The Revolution of Meaning in Urbanism
Towards an architecture of meaning. A proposal for a new agenda for world architecture, drawing its characteristics from ancient world architecture and poetry - combining narrative and cultural content with form. Such a paradigm could replace modernism and post-modernism in architecture, and then we won't understand why we saw urban alienation, empty formalism, and meaningless replication as inevitable fates
By: The Homeless
In architecture, what needs to be done is to publish information along the entire street about the person after whom the street is named, for example, excerpts from their work throughout their life, to give meaning to the place that stems from time, and not purely spatial meaning. Just as rituals give time a spatial meaning, a place in time, because there is no pure meaning, one that exists only on one axis.
Therefore, a house will be more homely if it has uniqueness, if there is, for example, a mural, whose cost is negligible compared to construction, or if family history is on the wall, of the ancestors, and the history of the building - if we know who lived there before, not necessarily their name but something about them, what they did, their story. And so the residents will not be erased but will be like ghosts around you throughout the city. And the city will be full of quotes from poems, everywhere, like in the ancient world where there was no wall without a painting or inscription.
The wall is too important to turn it white, which creates an erased consciousness, attention to garbage and not to culture. And if there is no previous history, then there should be themes for places - for example, a neighborhood of flowers and in each street specific flowers, explanations about them, knowledge about them both biologically and cultural references. Thus, architecture will not be anonymous, and will not deal only with form but with meaning. If not a machine for living, then a computer for living, and if not a computer for living, then a book for living.
The experience of a child growing up in such a place will be both unique and educational - imparting culture and science. For example, a neighborhood whose theme is scientists (or notable figures in any field). The uniqueness doesn't have to be in design but in writing and paintings. Paintings of scientists and illustrations of what they did. Or of flowers. Or the history of chemistry. Or of dance. Or a story or myth of the specific culture. Or the Iliad. Or War and Peace. We need themes, content, meaning, narratives, and not pure form. Cities empty of culture create lack of culture. This is the modern disaster.
At the very least, if one wants to remain in pure form, mandatory characteristics should be set for each neighborhood and city, so that there is no cacophony and there is a certain character to the place. Because locality means character. The mess in which modern buildings look as if they only thought about the level of the individual building and each building just tried to be original with its own aesthetics and they don't talk to each other uglifies almost every city in the world and gives a feeling of individualistic and egoistic capitalism that doesn't consider the environment - that is, it broadcasts an infantile aesthetic and ethical philosophy.
Architecture should be like poetry, because it combines content and form and knows how to submit to the specific and arbitrary characteristics of the language tradition and relate to them. Buildings need to rhyme with each other and relate to one another. Even at the level of the individual building, there is no rhyming of elements - in a building there should have been internal rhyme, and architecture students should have been taught poetry. The cacophony between buildings also spreads to the level of the individual building within itself, as well as the lack of content in the city and building - and entire cities are created without uniqueness, and streets without internal weight, and then the city dies urbanistically because everything is alienated. The first question that should be asked about a building is where is the internal and external rhyme, between which elements (shapes, angles, colors, volumes, etc.). An element cannot be just arbitrary without some rhyme - that's the ugliness. Therefore, we need to think about architecture not as frozen music, that is, not just as formalism, but as poetics in material - as in the ancient world that was a world full of architectural meaning. And then buildings would sing and cities would be poems.