ABSTRACT
The term technical imagination comes from the painter, Francis Bacon, who wrote, ‘Real imagination is technical imagination’. This essay takes this suggestion to examine the relationship between the techniques of building, of structure, construction and environment, and the conception of works of architecture. The historical and theoretical relation between technique and design is discussed by consideration of the contrasted arguments of Geoffrey Scott, in The Architecture of Humanism (1914), and Le Corbusier, in Techniques are the very basis of poetry, from his Buenos Aires lectures (1929). The investigation then moves on to studies of a group of significant late twentieth-century buildings that adopt quite distinct positions on the question. Piano and Rogers’ Centre Pompidou and Louis Kahn’s Yale Center for British Art represent opposite poles of the matter in relation to the modern art museum. Robert Venturi’s Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery in London offers a third approach to the same questions and Carlo Scarpa’s Castelvecchio Museum at Verona yet another. The essay proposes in conclusion that decisions of technique in architecture are primarily cultural and aesthetic matters that lie beyond purely objective, technical considerations.
