Architecture is a living entity made up of materials, form, and time. Structuralism has understood architecture as a system of signals since the 1960s, resulting in the dilemma of architecture being disconnected from humans and the world. From then, only it became about the external aesthetics of the buildings, and the responsible persons for its development started working on the sponsor’s needs rather than thinking about the societal needs. Appearing at the very origins of humanity and as a final, creative, and immediate product of human instinct, architecture is an artifact of embodied experience, which is made by people, to challenge, intrigue, delight and amuse, and which resonates with them and their lives.
The experience is immersed in that it is received through the body as the seat of perception – through elements, arrangement, and time – as well as because the architecture itself, like a complex organism, impels sensation in that way. The experience is incorporated because it is mined from the raw resources of the human desire to comprehend the environment via narratives it can tell and the promise that these narratives may be transformed into the real-time sensory experience via human design.
Architecture is intended to integrate human knowledge of the world, humanity, and architecture through spatial narrative. It is impossible to imagine a world without architecture since it is about the real-life culture of the people, their day-to-day activities, their daily struggles, and their constant social and political negotiations. Rather a world without architecture should be correctly framed as a world without power, greed, and so-called term development. In this article, we will time travel and see how the meaning of the revered term ‘architecture’ transformed over time.
LET’S DIVE DEEP INTO THE JOURNEY OF ‘ARCHITECTURE’
The world in which humans exist and live is a material world: From the minute we are born, we are involved in the material world.; We instinctively discover what it is, make it physically, emotionally shape it, create meanings, consume items and meanings together, and even offer those objects, and maybe those meanings, to others.
Humans are spiritual beings who not only want to know everything about the tears, laughter, kicks, punches, the flow of images we call thought, feelings, words, stories, beliefs, music and poetry, happiness and ecstasy, but they also want to survive and establish worries for the self, those around, and the art of life. As an actual human experience, with ‘content which is the actual content of experience,’ architecture is a shelter of enclosed habitation, where ‘desire can recognize itself’ and can live, which transforms the apparent enthusiasm of human beings ‘into connected, engaging, integrated activities that lead to growth. Regardless of the building’s primitive purpose to shelter the human body, as demonstrated by a man slowly adapting the various makeshift arrangements that the weather inclemency imposed upon him. Such as the onset of the ice age, which forced men into shelters and caves.
The difference in conceptualization, the attachment of meaning, differentiates man’s early attempts to realize human beings’ physiological, psychological, and spiritual requirements from those of instinctually driven creatures. Acting to both constrain and enable certain kinds of life and experience, the architecture allows living events to take place within the clusters of rooms, buildings, streets, and cities we inhabit, which are structured and shaped by walls, doors, and windows, and framed by the decisions of designers. Architecture creates the representational frames and narratives of the places in which we live. Architecture guides humans through the necessity of reimagining our sensible life and our understanding of life in response to their encroachment, in response to this continuous transgression that occurs from the skin to the objects and from the objects to the body without our being capable of recognizing its origin in a specific place.
Humans have no mental trace of whom we are until storytelling appears as a type of armature, shaping that record. Therefore, architecture is designed to collect, preserve and pass on the lived experience of human beings, as well as their exploration of what man makes of his world, of his fellow beings, and himself, and their constant participation with the outside world, inside world, other human beings and with architecture. Humankind has no mental trace of who we are till narrative appears as a type of armature, shaping that record. Spatial storytelling tangibly and intuitively shapes that record, conversely making it natural for human beings.
As Peter Brooks has said, our full definition as humans is inextricably linked to the tales we tell concerning our lives and the society in which we live. We cannot resist the imagined imposition of shape on existence in our dreams, daydreams, and ambitious fancies. Spatial storytelling demonstrates that architecture is not isolated from the world and human beings.It is instead inextricably linked to the world and people through its elements of meaningful components,arrangement and time.In whatever way we are aware of the planet as the universal horizon, as a coherent universe of existing objects, humans, each ‘I-the-man’ and each of us together, relate to the world as living with each other within the world; and the planet is our world, valid for our awareness as existing precisely through this living together. This is the relevance of architecture – as a human-created object that concurrently mediates human knowledge about the world, humanity, and architecture.
Because of the fast growth of building and technology, architecture has become less sensitive to context since advancement is primarily viewed as an intellectual exercise of knowledge extension. Humans, the end-users of architecture, are often swept aside to create a place for the anticipated rapid development to fulfill quantifiable benchmarks as a measure of success. In this situation, architectural design generates an impression and displays authority rather than accommodating people. Many critics have problematized this kind of development; however, the hegemony of capitalism seems too strong to resist it, leaving the architectural design to become a tool for creating a visual-oriented object disconnected from the complex social-political context of the people.
The building attempts to break out from the mold by providing options for coping with complicated urban social problems, which will be required if architecture is made for humans. The design included aspects that should show a level of understanding of material culture challenges, such as the artifacts and the experience, sensibility, intervention, validation, implementation, and expertise that goes into their manufacture and usage.
Many experts have claimed that architecture should link to people’s real-life culture, everyday activities, daily difficulties, and ongoing social and political disputes.
As a result, rather than being a method of individual expression, architecture is a social artwork that represents society’s value and meaning; consequently, architecture must be humanistic and followed by empathy and rationality. However, design frequently eliminates architecture’s depth, leaving an essential exercise of aesthetic forms and shapes that neglect society’s otherwise complicated multi-layered features. Focusing entirely on tangible elements for design development has been heavily criticized, particularly when knowing the context is primarily accomplished through site analysis, which unfortunately becomes an aspect of a recommended design schedule, framed merely to line up with the architects’ prejudices and priorities.
One of the challenges with today’s education and training is that architectural design is still bound by the ancient Vitruvian Triumvirate paradigm, in which longevity, function, and beauty become measures of ‘excellent architecture. The trio lacks context or locale, as Greg Missingham describes it, which should be regarded as a crucial driver of architectural design. This perspective questions the place of context in the design process and the degree to which architectural design may go beyond the dominance of physical components of context. People, or the human factor, are one significant contextual feature that must be addressed, yet people’s interests, which include societal, political, economic, and historical layers, can occasionally conflict with the capital owner’s final aims.
Christopher Jones identified this issue as a moral design dilemma, describing it as pervasive in today’s design process since the consequences of every design decision increase quicker than that of the design itself, especially in architecture as a people’s living space. He suggested that excellent designers go outside their function and make judgments on behalf of society instead of empirically oriented designers who could overlook the whole matter of working outside their corporate sponsor interests. This remark exemplifies the present issues that architects confront in the face of capitalism’s powerful dominance, in which money and authority dictate the evolution of the built environment. Architects frequently succumb to this dominance, viewing architecture as solely a tool for impressing customers while ignoring the societal, historical, economic, and political harm it does to the surrounding ordinary people.
LET’S THINK
Architecture is a topic of way more profound concern than how we see it today from where we are coming, achieving a lot to how we destroyed its valuable essence and molded the term according to our needs. The current situation raises several questions. What does architecture end up serving? Whom is it intended for? Whom does it benefit? Is architecture still seen as a site for human activity? Why are human factors ignored mainly in the design process if this is the case? Do we create architecture for people?
