Ephemeral eternity or eternal ephemerality?: 405 Rooms: an architecture school

Ephemeral eternity or eternal ephemerality?: 405 Rooms: an architecture school

Baalbergen, W.

Radman, A. (mentor)
Plomp, H. (mentor)
Boumeester, M. (mentor)

Architecture

Architecture

Delft School of Design

2013-04-18

In judging the middle to be a compromise, architectural practice has the tendency towards the extremes, producing rhetorical architectural gestures and self-fulfilling prophecies. After the coining of the term modernity in 1863 by Beaudelaire, as being the conjoining of the ephemeral and fleeting with the eternal and immutable Architecture has wavered from opposition to opposition. However oppositions, up to now, could not provide for satisfactory solutions. Whereas modernism still tried to conjoin the “ephemeral and the fleeting” conditions of modernity with the “eternal and immutable” conditions of architecture, postmodernism merely celebrated these conditions without even bothering to provide for answers. In that sense, both modernism and postmodernism as such can be regarded as tendencies towards extremes. Moreover modernism was even able to produce extremes within its own thinking. Hence functionalism claimed that every function could have its own single optimum. Thus the Raumplan provided many functions in an array of single optima while the Plan Libre, in its spatial redundancy, provided many functions, yet no optimum at all. In desperate attempts to catch up with their Zeitgeists, architects thus sought answers in polarities. Almost negativist like: If not A than B! Architects thus seem to avoid the middle. However, accepting that the truth might be somewhere in between, the middle - or the architectural oxymoron - could provide the best of both worlds. Thus creating buildings with more humble, multiple optima. The middle finally breaks with vertical thinking, which remained predominant in architecture, and taps into horizontal thought, which is thinking from difference rather than identity. Thus one could argue that the middle is even more radical than any extremity and in its shift from vertical to horizontal thought even the antithesis which, up to now, has been avoided.

ecology
modernity
multiple optima

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:3cf22a37-7c19-4871-8ad6-33376ca94a9b

2013-04-18

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2013 Baalbergen, W.