Spent the afternoon at the Future Cities exhibition at the Barbican Centre.
Well before that I actually spent two hours and something in trying to fight my way through Transport of London's engineering works. I must admit I'm still far from being a black belt in transportpicking-foo.
Anyway, Barbican. Barbican Centre is a strange place ya know. Beautiful (well, at least interesting, with fountains and all) if seen from outside, or just passing by, it becomes truly a nightmare if you have to experience it. But the exhibition was good. Quite expensive (but you can save a couple bucks if you book online) but definitely interesting: a tour through fifty years of provocations, ideas, and dreams of architects from all over the world.
Among others, I've been impressed again and again by Shigeru Ban's Paper Log House and the Yokohama International Port. But I found also the SuperStudio and Archizoom (both Italian architect groups) quite interesting from the radical/provocation point of view.
The Organic Architecture always puts me in a difficult position: in one way I find it beautiful; on the other hand I can't really imagine myself living inside an earth womb. Maybe we could use those shapes but with different materials (steel, glass...)? Hmmm... much much better, I can imagine it now... but at that point it wouldn't be really sustainable/renewable probably...
Luckily enough, Francesca was there giving a pace to the visit, or I'd have been thrown out of the exhibition late at night.
During a conversation on the topic thereafter, I discovered how it's hard to share the idea that a space should be built with aestetic in mind... after all, it was Wright who argued that form and function are one. Brilliant. So for instance a practical form will be required for practical functions, like offices or even homes in a sense. But that doesn't mean it has (or can) be also ugly: as we can infer that an ugly form will ineherently lead to an ugly function ;)
So we have aesthetic as a kind of meta-architecture or, better, a prerequisite to architecture itself: architects should definitely be free to deliver their personal message, but through a conduct, a pipe defined by aestethic principles aimed at providing the best "user experience" (unless the architect wants deliberately to create a monster, in which case he's sick and needs mental care).
The problem is, what is cute or not is higly a matter of subjective tastes. And hardly definable in objective terms.
So probably we should look for laws and "all-comprehensive", inconfutable truths. And this is the hard part: we know that a body released in proximity of Earth's surface will accelerate toward at about 9.8 m/s^2, and that's valid for everything and everybody... but is there anything similar that applies to sensory-emotional cause-effects? Well, that's exactly the field of aestethics if I'm right.
So that could be a good starting point.
Unluckily enough my knowledge on the matter is almost zero... what I know is that greek philosphers went a long way to try and define beauty, and Aristotle identified order, simmetry, and... definition(?) as sources of beauty. Now that's definitely a great starting point but I have some doubts on it's "objectivity": for instance I don't believe so much in simmetry, finding it quite boring (after all if it's symmetric you can cut the image in half without loosing information)... and while sure to be in a minority I also know not to be alone in this "asymmetryc" idiosyncrasy.
Well, now I know philosophy went a long way in the meanwhile, so I'd like to try and catch up with it somehow. Any name/suggestion on where to start? (the quick route please ;) ).
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