- 期刊
The Potentiality of Architecture as an 'X' Function between Zōē (ζωή - animal life) and Bios (βίος - aspirational life)
摘要
The rapid advancement and distribution of techno-science in the past 50 years has fundamentally altered the course of all cultures and traditions. Architecture is at a crossroads: it is a thing of the past, a recorder of traditions, and yet it must accommodate the future. But the price of the very structure of material and cultural life that is afforded by the current global economic system is one that is paid for with deletion of tradition, and meaningful identities connected to tradition. We seek not to judge this phenomenon as either Good or bad, but to evaluate to what extent we can claim to have and do architecture as a matter of meaningful intellectual activity that enriches cultural life in a positive way. To that end, we begin by positing that architecture must be understood as a field of intellectual intensity with specific interests that connects to other fields of intensity as a matter of metaphysical tension, as opposed to a commodity oriented, object (building)-producing praxis alone. From this position, it follows that architecture today is under attack from a battery of forces that threaten to degrade the line between (mere) animal life and aspirational life. As such, these forces comprise can be designated as the ＂enemy＂ of architecture, since they go against the central mission of architecture: to serve as an intermundium, a medium between ＂this world＂ and the ＂next world.＂ We analyze the concept of 'enemy' as a political concept, and attempt to reinstate architecture as a ＂ political ＂category that functions above and beyond the narrow concerns of internally-invented aesthetics, and the market forces that actually create a demand for certain aesthetics, and not others. We designate this on-going cultural and economic praxis as 'hedonism,' whose values and emphasis on materialism, pose a challenge to the very foundations of all traditions that have their roots in one form of metaphysics or another. And this, we claim, is the heart of the crisis of contemporary architecture - the weakening of its educational orientation and intellectuality, and strengthening of practical application toward maximum effect (style, trends, jargon, etc) for the purpose of garnering commercial attention. The essay's conclusion proposes the need for architects and architectural educators to step back from the buzz of pseudo activity- the meaningless and hypocritical rhetoric of moralizing cliches (＂sustainability＂)-and re-examine the original connection of architecture to the foundational metaphysical questions that underlie the human condition, and aspirations.