experiencing architecture, r quek

EXPERIENCING ARCHITECTURE We experience architecture when we encounter or witness an edifice as we apprehend or measure its qualities in the milieu of architectural knowledge. Without the actual edifice, we also have the opportunity to encounter the idea of architecture, through partial representations of an architectural experience. Writing, speaking, drawing, modelling, watching and listening allow us to engage in architectural discourse by discussing order, design, proportion, meaning and so on. ARCHITECTURAL COMMUNICATION Historically, the transmission of knowledge of building was at first communicated orally. Some very early parchments exhibit evidence of delineated descriptions of buildings, the first record of drawings of buildings. Through excavations we also know of the use of models and fragments of models in Ancient times. These modes of architectural communication have been with us since Ancient times. One of the earliest written treatises we have on the art of building is from Vitruvius. It contains writing only as the illustrations it refers to are no lost to history, and it describes the craft of building and the qualities of good order. Until the invention of the printing press, we have little in the way of written and visual treatises. From Alberti’s treatise De re aedificatoria (c.1486 by modern reckoning), we have the first widely published treatise. The use of models was frequent in Cinquecento Italy. During the Cinquecento, the development of perspective and proto-orthography allowed drawn conventions of architectural representation to be codified. Orthographic drawing as a system of representation developed fully in the 18c with Gaspard Monge, who taught in the Ecoles Polytechnique. The development of architectural drawing as a comparative method of study was instilled in the Ecoles Polytechnique under the tutelage of Durand in early 19th century. Our common methods of drawing architecture have only been with us for 200 years. Photography, Cinema and computer simulations today allow us many other means of architectural representation beyond the spoken or written word. Hitherto, this is our heritage of how architecture is represented and communicated. EXPERIENCING ARCHITECTURE Two modes of experience are distinguished in German - erlebnis and erfahrung. Art and architecture are always experienced through a mode of communication of understanding, which occurs through understanding something referential. Although the work of art or architecture is complete in itself, when experienced aesthetically, as erlebnis, it is removed from the actuality of the cultured world - life as we experience it. This experience is mere fleeting entertainment. It is characterised when art and architecture are typically spoken of as being “liked ” or “disliked”. Such discussions are rarely able to transcend undetermined preferences, and often merely reinforce many ways of saying “I like it" or “I don't like it” without further qualification. A deeper experience of the work of architecture and art, in which a change is induced in the person so experienced, is distinguished as erfahrung. In the experience of architecture and art as erfahrung, there is present the fullness of meaning that not only belongs to the work of art or architecture, but stands for an identity with a greater cultural mediation. In this mode of experience there is a moment of epiphany. A genuine architectural experience is one of a heightened understanding when one encounters the work of architecture. The work of architecture is understood as the consummation of representation of tectonic, symbolic and spatial order, through a revelation of meaning. In the original Greek, poesis, refers to a ‘... revealing’, or a ‘... bringing forth' in the experiential sense. In our everyday conversations, we say “I see." when we experience a genuine moment of understanding an argument or proposition in a dialogue. Architecture should have that ability to allow an encounter with its poetic possibilities; it should make a person who encounters it say: “I see."

Raymond Quek © raymond quek 2000