Dwelling, Community, & the Poetic Landscape | Design Build Timberframing, Orvieto Italy
This course investigates the layers of timeless connection between architecture and its inhabitants. Together and individually, we will set out to contemplate typologies of shelter, dwelling, cell, chapel, tent, and tabernacle. What happens when art engages not only the focal but also peripheral vision? Students will seek to apprehend the atmosphere, genus loci, or spirit of the place as they connect and respond to particular places.
Focused on the visual imagery, detached from social and contextual considerations, much of the architecture of our time - and the publicity that attempts to convince us of its genius– has an air of self-satisfaction and omnipotence. These buildings attempt to conquer the foreground rather than to create a supportive background for action and perception…Authentic works of art, however, remain suspended between certainty and uncertainty, faith and doubt. Architectural culture, on the threshold of the new millennium, would do well to nurture productive tensions: cultural realism and artistic idealism, determination and discretion, ambition and humility.
- Juhani Pallasmaa
