How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the
technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human
values and capacities. Architecture remains in crisis, its social
relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and
technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls
for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities,
an architecture that is connected—attuned—to its location and its
inhabitants. Architecture, Pérez-Gómez explains, operates as a
communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in
its connection to human health and self-understanding. Our physical
places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent
work in embodied cognition, Pérez-Gómez argues that the environment,
including the built environment, matters not only as a material
ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our
consciousness. To be fully self-aware, we need an external environment
replete with meanings and emotions. Pérez-Gómez views architecture
through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the
key German concept of Stimmung—attunement—and its roots in
Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He
considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of
architecture—the voices of architecture and the voice of the
architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience,
with Piranesi, Ledoux, and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical
modeling; and how Stimmung might be put to work today to realize the
contemporary possibilities of attunement.
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Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science
Product details
ISBN
9780262333337
Published
2020
Publisher
Random House Publishing Services
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Author