Architecture Beyond Experience
is an interdisciplinary work in the service of one goal: the bringing
about of a more relational, 'posthuman' and yet humanist strain in
architecture. It argues against the values that currently guide much
architectural production (and the larger economy's too), which is the
making, marketing, and staging of ever more arresting experiences. The
result, in architecture, is experientialism: the belief that what gives a
building value, aside from fulfilling its shelter functions, is how its
views and spaces make us personally feel as we move around it.
This
thought provoking essay argues it's time to find a deeper basis for
making and judging architecture, a basis which is not
personal-experience-multiplied, but which is dialogical and relational
from the start. In this context, the word relationaldescribes an
architecture that guides people in search of encounter with (or
avoidance of) each other and that manifests and demonstrates those same
desires in its own forms, components, and materials. Buildings are
beings. When studying architecture, they teach as well as protect; they
tell us who we were and who we want to be; they exemplify, they deserve
respect, invite investment, and reward affection. These are
social-relational values, values that both underlie and go beyond
experiential ones (sometimes called 'phenomenological'). Such relational
values have been suppressed, in part because architects have joined the
Experience Economy, hardly noticing they have done so. Architecture Beyond Experience provides the argument and the concepts to ultimately re-centre a profession.