The thrall of images
Images in the 20th century had a unique power, where image became divorced from reality. Among architects, photographs of buildings in magazines became more important than the buildings themselves. Buildings were judged — at least by members of our own profession — more by the way they looked in magazines, than by the satisfaction people felt when using them.
Strong connection to user experience and user-interface design, although it seems the state-of-the-art in software is just not caring about UX; it doesn’t really have the image/ego component to it, at least not as pronounced as it seems to be in architecture.
A building design can unfold successfully only when its features “crystallize out” in a proper order. In order to be successful, each step of the unfolding creates new form that preserves the wholeness of the previously unfolded form, yet is rooted in common sense so that simple realities are adhered to. Land, sun, rooms, structure, all take their shape, in a coherent and well-adapted manner that guarantees living structure to the emerging whole.
The essence, in all cases of unfolding, is common sense. You want to make a house. At each moment, you ask yourself, What is the most important thing I have to do next, which will have the best effect on the life of the house? Then you do it.
In other words, many of the buildings we have inherited as icons of the modern movement are arbitrary, and do not — deeply — make sense at all. The wrongness of their form — of so many of the buildings of the 20th century, and including, in many cases, famous buildings of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Botta, Graves, and so on — becomes apparent in the fact that they cannot be generated by an unfolding process.
When you embrace steps that might otherwise be structure-preserving steps, preserving the land, entrance path, best daylight in the rooms, and almost every other practical matter or matter based on human feeling, you go in one direction, the direction of life; but to keep the image, instead you have to go all at once, from beginning to end, on the basis of an idea.
It is this intentional nature — the presence of arbitrary idea and image — which distorts the process, makes it not-unfolding, makes it contrived.
What I mean is that an unfolding process never runs at cross-purposes with the structure that exists, and is always consistent with the deep structure that exists. An unfolding process, by its nature, produces things that are alive. The image-driven process, by its nature, produces things which are dead.
#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/4 Structure-destroying transformations in modern society - the failure of unfolding#