Architectural Space

It was very satisfying reading Zevi’s article about space as the protagonist of architecture. He gave the most cogent criticism of mainstream architectural discourse I have ever read. I greatly appreciated the fact that he pointed out that the purpose of architecture is not its relationship to some perceived socio-cultural-historical context. Architecture is about building and spacemaking, and should be judged by the success or failure of that space. This, to me, encapsulates my belief that architecture should not need justification, a theme I seem to be coming back to more and more. A building succeeds or fails on what is built and has physical form. As is made apparent in the excerpt from The Oneiric House, buildings are ultimately to be inhabited, and in both Zevi’s and my own opinion, the spatial character of a building is ultimately the most important factor in determining the experience of inhabitation. Tschumi’s article, in contrast to Zevi’s did not strike a chord with me at all. I was irritated and angered by his characterization of architecture as having value through uselessness. Certainly, a building should be pleasing, but that pleasure comes from a function that is given shape and form and made pleasurable. I would not even characterize art as useless. I would say that something useless could only be called trash, and celebrating uselessness seems to me to be reveling in decay.