The Act Of Creation And The Spirit Of A Place: A Holistic-phenomenological Approach To Architecture

摘要

Beginning in the 1960s with Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Aldo Rossi's The Architecture of the City, numerous books have described the failures of modern architecture. Some have focused on abstraction and alienation, finding modern buildings to be ill-sited, poorly-scaled, and generally miserable places to inhabit, problems many feel exist to this day. Architecture has continually generated new approaches to design, from systems building to semiology to postmodernism to deconstructivism, but none has led to a more humane architecture. Another line of thinking was proposed by Christopher Alexander in three seminal works in the 1970s. In The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language, and The Oregon Experiment, Alexander and his coauthors asked, "How was it possible that any simple farmer could make a house a thousand times more beautiful than all the struggling architects of the last fifty years could do?" Their answer was that vernacular buildings are assembled from traditional elements long used in given building types. Since these elements are as much events as objects, and since their relationships are more important than their dimensions, Alexander called them "patterns." More recently, Alexander has extended his ideas in another series of books beginning with The Nature of Order.