ABSTRACT
Today’s most conspicuous architecture tends to be dominated by an emphasis on autonomous form. e current hunger for novelty, which values the often arbitrary, iconic image of individual buildings above their content or meaningful integration into the urban context, is in part the product of the nancial and instrumental concerns informing contemporary architectural practice. is condition also has roots in Romanticism, however, with its stress on the original creativity of the artist. is preoccupation, which tends to disregard the value of cultural continuity, history and specic urban traditions, is reected also in much of today’s architectural education. To counteract this problem, one of the most important questions which current pedagogy needs to ask is how best to engender in young architects a concern for the traditional communicative role of architecture. The recognition of the modern malaise of formalism, placelessness and the poverty of meaning has led in recent decades to a renewed interest in place-making and strategies of regionalism. ese explorations have been helpful, and reinforce this author’s conviction that to counteract the wide-spread tendency toward homogenization, aestheticism and banality, and to maintain its traditional ethical function, architecture must grow out of the given conditions of its
setting; it must be situated in and expressive of a particular physical and cultural context. In this sense, the setting or site must play a central role in informing the content and form of architecture and of the public realm. e question of the appropriate content for architecture – of the kinds of themes which it should communicate – only arose with the waning of the classical tradition in the late eighteenth century, and is a characteristically modern issue. It is now often framed in terms of the original invention of the artist-architect. is modern emphasis often throws up the problem of the legibility of meaning. A conceptual, invented narrative – no matter how elaborate – fails to produce the pleasurable sense of deep recognition which an architecture situated in a shared background can evoke. is is because individual creativity, no matter how inspired, is only a poor substitute for the rich cultural memory which over time is sedimented in the situations which articulate the shared background, the world of human experience.1 e history of ideas and architectural tradition must play an essential role in helping to identify the kind of themes architecture and the public realm should communicate to be meaningful, and to full their essential function – as did the civic buildings and communal spaces of pre-modern cities – of providing existential orientation to their inhabitants. e interpretative, hermeneutical approach, with its respect for tradition and its emphasis on the generative role of metaphor, is fruitful in this process.
