#aaron betsky – @nickkahler on Tumblr

We have no place for rituals in either our daily lives or the buildings that house them. In the past, we built separate spaces for rituals: churches, grand bank buildings or eloquent city halls, monuments to the fallen… The easy answer would be to throw a classicist cloak over everything, squirreling daily life away into the poché while marking and framing important events with columns and colonnades. The opposite of the (rather expensive) traditionalist strategy would be to abstract everything, retreating into complete fluidity, limbo, and loss of meaning. We need something in-between.

Aaron Betsky, The Evil of Banality in Architecture, 2014

#aaron betsky #evil #ritual #life #building #church #bank #city hall #monument #classicism #cloak #poche #column #colonnade #opposite #expensive #tradition #traditional #limbo #loss #meaning #banal #banality #architecture

nickkahler

The biggest, most overwhelming problem in architecture is how bad the vast majority of buildings—designed by licensed architects and constructed not just in this country, but also around the world—truly are. By bad, I mean that they are wasteful of our natural resources, both in their construction and their operation; that they imprison us in spaces that reinforce social separation and hierarchies and isolate us from the world; that they perpetuate existing power structures in everything from gender definitions to the uses of capital; that they make power, whether financial or political, real and difficult to tear down; and, finally, that they are ugly, numbing to the eye, mind, and soul.

Aaron Betsky, The Evil of Banality in Architecture, 2014

#aaron betsky #evil #architecture #bigness #design #world #problem #imprision #space #social #separation #hierarchy #waste #wasteful #natural resources #capital #power #politics #reality #soul #ugly #banal #banality

nickkahler

What we need is a shot of true beauty, and maybe a bit of nonsense.

Arron Betsky, Start Making Nonsense, 2014

#favorite #nonsense #aaron betsky #beauty #quote #criticism #making #make #shot #truth #architecture

nickkahler

The truth is that architecture is not made by or for “a wide spectrum of the population.” It is made for those who have the means to commission it, and reflects their values and priorities. If some architecture looks strange and is engaged in experimentation, it is because the only way architects have to make something that has a chance to escape from that affirmation of the social, economic, and political status quo is to make spaces that open up, forms that question or stretch our expectations, and buildings that build in delights, from amenities to visual pleasures, that the clients do not necessarily need—though they may desire them in the end. Beauty of a deep and satisfying kind is what good architects often have to sneak into commissions. Architecture, in other words, is either the dull affirmation of what we have, or it is an attempt to make our world better. It succeeds not by DNA-based forms or mystical appeals to the tastes of the public, but through hard work in the real world.

Aaron Betsky, The New York Times Versus Architecture, 2014

nickkahler

Aaron Betsky, MVRDV: The Matrix Project, 2002

"The notion that our reality is the outward appearance of data is a Platonic idea that recently has been given a new lease on life through the interpretations of scientific research that seems to continually question the material reality of anything we apprehend. Instead of only seeing the shadows of a real world, it seems we experience only electronic impulses acting on our nerve endings. It is now generally accepted that both solid form and the void are nothing but different states of energy - as we are as human beings. The only things that have eluded our ability to quantify all of our reality have been precisely those postulates that we derive from our attempts to reduce everything we know to calculable bits but cannot make real. These are the zero-conditions of God, consciousness, and the absolute state of non-being before, after or outside of reality."

#aaron betsky #plato #matrix #MVRDV #quote