ABSTRACT
Architecture gathers meaning. It connects the things we process through our senses to our emotions and memories of other things (other moments, other places, etc.). The struggle (and what defines architecture) is in how you design something that will allow for these connections. You must be able to not only articulate the experience of senses, emotions, and memories tied to a site, but also understand how the architecture will open up the possibility of recognizing these. Kenneth Frampton, architect and historian, echoes this dilemma and offers a potential resolution:
The specific culture of the region—that is to say, its history in both a geological and agricultural sense—becomes inscribed into the form and realization of the work. This inscription, which arises out of “in-laying“ the building into the site, has many levels of significance, for it has a capacity to embody, in built form, the prehistory of the place, its archeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transformation across time. Through this layering into the site the idiosyncrasies of place find their expression without falling into sentimentality. 1
