Day 42 of the 100 Day Studio: In premodern times, the notion of alterations and ruinations in architecture were integral to the life of a building. The pieces of buildings that would wear or modify had a romantic, incidental quality to them. A place of incident would be created by an unconscious event, absent of design, that came to pass merely through chance and the passing of time. Once these different layers of time meet, a made place becomes a found place. These found places are particularly present in medieval structures. This was a time that the notion of a complete building, as introduced by Alberti, was not present yet. Structures would be built addition by addition, from builder to builder, while at the same time having pieces removed through weathering, use or war. A built structure would consist of intended segments, rational designs, pieced and layered together with the incidental places in between that occurred over time. This mix of the formal and the informal allowed for places of order and grandeur and places of incident and intimacy. This constellation of the formal and the informal is much like the workings of a classical garden, where the formal villa is followed by a cultivated garden which in turn is followed by the natural landscape. Together, these describe the sequence from the rational to the natural while always allowing for the two entities to reflect upon each other. Is it possible to read a house or a city as such, with places of formal intent and places of informal incident? Bringing with them, like the classical garden, conditions of rational structure and of romantic entropy.
100 DAY STUDIO
The 100 Day Studio is a new series of online lectures, interviews, building tours and panel discussions, organised by The Architecture Foundation. For 100 weekdays from Monday April 6th 2020 to Thursday August 27th 2020, the 100 Day Studio will host many of best architects and architectural thinkers in the world, broadcast live and uploaded here on this channel. The curriculum for the week ahead will be announced each Friday at architecturefoundation.org.uk/news/100-day-studio
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