How Gaston Bachelard gave the emotions of home a philosophy | Aeon Essays
But when architecture falls out of sync with the conditions we live in, home begins to feel more and more precarious. The reason we dislike contemporary architecture is because it fails to achieve this essential purpose, to, as the architect Antonio Sant’Elia put it, “freely and audaciously harmonize man with his environment”.
Noah Putnam • The Concrete Oasis
architects are now taught to design houses, not homes, thus contributing to the uprooting that feeds into our growing inability to genuinely connect with the world. There is a “poetics of home”—linked to memory, emotions, dreams, identity, and intimacy—that functional architecture and “modern living” have foreclosed
Arturo Escobar • Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us. It requires that we open ourselves to the idea that we are affected by our surroundings even when they are made of vinyl and would be expensive and time-consuming to ameliorate. It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our
... See moreAlain de Botton • The Architecture of Happiness (Vintage International)
It was then I realised architecture is not about creating structures that are aesthetically pleasing or merely functional: it’s about designing spaces that evoke emotion and resonate with the human spirit. The Farnsworth House may have been a triumph of modernist design, but it lacked the warmth and humanity architecture should embody.