INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION:

As our world continues to progress and develop, notions of mere aesthecisation start to take over. Architecture has become almost entirely centred around vision. Visual culture has caused architecture to lose its wholistic value, and lead to its emphasis being merely placed on its visual appeal. Buildings have become externally viewed and admired rather than lived as an inseparable part of our awareness and sense of life. The following thesis is a theoretical investigation that seeks to find meaning beyond the visual values and aesthetic characteristics of architecture and explores precedents in which vision has either dominated architecture or supported it in enhancing the human existential experience.

This thesis begins by discussing the dominance of vision in our modern world. Explaining the deteriorating visual fixation and the need for a wholistic architectural experience as the world is a result of collective lived experiences. To find the cause of this shift of emphasis on what appeals to the haptic eye, it was essential to look back at the line of history to trace back significant periods in which vision has affected our perception of architecture.

Starting from the introduction of perspectival tool in the renaissance, and onto the discovery of movement representation. Moving forward in time to a rather tough period of the 20th century World War II, where the bigger urban scale is explored through ideas of modernity and post-war examples. It discusses the replanning of the city based on a new vision-based image and giving it a new identity. Moving on to adaptations of Postwar damages through embracing and celebrating remnants of bombings which changed people’s perception on wars and defeat, doing so through an analysis of Aldo Van Eyck’s playgrounds in Amsterdam. It later discusses the powerfulness that architecture needs to maintain in providing humans with historical archaeological continuum. And finally ending the research with exploring the smaller scale of the Scandinavian architectural approach in relation to connection with space.