lunes, 2 de abril de 2012

#books #architecture | The forces in architecture

The forces in architecture / Alejandro Aravena
TOTO, Tokyo : 2011
199 p. : il., planos.
Texto en inglés y japonés.
ISBN 9784887063204
Materias:
Biblioteca Sbc Aprendizaje A-72 ARAVENA FOR
OPAC Millennium

After studying at the Catholic University of Chile, Alejandro Aravena (b 1967) established his own firm in 1994. Since 2006, Aravena has served as Executive Director of Elemental S.A., a non profit company with social interest working in projects of infrastructure, transportation, public space and housing, partnering with the Catholic University of Chile and COPEC (Chilean Oil Company). His architectural projects include the Easter Island High School, a Montessori School, the Garib House, a Medical School, the Siamese Towers, the Pirehueico House, the School of Architecture, the Verbo Divino School all in Chile.

What informs the form of a project?

We spend a lot of time identifying and designing the right question (not just the answer) that a project is expected to solve (there is nothing worse than responding well to the wrong question).

In a projects equation, there are some terms that are unavoidable. Like gravity or nature. Gravity its a fact and as a consequence our projects weight. Nature works with different magnitudes and as a consequence we try not to loose the big picture in our projects. Both of them introduce atavistic, primitive forces that impose a certain discipline to forms. They work as filters against arbitrariness. We like that.

But even if counterintuitive, there are other forces in architecture that are much stronger and it is better to agree with them. One of those forces is the strength of daily customs and everyday life – the search for the shortest distance across a field that a shortcut offers, the search for a nice morning light for a bedroom or the possibility to darken it at night, the proliferation of curtains that try to reduce undesired glare in curtain-wall office spaces that may be too modern for eyes that haven’t changed in millenniums – are traces of the force of customs.

All these forces should inform the form of architecture (and if not taken into consideration, they transform it anyhow). This exhibition documents these forces in play.

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