Friends,
I have been enjoying the conversation about why certain buildings (and not others) manage to survive throughout time and move us while others (of which, arguably, a disproportioned number are modern and postmodern examples) don't. The issues of beauty, emotion, aesthetics, and so on have been appropriately brought up as reasons for such success (or lack of). I would like to add a couple of comments to this conversation.
One is that this is an area of scholarship in which I have been working on a while and therefore I may be able to (humbly) share what i have learned. For example, I conducted a survey of close to 2,900 people on 'extraordinary architectural experiences' (finished in 2008). Many findings have come out of it. One of them is that modern (and contemporary, neo or post modern) architectures seem to work better at critical (i.e., intellectual, logical, knowledge-based, judgmental, object-centered, etc.) and self-conscious (i.e., sharply detached, ego-driven) aesthetic levels. This is in big contrast to pre-modern architectures that tend to elicit more embodied (i.e., physical, scaler, visceral, neither object nor subject centered), emotional (i.e., feelings), and conscious (i.e., subtle, no-self centered) aesthetic responses.
Of course, these dualistic differences are less marked and clear than i make them sound ... It's not black or white. In other words, great modern/postmodern buildings (e.g., Mies' Barcelona Pavilion or Bilbao Guggenheim) easily transcend such dichotomy and deliver (according to the survey) life-changing experiences at the same level as Gizza Pyramids, the Pantheon, or the Alhambra. Sure enough, poor pre-modern buildings fail to deliver the goodies too. However, at a statistical level (i.e., a significant majority) the differences seem to hold. Interesting enough (but not too surprising), the architectural extraordinary appears to occur much more frequently in buildings dedicated to religious or sacred practices than not. For those interested in learning more on the survey and related work, visit:
http://www.faithandform.com/features/42_2_bermudez/index.php http://www.acsforum.org/symposium2010/works/bermudez.pdf My second point is that initial results from a pilot study of this matter that I am currently conducting using neuroscience (i.e., fMRI scanning and data analysis) do support the mentioned distinction. In other words, there is a biological (measurable) basis for the way certain architecturally designed variables affect us.
In the end, this is not rocket science. Modernity and its offspring postmodernity (despite the latter denial or criticism of the modern worldview) are a huge historical break that did away with millennia old methods of designing and buildings (that could be said to have 'organically' evolved to respond to us) and replaced them with rules, beliefs, technologies, aesthetics, and so on based on ideas, rationality, production, and functionality. The result: we got what we put in.
Don't take me wrong. I am not nostalgically advocating for going back to premodernity or some sort of post-modern pastiche. At their best, 'contemporary' buildings (i.e, the architecture of, roughly, the past 100 years) can do it just fine, thank you. The challenge is that most don't. Where to go, what to do? I think that the teachings/reflections of Juhani Pallasmaa suggest possible directions that move forward the modern project without surrounding to historicism.
I'd love to hear back from those interested in these issues.
Cheers!
-------------------------------------------
Julio Bermudez Assoc. AIA
The Catholic University of America, School of Architecture & Planning
Washington DC
-------------------------------------------