The Perfect Home

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.

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”.

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 wal

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“emotional architecture”—a concept which also lends the title to this exhibition. According to Barragán, “It is very important for humankind that architecture should move by its beauty; if there are many equally valid technical solutions to a problem, the one which offers the user a message of beauty and emotion, that one is architecture.”

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