ABSTRACT
Rationalism is the metaphysical view that everything in reality is logically consistent with everything else in reality, and that this logical consistency can be grasped by the human mind because the human mind reflects the logical structure of reality. — Donald Palmer
On the longest view, modernism in philosophy starts out with Descartes’ quest for knowledge self evident to reason and secured from all of the demons of skeptical doubt. — Oxford Guide to Philosophy
Following Descartes, architects such as Laugier (1753) described the process of designing as one of decomposing a problem, solving these components, and then synthesizing these partial solutions into whole ones. They referred to this as the rational method. — Jon Lang
The rational became the moral and aesthetic basis of modern architecture. At this point … reason turned its focus on itself and thus began the process of its own undoing. Questioning its own status and mode of knowing, reason exposed itself to be a fiction. — Peter Eisenman
The rational method is most closely associated with the scientific method. It was embraced by pre-modern and modern architects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the route to legitimization and acceptance in a world that had come to value the utility of science above the arts. It promised to give architecture a rationally defensible footing and respectability as a quasi-science. Unfortunately, the rational method rejects the irrational, an important human dimension. It also fails to acknowledge the immeasurable – a significant part of our existence. Because of these limitations, and its reliance on “function” as the authority for form, the public vilified the barren modern architecture that resulted. The assault was relentless from all quarters. In response, some architects turned away from their reliance on rationalism, and embraced the merging of the mind and body in the form of phenomenology.
