ABSTRACT
Buildings are usually regarded and conceived as material objects of differing degrees of functional, organizational and formal complexity. The design process is normally understood as a conceptual and rational problem-solving task, which develops towards an aesthetic resolution through a distinct rational design logic. Yet, architecture is a hybrid and “impure” discipline, as its practice contains and fuses ingredients from conflicting and irreconcilable categories, such as material structures and mental intentions, engineering and aesthetics, physical facts and cultural beliefs, knowledge and dreams, means and ends. This internal complexity is characteristic to architecture, and it calls for specific methods and approaches, which combine rationality and emotion, logic and intuition, scientific reasoning and embodied artistic creativity. Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), the Finnish master architect, acknowledges the complex and contradictory essence of architecture, and assigns the main role in the design process to an artistic synthesis.
In every case [of creative work], opposites must be reconciled [...] Almost every formal assignment involves dozens, often hundreds, sometimes thousands of conflicting elements that can be forced into functional harmony only by an act of will. This harmony cannot be achieved by any other means than art.
(Aalto, 1997a)