Architecture

Building design, aesthetics, and engineering.

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How Mouthwash Studio make creative decisions across the multi-media landscape | Alex Tan

gabriel

Image

(("JP")

We'll speak about the architectural imagination.

And I'm going to suggest that some concept like the imagination

is necessary if we want to treat architecture as a mode of knowledge.

The classical philosophers said, the soul

never thinks without phantasm, which is to say that thought needs a material

image, something to carry the thought.

So we begin to think of the imagination as bridging the gap between perception

and understanding.

source: HarvardX GSD1xThe Architectural Imagination

I find an interesting parallel here to the ideas James Scott proposes in Seeing Like a State (which we covered back in RE #4): a top-down, central planning-style of design can't effectively predict the diversity of user needs. It turns out, contra to the "expert architect", that the users know best what they need from their space. And often even... See more