An architectural product, a building, is a character: then we should as architects how to model their personalities, their dominant features in order to enhance their communicative capacities. Buildings are ‘urban messengers’.
Let’s see buildings as a set of ‘individuals’ with their own identity, with their own singular characteristics. Buildings do set an empathy relationship with the user. This affective relationship must belong to the specific tools of architecture. Therefore, architecture operates with objective materials and also with subjective bonds an relations with users and objecs around them. Following this line of thought, context deals with transferences between project and ‘everything else’, aimed to link user and ‘building’. These links are finally identification codes.
We could think of buildings starting from their performative capacities before the user and its context, beyond any other concern, like abstract form producing. As a matter of fact such ‘form editing’ should emphasize those performative capacities and even maybe hide those architectural codes that blur those capacities. Architectural abstraction, complexity or monumentality could be transformed therefore into something apprehensible, legible. The domestic object turned into a pet.
Baudrillard defined the object as the “perfect pet”. Objects are the only ‘beings’ that emotionally affect us without any restriction to our personality whatsoever. “Objects are the only beings whose coexistence is truly possible, because their differences do not confront people, as it is usual among the living creatures, but they tamely converge to us and sum up esasyly to our consciences”
And follows:
“The object is a dog whith everything taken out extept fidelity”
Therefore, the relationship between architecture and user, if appropiately articulated, can be intensified if perceived as an object of affection and not a presence unconnected to our own experience.
Next post: On Kawaii
4 comments:
the fox vs. the lion
In “Pet architecture”, Atelier Bow-wow’s scattered architectures in Tokyo having pet like characteristics, but much rather focused on small scale, humorous and charming constructions and the way they may become pets of the city... But pets are expected to be so, they are breed or grown their behaviour is predictable in a way. That’s what’s comfortable about them; they are conceived to satisfy a specific sort of emotional relationship... There is also this other understanding of taming (an act too often neglected, said the fox. It means to establish ties...) I find more appropriate, the ways architecture can be fox-tamed by users in order to avoid the need to lion-tame our surroundings in a rougher sense, a kind of force-imposed affection too long experienced.
"There is a flower. . . I think she has tamed me. . .". Though these quotations may sound fainthearted I find them really provocative. Our mass consumption-victim society is truly tamed by architecture, as Little Prince became tamed by his rose.
Free confrontation, no restraints, thats what an architectural product might offer if designed properly. Those small architectures analized by Atelier Bow Wow are interesting because they are unpretentious, they lack an 'architecture character' that is red whith a certain relief and sympaty by the user and the citicen. Consistent mainly by its performance. On the one hand defenceless, on the other Witty objects that do not avoid any opportunity or crack left in the city.
The act of building is violent by its very own nature, the city shows itself as an imposed, finished whole that has to be accepted by its users.And in my opinion this violence is blurred in such modest constructions because they are open, "free of confrontation and with no restrains to offer". Humble and brave.
Maybe the act of taming is also an act of violence anyway. Maybe it is better to think of objets in a level equal to humans, as symmetric sociology postulates. Non humans and humans perpetually related. Objets offering something to users. Unfinished, incomplete without our interaction with them, that's what we owe them in return.
pls. see risa sato artworks post on the ideas of empathy and the symmetry between objets and users.
It is just like the two meanings of the word "care" in english: you take care of your pet, because you care about it.
Making user co-responsible is also a way of making him/her care about it, like a tamagotchi to feed and distract.
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