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Architecture should evoke community.
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The built environment should encourage social interaction. Architecture should compel people to serve common needs. Built form should connect to its context in a way which either induces or suggests activities of a society.
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The built environment should not only gather members of a social network, but entice them to perform either individual or shared activities. Architecture shouldn’t force social situations but should make us aware of one another’s presence. It should entice use and should read as so even in human absence. Architecture should always render spaces which are not owned but are shared. It should generate sensitivity toward an individuals affect on (and existence within) a social framework. Architecture should create feelings of commonalities and combined efforts which drive the “social machine.” It should allow individuals to feel that they always have a role in this machine (even if it alters) – the shopkeeper, the customer, the nosey neighbor, the teacher, the student, the delinquent, the child, and the parent. This environment should allow for both a crossing and a connection of social networks which we may adhere and revisit for support when our role in society seems trivial in contrast. Community can identify us while architecture can embody it.
1 comment:
at the core of your ideas is the notion of community which, as you probably already know, can be extremely difficult to define... how do you define community?
i believe that you are defining the characteristics of it in the following paragraphs... although, i wonder how the connection to context is suggestive/inductive of community?
your final statements (9+) have to do with the character of the architecture to create some character or condition of good "communal" living: interaction, sharing and upkeep of public spaces, commonality, overlapping of social networks, etc. but, how - ultimately - do they help to create, maintain, encourage the notion of "community"?
see? everything is dependent on how you define that term... but, i think that there is something (refreshingly) very straightforward about your approach and ideas.
you also introduced the "social machine" concept... how do you define that? is there a way to restate that without relying on that term? (again, for clarity's sake)...
the image [of the roof], incidentally, speaks greatly about the direction... i'm still not sure how it defines "community." [not to be like a broken record...]
so....
i'm curious as to what you got out of the exchange of ideas the other day... what program was suggested for you? what program are you interested in? etc.
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