Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space and place. This is my reformulation of Mies van der Rohe’s famous definition of Architecture: ‘Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.’ [1] Space, alone, is no more sufficient to describe the systemic complexity of architecture, which, at the beginning of a new era, is better understood…
I arrived at the conclusion that whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion. Split apart by the schizophrenic mechanism of determinist thinking, time and space remain frozen abstractions… A house should therefore be a bunch of places – a…
Images 01-02: Early study painting for the Vitra Fire Station, © Zaha Hadid Foundation (left). Encounter on the roof at the Vitra Fire Station, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (1990-1993), Weil am Rhein, DE, 17 April 1995 (right). Slideshow: Event-place — Encounter with and Celebration at the Messner Mountain Museum, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects (2012-2015), Plan de Corones, IT,…
Architecture creates spaces and modifies places for dwelling. That is my definition of architecture: a discipline primarily concerned with space, place, and dwelling, which is its ultimate scope. A discipline in-between the ideal (or mental) and the physical (or corporeal), the abstract and the concrete, actuality and potentiality, being and becoming. Spaces, which are ideal and abstract entities, can be…
During the first decade of the 2000s, I grew dissatisfied with the state of architecture, which had become overly focused on form, taking to the extremes the principles of postmodernism and deconstructivism that had shaped the architectural discourse in the previous century. With the definitive capillary diffusion of CAD technologies, since the early 2000s, or shortly before, new formal possibilities…