ARCHITECTURE AND ENDURANCE

 

"...all suprahistorical kinship of languages rests in the intention underlying each language as a whole - an intention, however, which no single language can attain by itself but which is realized only by the totality of their intentions supplementing each other: pure language."

- Walter Benjamin The Task of the Translator

 

A rudimentary palette of spatial and tectonic patterns have emerged from the history of urban civilization. As archetypal in origin, they are neither constrained by time period nor particular to culture. Though infinite in semantic realization, they are fixed in number. They are applicable to any environment where humans build.

In order to have meaning for its attendant inhabitants, an architectural conception must engage this primary palette. Meaning is manifest as value, whose currency is endurance. impoverished, it would thus appear, are the children of invented sources.

It is the sober architect who is therefore the critical translator: Beneath the syntax of an enduring creation an archetypal source is pursued, uncovered, and subsequently re-proposed. Meaning is sustained, and as such, the built artifact endures.

Failed built environments are those incapable of conveying meaning. The are the result of literal translation, facile abstraction or technological imperative. The first ignores the specificity of grammar. The latter two, by denying the value of endurance, operate outside the palette of archetypes.

The Post-War American landscape is replete with failed built environments. Literal translation of stylistic idiom fails to hide the absence of spatial cohesion in the suburb. Urban environments are the theater of technological license, functional indulgence and subjective expression. In both tectonic and spatial conception, vast tracts of the American city are beyond an archetypal source, and consequently, beyond human comprehension. The crisis of meaning in American life, whose manifestation is a generation characteristic for its discontent, is commensurate with the failure of this built environment.