housing, the writer of this post encountered the following sentence:
“The size of the rooms, in addition to offering flexibility based on ambiguity of use and functional indeterminacy, allows an optimal structural space for the wooden structure.”
Ahh, architectural descriptions. The pictures so delightful, so promising . . . the descriptive language so . . so . . . tiresome? . . . confusing? . . . deliberately obfuscating?
The author of that article, together with his message, seems to have disappeared up his own fundamental architectural vocabulary. Does this review of a largest yadayadayada in Spain have anything positive to contribute to the future of social housing? Th author of this post remains at a loss. Figure it out for yourselves at de zeen: Peris+Toral Arquitectes completes Spain’s largest timber-framed residential building
The de zeen article miraculously achieved a second life as an introductory cry of bewilderment. Here, it accompanies news of an architecture program instigated (this may well be the right word) at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.
The article about the Bard College program in Bloomberg City Lab describes it thusly:
“Here, architecture is a method of critique, not a profession dedicated to making shelter. And instead of world-striding creative visionaries, its practitioners are presented more as beleaguered functionaries in a global chain of resource extraction and wealth consolidation — often on the wrong side of history.”
Well now, the author of this post can identify as a beleaguered functionary in a global chain of resource extraction and wealth consolidation — definitely a practitioner of something or other (but not entirely sure what).
The concept of architecture as “. . .a method of critique, not a profession dedicated to making shelter. . .” is more than a little worrisome, given the enormous and growing need for forms of truly affordable shelter.
Having read the City Lab article, however, this author feels there could be something strongly positive in this teaching program. It seems determined to shake the three-dimensional design tree and beat about the self-absorbed phraseology of its descriptive language until something visionary falls out. Read much more at Bloomberg City Lab: A Radical Way of Teaching Architecture
