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The Creation of Sense of Place: Negotiating the Divide Between Nature and Culture Through Phenomenological Architecture
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Nolle, Gabriel |
| Copyright Year | 2013 |
| Abstract | seeks a balance between these two diverging ideologies. As Kenneth Frampton points out in his argument for Critical Regionalism, the universal over-optimization of technology in architecture and the modern desire for flat-datum in topography for rationalization of construction has brought about the condition of placelessness of buildings.4 While Frampton wrote this in 1983 as a reaction to the rise of Post-Modernism, the issue of placelessness has since been exacerbated over the past decade with the preoccupation of technical innovation and design trends, like sustainable architecture, which focus on making buildings of optimum performance. The resultant buildings often disregard the regional character of the site by creating an object on flat-site condition, using materials that are not endemic to the site, organizing program based on efficiency of the building and rationalization of the structure, and preconceiving form instead of allowing the form instead of allowing the form to be respondent to and unify with site, material, and program. Echoing Frampton’s call for architecture to remove itself from both over-optimization of advanced technology and the tendency to regress into nostalgic historicism5, this project seeks to explore methods and processes of designing architecture that unifies site, material, purpose and form to create buildings that, through time, become part of the history and sense of place. Nature, the abstract term used to describe the physical world in which we live, has become less important in modern architecture as culture, human consciousness and its products1, continues to expand. Western architecture views the relationship between nature and culture as dichotomous; believing only primitive man lived in harmony with nature – a harmony lost on modern society.2 As a result, much of contemporary discourse on nature’s role in architecture has become primarily scientific and technical. Nature is often marginalized from the actual design process where there is potential to harmonize with the natural world and, instead, is reserved for the fields of sustainability and biomimicry where it is analyzed on a more scientific basis. This approach has stripped architecture of the emotion derived from experiencing nature and as allowed humankind’s sense of place in the natural world to be less clear. This paradigm shift underscores the question: How do we reconcile the demands of both the human-nature and human-culture relationships? The project I am proposing seeks to explore phenomenological architecture as a medium between culture and nature in order for humans to regain a sense of place in the natural world. While recent trends in architecture, namely sustainability, seek to emphasize environmental consciousness, the subjective relationship to the environment – how it affects our senses – remains the one we know least about.3 The process of designing and constructing buildings in the natural world must respond to conditions of nature in terms of site, material, purpose and form, to answer the demands of the human-nature condition. At the same time the architecture must accommodate specific human-cultural needs and criteria. This project 1. Sherry B. Ortner, “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?”, Feminist Studies 1.2 (1972): 11. 2. Daniel Guthrie, “Primitive Man’s Relationship to Nature”, BioScience 21.13 (1971): 721. Print. 3. J.B. Jackson, Landscapes: Selected Writings by J.B. Jackson, (Boston: University of Massachussetts Press, 1970) 4. Kenneth Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism”, The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture, Ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983): 26. 5. Frampton, 20. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://surface.syr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1226&context=architecture_tpreps |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
