Arcosanti post card, 1978, Arizona
Architecture is one of the disciplines that most requires to focus attention towards the relationships that exist between objects and contexts. While in art the actors analyze the context (if it exists) as basis of a process finalized to the creation of an object, often conceived as a representation, science, in the opposite way, puts too much emphasis on the relationships between objects and it is almost completely unaware of consequences in human lives.
After almost three hundred years of distance from the classic conception of architecture as made not only of designing processes, the Advanced Architecture, in different and adaptive ways, is trying to recover an holistic vision of planning and construction. In such a situation, relationships between subject, object and context are various and contribute to generate a more complex scenario than the one you can obtain only considering all variables as independent from each others.
Specialization is an evolutive phenomenon issued with a vital importance in our universe and permits to increment efficiency and productivity, but if not controlled it will transform the human being in a programmed machine that carries its task out. What we are making out is a future made of knowledge, sharing, continuous learning, experimentation and collaboration addressed to the constitution of active intervenes that possess “functional resonance”, that is the ability of a system element to develop, at the same time, multiple functions and to reach multiple goals. The logic with which relations could be created and linked with each others feels the effects of a natural complexity.
All parts of a project react to his surroundings according to different system (illation, analogy, interaction, correlation, alteration, energy) and to their relative relational logics (positional, metamorphical, atmospherical, intangible, disturbed, environmental). It seems clear how these categories simply are a first and general subdivision and representation of how Advanced Architecture operates. It is dutiful to remember that an unambiguous subdivision is not able to describe all the possible dispositions and that some of these logics can assume more resonance than others.
Energy and environment, for examples, have been taking for the last decades a huge relevance and they have to be considered as first system and logic. For this reason Diego Arraigada’s and Johnston Marklee’s Wall House assumes a shape and a material composition not really usual for a residential purpose, made of four different energetic layers and an external tent surface. In this concept natural energy flows are not interrupted but followed and architectural solutions go along them. This kind of approach, as Sean Lally writes in The Shape of Energy, allows us to create an “architecture built of material energies” that “produces a type of shape that is micro-vernacular, as each site creates a unique feedback relationship to the energy system deployed”.
Similarly to the idea of an architecture made of energy, the interaction between parts of systems is fundamental and has the first aim to generate an atmospherical relation (natural and artificial) with the territory and within the concept of atmosphere as “the envelop of gases surrounding the Earth or another planet” and “the air in any particular place” instead of “the pervading tone or mood of a place, situation or creative work” (Oxford Dictionaries). View House and N-House are examples of this logic but, as written above, each project feels the effects of different influences and distortions according to designer, builder and user. While Sou Fujimoto tries to subvert the natural perception we have of inside and outside, Arraigada and Marklee want to underline the natural environment and his visual potential. Both houses, nevertheless, instead of focusing in the interaction with their surroundings, tend to consider them as artificial features lacking of positive influence on the built up. What seems to be relevant to mark is the necessity of analyzing the ways in which architecture and its products operates in the nature rather than over the nature.
As we discussed, relationships categories and intervention strategies are subject to variation and it is theoretically possible (and maybe it has to be hoped) to detect other relational logics according to the amount of architectural topics and visions. We could have a logic of economic in a natural disaster situation, a logic of safety in another context and maybe more new logics generated by the mix or by the mutation of some of them. Taking in account the metamorphical relation between urban and natural, the actual emergency of cities, the constant population increase and the quality of life (sound, light, pollution, food) we can presume an explosion of the urban boundaries along a completed built (not urbanized) world. The solution could be to finally mix urban and natural in a unique organism, thinking to buildings and landscapes with natural appearances and functionalities. We are speaking about an environment that permits to go from your house to your office without never loosing the awareness of a world that is firstly natural, as all its parts.