…”The present work argues that modern architecture, and the crisis it faces, has its roots in a historical process touched off by the Galilean revolution, a process whose development is marked by two great transformations, the first of which occurred toward the end of the seventeenth century, and the second, toward the end of the eighteenth.
In the first transformation, the assumption, which had been inherited from medieval and Renaissance cosmology, that number and geometry were a scientia univeralis, the link between the human and the divine, was finally brought into question by philosophy and science. At the same time, technique and the crafts were freed from their traditional magical associations. In architecture, this laid the basis for a new approach. Architects began to consider their discipline a technical challenge , whose problems could be solved with the aid of two conceptual tools, number and geometry.
But in the eighteenth century, the transcendental dimension of human thought and action was sustained through the myth of Divine Nature. This myth lay at the root of Newtonian natural philosophy. The eighteenth century rejected as fiction the closed geometrical systems of seventeenth-century philosophers, but accepted Newton´s empirical methods as universally valid. The influence of Newton paved the way for the systematization and mathematization of knowledge, a knowledge that held that immutable, mathematical laws could be derived from the observation of natural phenomena, and that would eventually take on the form of nineteenth-century positivism. Implicit in eighteenth-century Newtonianism, though to the modern mind it may seem thoroughly empiricist, was a Platonic cosmology, usually complemented by some form of deism, in which geometry and number had transcendental value and power in and of themselves. Architectural theory absorbed the fundamental intentions of Newtonian science, and in doing so, it sidetracked earlier developments…”
Alberto Pérez-Gómez. The Rational Horizon, extracto incluído en "Architecture and the Crisis of the Modern Science". Cambridge. MIT Press 1983
Render complementario tomado de la web: MAD, propuesta para el Museo Nacional de China, 2012
Seleccionado por el arq. Martín Lisnovsky
"We have decided to address these issues by approaching innovation through a slightly alternative emphasis: as an activity that generates vitality. This gives an experiential edge to the notion, allowing us to focus less on the 'new' or on what innovation is per se, than on what we do, how we do it, and the value it offers to our individual and collective experience (as a kind of raison d'etre). By attending to some of the tactics and strategies that can be found across a range of innovative practices, our intention is to highlight practice over product, and provoke questions about the ethical dimensions therein.
Vitality, the state of being vigorous and active, invokes notions of the seed that, with supporting humus, nutrients, sunlight and irrigation grow into a plant yielding the future seeds. Conceptual and technological inventions only become innovations when the conditions are right for lateral shifts and take-up in unanticipated contexts - windborne seeds blown to new gardens. Given the right conditions, inventions connect apparently separate ideas, materials or components and bring them into fresh concert - where they resonate with each other and things beyond themselves, forging the pathway to innovation: a vital difference to linear and predictable progression. This spread of resonances becomes a contagious 'newness' that conveys a living pulse. In these ways, vitality is always about collective or field conditions, pertaining to ecologies of material, social, economic and often imaginary interrelations (to name a few dimensions of the field) - the sustaining ingredients for innovation. Innovation in this light involves a sense of connection to a creative collective force beyond 'oneself' as creative individual. Such a vital force, evidenced in contributions across this issue, operates as the flip side to the various opposing forces of disconnection between creative individual and collective context such as depression, alienation and loneliness..."
Extracto del artículo:
The Innovation Imperative. Architectures of Vitality.
Pia Ednie-Brown, Mark Burry y Andrew Burrow
Introducción del número de la Architectural Design de Enero-Febrero del 2013: The Innovation Imperative. Architectures of Vitality
Seleccionado por el arq. Martín Lisnovsky
Fotografía del Louvre Lens tomada de la web. Autor: Jean Christophe Hecquet
