architecture 'beyond building'

ARCHITECTURE AS AWARENESS IN TIME

Conferinţă susţinută de profesori la Oslo School of Architecture and Design [AHO]

Data: 6 noiembrie orele 14.00

Locatie: Muzeul Ţăranului Român, sala Horia Bernea

One guest speaker taking side for each of the three aspects, generating an interlinked lecture and dialogue among them, with open questions from the audience.

• Lisbeth Funck on : Human beings, magic, sustainability

• Per Olaf Fjeld on : Materials, techniques, process

• Rolf Gerstlauer on : Object, connections, context

Architecture as Awareness in Time Synopsis

Lisbeth Funck

It is the beginning of November, the year is 2008 and the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years old. It is 6.7 billion people living on earth right now and in about 40 years the number will increase by 2.5 billion.

Sustainability, in a general sense, is the capacity to maintain a certain process or state indefinitely. To be sustainable, nature’s resources must only be used at a rate at which they can be replenished naturally. We have for a long period of time overexploited the resources in nature and are now facing the consequences: climate change, over fishing, marine pollution, deforestation, freshwater withdrawal etc. It is no longer a question whether we are over consuming – we absolutely are, and we have to change the way we live. Strategies are worked out on how to deal with the situation, but our reactions are slow, avoiding the seriousness of the situation, we are very much afraid to lose our standard of living. A collective human effort to keep human use of natural resources within the sustainable development aspect of the Earth’s finite resource limits is now an issue of utmost importance to the present and future of humanity.

If its right, what some scientist declare, that human beings have no instincts, compared to animals, and that everything is a consequence of learning, then we should take this opportunity to redefine our current identity and our current context. Time is changing radically, what will the changes bring? What values can I afford to give up, is it anything for me to gain? What will inform architecture, if you agree that it’s more to architecture than meeting the new technical challenges?

From Corbusier Buenos Aires lectures in 1929 I quote:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I begin by drawing a line that can separate, in the process of our perceptions, the domain of material things, daily events, reasonable tendencies, from that specially reserved to spiritual ones. Below the line, what exists: above, what one feels. Continuing my drawing one, two, three plates. I put something on each plate. In the first; Technique…in the second plate I write: Sociology. In the third plate: Economics. I step over the line and enter the domain of emotions. I draw a pipe and the smoke of a pipe. And then a little bird that flies off, and, in a pretty pink cloud, I write: poetry. I affirm: Poetry is equal individual creation.”

To this matrix I am adding the awareness towards nature (if not the poetry part has already taken care of that?) and tell you a story from Japan about sustainability and the importance of poetry.

Per Olaf Fjeld

The lecture will take on some of these topics:

New relationships between process and product through time action and movement.

Efficiency/ productivity/ techniques

The international office, the avoid of the personal

The relationship between change and speculation.

The dream of an un built utopia.

The relationship between new materials and an old content.

Before and after commodities

What is architecture “beyond Building”

Rolf Gerstlauer

The lecture is based on personal reflections about recent and separate trips to Tokyo, Beijing and New York (all 2008), and describes (as casus):

- New York as a city that grew old, not being capable of competing with modernity but providing familiarity.

- Tokyo as a machine-like infrastructure with the loss of perspectives but the strength of discipline and rituals.

- Beijing as a romantic European fantasy on the radical outburst of the New but with the loss of generations and a strong awareness of despair, desperation and nihilism.

and hence rises the following questions:

- what are the new objects of desire?

- can information and new media create identity and become the object of desire?

- what can we learn about how web2.0 avatars connect to each other and hence handle, produce and consume information?

Further:

- is the idea of context about to be replaced by information and hence becomes immaterial – is not part of a consensus anymore?

- who makes the connections in the future, how are the connections made and who is it that produces what for whom?

- where to find content – how to understand content – and what is sustainability?

And:

- how does architecture as a discipline connect and discuss itself – before, now and in the near future?

- what are the challenges for academia …and will there still be an ‘architectural practice’ in the future?

The lecture will be supported by a film (with sound) that runs throughout the duration of the lecture.