image: Balancing Barn, Suffolk-Mole Architects
The Architecture of Happiness because of a great phrase I found in the work of the French 19th century writer Stendhal. He writes: ‘When we see a place and call it beautiful, really what we mean is that we can imagine being happy there’. This sums up for me very accurately what is distinctive about beauty: it gives us a sense that a good life can unfold in its vicinity.
The way that I feel about many aspects of everyday life, for example a contemporary architectural culture, which is dominated by an endless consumption and production of images, graphics and information. We can easily express it trough a metaphor, comparing an ideal of architecture to a tree.
This way it’s much easier to understand that today architects have a tendency to develop their project to a degree, that surrounding is disordered. The architects are making plans that form and independent order unrelated to their context, introducing the example from the natural environment, but if a tree tried to implement such an independent idealized image, it would be destroyed in an instant- however egoistically the tree tries to live, a tree can only survive in a vast number of relationships. We must consider this as an important lesson for thinking about contemporary architecture.
If we want to create an architecture that would be more open to nature-as man’s natural habitat, we must think about the types of connections that this architecture creates. They need to be decisive in this case, because as much as architectural design was good or profitable on the other side, if the connection that this newly created architecture has with its natural environment is not solid enough, the solution simply will not bring anything new to the already existing ways of thinking and solving problems that we are facing today. Thinking about the architecture must be based on relativistic relationships with the environment. Architecture must be opened to the environment.
self′-sustain′ing
adj.
able to support or sustain oneself or itself without outside aid.
Is it even possible to have sustainable architecture? Is it possible that a system that works within another system to be self-sustaining without interconnecting with other systems?
These are the questions I would like to do deeper research about. Since I do not believe in the idea of a sustainable system as such (because nothing in the nature is self sustainable), but the interconnection of smaller systems within a larger system in a way to function in symbiosis.