Architecture "is" vs Architecture "becomes"

by Guillermina Chiu
These are my ideas , a response to a set of cultural , social and economical circumstances driving architecture in the construction of my mind.
Architecture is part of society , a nexus of human activity driven by personal politics ; often times, a social experiment which leads the subjects to a set of deliberate choices, choices we as architects make , how far are we willing to make people go ?
I’m interested in what architecture can “become”, not in what architecture “is”; although it seems that architecture “becomes” because “it is”, the “is of architecture” refers to permanent, timeless and unchangeable concepts, opposed to “becoming”. I find the idea of Architecture very different from the experience of Architecture, and I wonder what lies behind the paradox of all t he thinkers in Architecture and their work (i.e. Nouvel, Rotondi, Eisenman, Lyyn).

If Architecture is a morphing creature indeed, it can only “be” if it “becomes” it can only survive if it changes. Eric Owen Moss says in “Who says what Architecture is?” that for Sciarc, there is no surprise; it has no permanent friends or enemies in poetry, time or space.
In “To have or to be” (pp.21) Eric Fromm states the philosophical concepts of “being”. For the “scholastic realists” makes sense only in the idealistic conception that a thought is the ultimate truth , therefore and idea is more real than an experience. Can Architecture jeopardize experience ?

I would like Architecture to “become” a subject in which no one but Architecture would be the spectacle, a place in which space is the subject to be discussed, it could be anywhere: desert, sea, wasteland, wilderness, city, suburbia, virtual land…in the realm of imagination. “A drawing limits as much as it opens possibilities” (Edward Robbins)
from “Fame and the Changing role of a drawing” by Jon Goodbun and Katherin Jaschke (pp 51).

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