Present day teaching neglects the modern psychology of visual perception. Architects think of beauty as an additional virtue to a functionally useful object. Beauty is treated as an entity separate not only from function but also from expression. Architects of the 21st. century are working on assumptions that are new in the recent history of the field. They have come to realize that architecture is an expression of the human personality. But, if one looks at what they mean by personality, one finds too often that they take it to be the manifestation of what is fundamentally distorted in people. Present-day architects with their emphasis on action and their playful experimenting with materials, their preferences for elementary shapes and pure colors, are typical of the earliest phases of artistic activity. Architecture design cannot be effective without an appropriate notion of what architecture is for. If architecture is a way of dealing with life, in what particular fashion does it do so? One of the basic tenets of art and architecture is that of discovering the necessity of our lived experience. We want to awaken in the student of architecture many ways of reacting to the various aspects of life; to the multiformity of its appearance as well as the lawfulness of its principles; to the clarity of its order as well as the mysteries of its dreams. |
