Download
1 / 34
E N D
Peter Grimesopera by Benjamin Britten and Montagu Slater, 1945Balstrode:Grimes, since you’re a lonely soulBorn to blocks and spars and ropesWhy not try the wider seaWith merchantman or privateer?Peter: I am a native, rooted here.Balstrode: Rooted by what?Peter: By familiar fields,Marsh and sand,Ordinary streets,Prevailing wind
Bill Brandt, Aldeburgh Beach ‘I am firmly rooted in this glorious country. And I proved this to myself when I once tried to live somewhere else.’ Benjamin Britten
Today man is mainly educated in pseudo-analytic thinking, and his knowledge consists of so-called “facts”. His life, however, is becoming ever more meaningless, and ever more he understands that his “merits” do not count If he is not able to “dwell poetically”. “Education through Art” is therefore more needed than ever before, and the work of art which above all ought to serve as the basis for our education is the place which gives us our identity. Only when understanding our place, we may be able to participate creatively and contribute to its history.Christian Norberg-Schultz, conclusion to Genius Loci
‘Northmens thing made southfolks place’James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939‘Architecture need do no more, nor should it ever do less, than assist man’s homecoming.’Aldo van Eyck
Critical Regionalism‘How to become modern and return to sources; how to revive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization.’ Paul Ricoeur‘The fundamental strategy of Critical Regionalism is to mediate the impact of universal civilization with elements derived indirectly from the peculiarities of a particular place. It is clear from the above that Critical Regionalism depends upon maintaining a high level of critical self-consciousness. It may find its governing inspiration in such things as the range and quality of the local light, or in a tectonic derived from a peculiar structural mode, or in the topography of a given site.’Kenneth Frampton, ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six points for an architecture of resistance.’ 1985
Today I cannot imagine any other desirable view of the future than an ecologically adapted form of life where architecture returns o its early, biologically-derived Functionalist ideals. This architecture must again take root in its cultural and regional soil; it could be called Ecological Functionalism. … My understanding of this view implies a paradoxical task for architecture to become more primitive and more refined at the same time; more primitive in terms of meeting the most fundamental human needs with an economy of expression and mediating man’s relation to the world in an equally fundamental and literal way – and more sophisticated, in terms of adapting to the cyclic systems of nature, both in terms of matter and energy. Ecological architecture also implies a view of building more as a process than a product. It suggests a new awareness of time – architectural time and human time – in terms of recycling and responsibility exceeding the scope of individual life.’ p.189
J. B. Jackson,‘A Sense of Time, a Sense of Place’ (title essay)
‘Constable said he had deliberately given The Cornfield more ‘eye-salve’ than was usual with his Suffolk pictures, to make it appeal to public taste for the Picturesque. Various features which would have irritated local countrymen – a dead tree, a broken gate, a neglected flock of sheep – were designed to soothe urban tourist tastes.’ Stephen Daniels
Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space, 1999 book of 1997 film‘The provincial feel of England belies the UK’s status as one of the most internationalised, deregulated economies in the developed world.’
‘There are people who do not like a place because it is associated with some ominous moment in their lives; others attribute an auspicious character to a place. All these experiences, their sum, constitute the city. It is in this sense that we must judge the quality of a space – a notion that may be extremely difficult for our modern sensibility. This was the sense in which the ancients consecrated a place, and it presupposes a type of analysis far more profound than the simplistic sort offered by certain psychological interpretations that rely only on the legibility of form.’ Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 1966
Ecocriticism, 2000‘For the first time it is possible to see both the continuity and the variety of the traditions in which ‘green thinking’ has emerged within literary culture.’ Jonathan Bate‘It isn’t language that has a hole in its ozone layer’ Kate Soper
Architecture’s ecocriticism?1996/1999‘Out of these views, of sympathy, of awe, of the usefulness of nature, comes slowly the attitude that we now call green or ecologically aware. Present in thoughts and deeds a hundred or more years ago, it has only in the last few years assumed centre stage. Many have contributed to it, some of whom in architecure at least have long been seen as irrelevant and backward looking.’
2001‘In recent times, the architecture/nature discussion has encouraged a dual response: architects have built in the image of nature – a token environmentalism – while environmentalists have focussed too narrowly on the technologies of ecology and sustainability, invariably without paying sufficient attention to spatial and visual issues. In this book, Hagan argues for a new relationship between architecture and nature, a contract that renegotiates the tension between environmental processes and their formal consequences.’Mohsen Mostafavi
