ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN AND THEORY : critical essays
Material & Immaterial Architecture is an object, space, building, city… But architecture is also a thought, perception, experience, absence… However, these are not opposite qualities but complement each other. Material and immaterial are both parts of a whole. Architecture as a Profession The rights of an architect are defined by law. This sheltered area made it a profession from an occupation and professionalized it. But these laws are also an obstacle to his creativity. Because a building must be stable, legal and functional. Therefore, the architect adopts forms, materials and function, repeats himself continuously, and the space of his autonomy gradually becomes shrinked. The architect, who grew up with a functionalist doctrine, assumes that every action in a space has a reason for its use. Therefore, the users are passive and their needs are predictable. This situation makes the spaces of architect static. House and Home Home and house are different: one is related to objects and the other perceptions. From this perspective, architecture includes not only the production of the architect, but more than that. It is possible to discuss a house without thinking of the architect, since the immaterial and non-embodied exist in architectural practice. On the other hand, the discipline of architecture tries to make it impossible to think of the house without architecture by making the user passive and dependent on the space. For Whom the Bell Tolls Space of architect It is very possible to talk about a domino effect about these strategies: first an architecture discipline under the dominance of capitalism and the user then finally home under the pressure of architecture. Identification, bounding and creating a common image lie at the core of commodification. The definition
and the characteristics of a house and a good house and what a house is should be understood by everyone in a very common way so that sales strategies and the architecture market can continue to create itself and capitalism. Moreover, the diploma of architecture also assumed as a proof that the one knows well how the house represented as an image. Therefore, the architecture must be determinate, defined and rigid. These determinate and defined spaces are followed by patterns of behavior that are intended and expected to happen within these spaces. Here the space itself is programmed to use the user as a slave of his own. Just like the child, which is behaviorally coded by their parents according to the social norms of society, the things should do and should not do are dictated to the user by the space. For instance, urban benches can an example in this manner. They’re designed as uncomfortable to lay down in order to protect the benches from homeless occupation or in another case they’re designed no to sit too long. It sends a massage that move on, don’t sit and slow down, don’t waste your time... thus urban experience is generated with the speed. It is a kind of terroristic strategy. It has much more violence then homeless occupation within the urban environment. The bench kills itself. It disappears in order to destroy unnoted people. When the user reject codings emerging from the house, the house itself starts to alarm as a machine.
Jonathan Hill says in immaterial architecture, just as the generic use of the video recorder which starts to flash when there is a danger of distorting the picture: the user is reminded that he is about to be creative and urgently warned to return to the norm. Functionalism in this way eliminates multifunctionality and various possibilities. The user is positioned passive and undercontrol by the house which is permanent and static. The name of the living room is the living room in the same direction with the event expected to occur in that space that is based on seating and here users must accept the ownership of the space. ın this respect emptiness and dysfunction is dangerous for a materialized and commodified architecture. It positions the gap as a lack. Emptiness can be interpreted as the absence of boundaries, resulting in a freedom. In this way, architecture, which is an act of concretization and ordering by using the boundaries of a land, cannot exist in the indeterminacy of the void. Indeterminancy and the term lacking are positioned here as a negative for the discipline of architecture and urban planning Space of user Can it be possible to mention the place where the user has an active role and creative position besides the common solidified spaces of architectural discipline? At this point, we considered that “indeterminate” spaces in the city have serious potentials as “empty or lacking spaces”.
Terrain Vague, called by Spanish architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales in the 90s, is an “indeterminate area” that abandoned, idle and waste within the city. These areas of uncertainty embodied as a gap or crack in the hegemonic power system of the city; it forms an escape point in the process of creating places and events of the control mechanisms and understanding them in present time. Therefore terrain vauges, indetermined spaces are such an accessible and porous occupying area for subcultural groups that are outside the mainstream values of the society in which they live “together”. Spatial Practice: Berlin‘s Indeterminate Territories The Space of Subculture Berlin's occupied subculture spaces are typical of the Terrain Vague. Wars, devastation, a continuous population movement, administrative division and reunification… The sharp political transformations of Berlin during 20th century have brought about an authority vacuum. Thus, it has created some areas within the city that authority cannot control. These areas are abandoned buildings and open spaces, and over time they have become the places where subcultural groups have occupied and used them. In occupation spaces, the user chooses the tools he will use while shaping the space and starts to reveal his imagination. There are no property boundaries in these areas; spaces are not divided according to functions; there are no strict boundaries between public and private spaces. It is directly the user who produces the space and whatever he needs. In short, the user of the occupation space establishes a more direct relationship with the space than the user of the architectural space. It does not need an intermediary between him and space. An area that an intentional community uses for agriculture, a concert site for punk groups and a home for a homeless…They are all in the same area. Neighborhoods that are adjacent to each other in the usual spaces are intertwined in these spaces; the limits are removed, the thresholds become permeable.