Can we elevate Architecture beyond being a Point in Space and/or a Point in Time?
Abstract
“Most of the work we saw stops at the level of being an artefact. It tries to make the connection as an experience but it does fall short of adding to the larger environment and fails to generate a dialogue with the city or a dialogue with our current problems.” – Mahesh Radhakrishnan
Does Architecture act solely as a response to philosophy? As a product of the bye-laws? As a fragment of the broader environment? As an activator of a programme? As a webbed effect that curates the sense of a place or belonging? As a response to the site topography? As a generative core of identity? As a keeper of memory and continuity? As unity of idea and approach? As a process of exploration of the endemic?
How imperative is it then for architecture to process these factors with equal representation and diversity?
Architecture in its limited agenda, needs to be powerfully expressive.
“Architecture is a very complex profession. Like they say, it is the mother of all arts and therefore, it has a huge responsibility towards how it performs, as function, as programme, as response to the culture of the people it serves.
It thus becomes the author’s prerogative to great extent to choose which particular aspect he/she wants to respond more to and which he won’t. In the way architecture is being seen today and measured, we have our own lenses and these lenses are labels that we trumpet and flag to say this architecture is good because it pertains to the idea of the green, or this architecture is good because it is doing well on its programme, and this architecture is good because within the budget and so on.
To my mind, I think these are prerequisites and therefore, it is important that we go beyond ourselves and beyond these accepted norms of measuring architecture to find more intense ways of being able to respond so that we can innovate.” – Samira Rathod
With these changes comes a responsibility, for architecture to consider the implications of its shifting realities.
These notes will be deliberated upon in essays to be published on thinkmatter.in. If you wish to present a comment (views / counter-views), please write to us: think@matter.co.in