Buildings are part of our main environment, they form part of our everyday life, it’s impossible to separate buildings from our infrastructure of cities. Building industry accounts for the biggest part of CO² emissions, so in order to continue having buildings in our infrastructure incentives for self-sufficient buildings should be made. Also to solve problems of mobility and transit people should receive incentives to stop traveling long distances and avoid using CO² emitting transports. New buildings should be merge with the natural environment instead of avoiding it, they should also prioritize and adapt to public transports to avoid the use of personal cars. Read More »
Starting from a contextual point of view and maybe a bit basic and logical, the buildings are part of our immediate context , which in turn becomes impossible to separate what we call environment, answering the question , the buildings are a part of this great system called environment in which are integrated from the traffic and infrastructure to daily feelings of every human being.
Q. It is very tempting to seduce ourselves, as architects or as anybody keen on architecture or otherwise involved in the design process that the answer to our problems lies with buildings. Do you actually believe you can separate buildings out from the infrastructure of cities and mobility of transit and the expectations and incentives of people?
A building separated from its immediate environment (“the infrastructure of cities and mobility of transit and the expectations and incentives of people”), would be a space craft, a piece of art in a museum, or just waste. A building is the form that human activities take in response to peoples needs. This shapes cities. Buildings depends on the mobility around them since we need to get into them somehow; or some kind of accessibility – physical or virtual.
Design is a infinite process. Architecture is a still shot of that process, turned into something that could be somehow built – a building. Buildings are dead bodies until people use them. It is the forces interacting inside architecture and inside the user´s mind, what gives it some real meaning.
Q. Why do people tend to believe that what is financially profitable (for developers) is not actually equivalent to economically feasible (positive impacts on social welfare)? How would you show that this does not necessarily have to be like this (but rather the opposite)?
In the globalized world and with the economic models that globalization works with, anything can become a selling product: cars, architecture, people… Sometimes it looks like the focus is only in money and numbers, and not in the actual resources available and their real value. Through “economic” crisis, we are all paying for this twisted conception of value. Some are getting rich, but what kind of quality of life you get when everyone around you have a lot less than you. Insecurity comes from inequity.
Under this model, cities are built not because they are needed, but because they are “economically” viable. Money and wealth have become just numbers in a computer screen, far away from the reality of finite things.
We can´t plant money nor eat it.
Socio economic effect ,architecture and environment always has to respond to each other. Many time architectural interpretations are derived by socio economic condition and environmental condition, it is in my opinion a good scenario but when it is visa a versa there are few concerns. As in when architecture for public use only responds to certain socio economic class it creates more imbalance in the society which is not good. And even in case it it responds to all the classes of the society and does not respond to environmental condition, it’s a huge concern.
The city is like a living organism, a human body, in which every cell contributes to the whole. If any part, no matter how small it is, is being abstracted, the whole will undergo the consequences. For instance, urban fabric consists of buildings imprint on the landscape and their voids. In these voids, the circulation of the city takes place, either in streets and pavements or in parks and squares. From the aforementioned example we can see that buildings and circulation diagrams are inextricably related. But spaces and places are not the only things that contribute to the city. City is a multilayered, complex topography. Urban equipment, utilities, services, laws, human beings, transportation, geographical location, climate, fauna and flora are some of the components that their interactions form the city. If an architect designs a building as a unit, without taking into consideration all the factors which have been mentioned above, he/she will probably end up creating a subjective piece of art.
