Architecture Beyond Experience

Michael Benedikt

ISBN 10: 1943532893 / ISBN 13: 9781943532896

Published by ORO Editions/Applied Research & Design 2020-07-13, 2020

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-NBN-9781943532896

Bibliographic Details

Title: Architecture Beyond Experience

Publisher: ORO Editions/Applied Research & Design 2020-07-13

Publication Date: 2020

Binding: Paperback

Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis:

Architecture Beyond Experience is an interdisciplinary work in the service of one goal: the bringing about of a more relational, ''posthuman'' and yet humanist strain in architecture. It argues against the values that currently guide much architectural production (and the larger economy''s too), which is the making, marketing, and staging of ever more arresting experiences. The result, in architecture, is experientialism: the belief that what gives a building value, aside from fulfilling its shelter functions, is how its views and spaces make us personally feel as we move around it.

This thought provoking essay argues it''s time to find a deeper basis for making and judging architecture, a basis which is not personal-experience-multiplied, but which is dialogical and relational from the start. In this context, the word relationaldescribes an architecture that guides people in search of encounter with (or avoidance of) each other and that manifests and demonstrates those same desires in its own forms, components, and materials. Buildings are beings. When studying architecture, they teach as well as protect; they tell us who we were and who we want to be; they exemplify, they deserve respect, invite investment, and reward affection. These are social-relational values, values that both underlie and go beyond experiential ones (sometimes called ''phenomenological''). Such relational values have been suppressed, in part because architects have joined the Experience Economy, hardly noticing they have done so. Architecture Beyond Experience provides the argument and the concepts to ultimately re-centre a profession.