5 minute read
Sensitive architecture
Next Article
Sensitive architecture
Between the user and the habitants
Between the architect and the user there is only one line that separates them, and another that sews them into a canvas that is embroidered in the present continuous tense. There are, perhaps, many types of users who inhabit the site to degrade it or to appreciate it. Or, seen from another angle, the site itself forces them to use it in a particular way or even expels them as if they were strangers. As if the place had a conscience and it is actually a mental externalization of its “user” who uses it or misuses it.
How many types of users make up the myriad categories for an increasingly divided world of exuberant ideologies. Or, how many types of places make up the unfinished ocean of spatialities designed by human beings to exist when it comes to using it. Because that’s what a user is. Someone who uses something for something. The question is, what happens when you stop using it? Not only with the place, but also with the user himself. Perhaps the space designed to be lived deserves to be reduced to the action that its use implies. Since everything that is used is also thrown away. And everyone who uses is used too. When we drive a car, we are using it, at the same time the car uses us so that we can drive it and the existence of both objects can make sense. The human being as an object of use and the car as a usable object. The same thing happens when space is designed for life. It is used and discarded and it uses us and discards us too.
Between the user and the habitants
Between the architect and the user there is only one line that separates them, and another that sews them into a canvas that is embroidered in the present continuous tense. There are, perhaps, many types of users who inhabit the site to degrade it or to appreciate it. Or, seen from another angle, the site itself forces them to use it in a particular way or even expels them as if they were strangers. As if the place had a conscience and it is actually a mental externalization of its “user” who uses it or misuses it.
How many types of users make up the myriad categories for an increasingly divided world of exuberant ideologies. Or, how many types of places make up the unfinished ocean of spatialities designed by human beings to exist when it comes to using it. Because that’s what a user is. Someone who uses something for something. The question is, what happens when you stop using it? Not only with the place, but also with the user himself. Perhaps the space designed to be lived deserves to be reduced to the action that its use implies. Since everything that is used is also thrown away. And everyone who uses is used too. When we drive a car, we are using it, at the same time the car uses us so that we can drive it and the existence of both objects can make sense. The human being as an object of use and the car as a usable object. The same thing happens when space is designed for life. It is used and discarded and it uses us and discards us too.
When does each case happen? When compatibility of use is not an answer or at least a coincidence. Because space is a permanent relationship with human existence of abuse or moderation and either case subsists to protect the logic of a changing and random reality and, therefore, complex and dichotomous. The use of space is submitted to the user and this is an exchange and an extension, at the same time, an eternal duality.
ARCHITECT-USER could be said to be two pragmatically inseparable words. But, life itself is full of users with and without architecture. Since its origins, human beings were great users of every object and circumstance that they discovered useful for their survival purposes. Although these goals, most of the time, were not consciously seen. I am referring to the heuristics of the act itself. To the very discovery of the usability of “something” for its transcendence in the future of the thinking, feeling and doing human being. So, architecture? Is it perhaps an object that is constructed, built or designed to be used only? Or, rather, it is an inherent companion to its user. Or, should that be it? Because the reality is that there are spaces that expel it with the coldness of a starless night. With the same luck, in the origin of homo sapiens he could have been expelled from a cave by a bear with an almost lethal roar. In that case, one would have to ask how many “deadly bears” there are currently in living spaces that expel their users.
Understanding architectural space in terms of usability means ceasing to perceive it as a sensitive void with memory and memory and consequently establishes the user as a body that uses that space to resolve physical and bodily needs, but does not perceive it in its completeness because the user is not a sensitive being. The human dimension is not a body that only uses, it is a body, an entity and a being. Three dimensions. The body that uses the objects, the entity that perceives them and the Being that feels them. And that trinity or triad defines a much broader concept. The “inhabitant”, a being who not only uses; It also constitutes his domicile, celebrates, venerates and elevates him and where the architectural space gives room for it.
