We stand at the turn of the millennium, the last 100 years of which might well me called “The Century of architecture”. Or at least it might be said that architectural production on a Worldwide scale over the past Century has been the greatest in history.
This piece of data is not to be taken lightly, particularly if we recall the statement by German philosopher Walter Benjamin to the effect that “buildings have accompanied man since the earliest of times” and that “the history of architecture is longer than that of any other art”, and also that “it has never been interrupted”.
Architecture constitutes an astonishing example of the artistic expansion f our times. So is that today we understand it not only as the art of constructing buildings, but also as the art of building a human environment.
It is possible (and necessary) to consider the human environment as the maximum realization of architectural aesthetics, although surely not in the traditional sense, which demands the elimination of all practical observations and the adoption of a contemplative distance with respect to the architectural work. Taken as the realization of an architectural aesthetic that is no longer visual and formal, the urban environment supposes and requires the close participation of the object perceived and the subject that perceives it – a participation that brings into play the historical and cultural interests of the individual.
There are two events to be borne in mind when looking at the subject of urban environment.
The first of these is the possibility that cities might no longer be necessary to the development of the economy. In effect, recent changes in modes of production and consumption have brought the decentralization of a large proportion of industries, and the rapid availability of merchandise through telephone and/ or electronic ordering procedures, as well as the acquisition of supermarkets and shopping centers.
Furthermore, although biological survival may not be affected in short term, the question of adaptation cannot ignore happiness as a human factor. And we know too that the inclusion of a moral dimension modifies the true sense of adaptability. Thus, biologists as noted as Rene Dubos urge us to end human standardization so as to generate broad-ranging diversity in our social environment.
“Diversity within social environments”, Dubos writes, “constitutes a decisive aspect of functionalism, not only in city planning and home design, but also in (our) management of life itself. If we take it for granted” Dubos adds, “that modern man must, to an increasing degree, fall victim to the chronic disorders resulting from his way of life, and if we realize that technological advances do not always significantly contribute to his happiness, then we must also know that these failings of modern life are of less importance from a purely biological standpoint”.
Dubos concludes that, “When we apply the concept of adaptation to man, we must,, then, utilize different criteria that those used in general biology”. This ethical potential strengthens the aesthetic potential that we have been treating all along. The development of an aesthetic environment, as in architecture, is, at the same time, the development of a moral environment, and vice versa.
An urban environment that assimilates vital necessities, ethical values and the perceptive characteristics of man into a functional network of human dimensions; that incites our imaginative responses; that symbolizes our cultural ideals and that speaks of our intimate understanding; that permits us to recognize human proportions within the universe; that, in short, augments the scope, depth and vivacity of our immediate experience, is an urban environment that simultaneously acts as an aesthetic environment.
When ethics and aesthetics are integrated by means of the integration of the person with his/her environment, an exchange between art and life is also achieved – an objective with which creators do not always comply. A study of the environmental experience refers us back to those two normative dimensions of art and life.
When the urban environment embodies the diversity of humanistic paradigms, it remolds the conditions of experience and thus toot the experience itself. The achievement of an advance in urban ecology is, in point of fact, an ethical and aesthetic advance in architecture.
It would be useless to seek to forget or to minimize the situation faced by major cities around the turn of the century and of the millennium, in which they are besieged by a barbarism born of progress. None of these cities much corresponds to ideas regarding the urban environment as a moral and aesthetic center for human life. They are, in truth, false environments that produce anonymous and standardized inhabitants who are alienated from the cities in which they subsist. Here, the urban environment is an external and separate entity from those who live in it. It surrounds them, rather than being integrated with them. If a genuine urban environment is a work of unity between person and place, the condition of the false environments, then, is the divorce of the two.
The problem certainly cannot be solved by demolishing the mega-cities, nor can it be expanding them. Economic interests and the political decisions that tend to be their offspring are not likely to break the alliance struck to dominate construction of the urban environment. Bt neither should architects dissolve the alliance struck with human beings in the search for a better world, a more livable environment.
The past two decades, however, have witnesses the multiplying of efforts by architects, theoreticians and critics alike – and even by politicians and business people – to change course with regard to urban environment.
The recycling of old buildings, the preservation of historical districts and the renewal of abandoned areas via the construction of new buildings constitute something more that real state ventures or cultural interventions: they are, in the end, a form of recognition of the ethical and aesthetic values of environments from another era, as well as a demonstration of the indivisibility of person and place, of urban life and memory.
But the recovery of testimonies from the past is not enough, and much less the mere imitation of the styles of yesteryear, which is so habitual in certain contemporary architecture that is even self-defined as post-modern. Architecture must not resign either its aesthetic imagination or its moral realization, two forcer that must respond to the peculiarities of each community, each country, each region, without, in doing so, losing sight of the era in which they are acting. And era here signifies new ideas, new values, new techniques, new materials.
Refference
La biennale di Venezia. Città: Less Aesthetics More Ethics. 7th international architecture exhibition. (2000). Marsilio Editorial.
Article: “Ethics and Aesthetics in the Urban Environment of the 21st Century”. Jorge Glusberg. (2000). Argentina.
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