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I will adding to this as I write it... I thought some of you might want to follow along with its development. Feel free to post recommendations or edits on grammar and content, realizing that this is intended to be an AIA/CRAN Position Paper that is being developed with in CRAN. Also, I would ask you to keep your comments to constructive criticisms... Thanks Dave AIA/CRAN White Paper : Architecture must be judged Style Blind Introduction ' This is born from a Position Paper* drafted by Duo Dickinson, Jeremiah Eck, Michael Griffith and myself David Andreozzi, during the Spring of 2010 in where eight points were derived to challenge the entire paradigm of the current state of architecture and the eroding role of an architect. It was our goal to reinvent the Architect. The eighth and final point of this paper states that "The NAAB and the AIA should advocate for inclusive diversity in education curricula and publication." It was decided by AIA/CRAN to develop the position into a more descriptive position that CRAN can support, and promote from within to have the AIA at large support. A century long love affair with modernity combined with a desire to create star architects have morphed our profession into celebrating architecture, that at times goes so for to the extreme that it begins to ignore building codes, fails to adequately satisfy program requirements, and encourages state of the art experimentation over proven technology, in order to proclaim invention over creating architecture. We live in a time of starchitects that design sculpture with secondary program placed upon it, and we all celebrate this as good. It can be argued that our current paradigm actually discriminates against history, environmental scale, and individual culture in architecture in whole.
All architectural archetypes can be good including, but not exclusive to, modern, traditional, and every formal and interpretive variant between. Amongst this backdrop, a new emerging paradigm is inventing itself, a new genesis! An architectural order that relearns and reapplies the historic code of the architectural genome, Vitruvius's ultimate synthesis as a backbone to good architecture, "Commodity, Firmness, and Delight," but then adds to this matrix two more; Vernacular, in respect both cultural and topographic, and Regionalism in respect to natural resources and labor. "Green" without the commercial gain. "Green" because it's right and fundamental to the architectural process. It is a new architecture based on an age old formula that suggests that the local materials, culture, and ideologies form the architectural building blocks to true idiosyncratic regional design.
Architecture must be judged, Style Blind, on content over style. *Original Position Paper: is
H E R E -------------------------------------------
David Andreozzi AIA
Andreozzi Architects
Barrington RI