HABITATION - ABOUT THE PROJECT
Architecture should promise expectations
Man
most often deals with architecture in the setting where he
lives.
Is architecture a kind of
art? It
probably is not so important whether architecture belongs to art or not.
As it determines our lives, it is good to know something about
it. Being
interested in architecture, we can enrich our lives because every walk
round the town becomes a walk round the gallery. Architecture can exalt
the man and raise his hopes.
What to do with historic cores of the towns? Should they remain
an open-air museum or can we interfere into them?
There
are no general instructions. There are historic towns that should be left
in peace. Their enormous cultural value is in their unchanged
appearance. On
the other hand it is important that the town is not to become a museum but
it is also true that it must be alive. A natural and creative iniciative
of people on town formation must be expressed, or otherwise, even the most
beautiful town could estrange from its inhabitants.
How to do
it properly, it is still a secret.
What to say to the program of "humanization" of housing
estates? Does it only mean finishing the roofs or spraying new
colourful facades of pre-fab houses?
Most
residential areas are not worth a lot but even the worst ones that used to
bring some values are worth preserving. These areas have very good parks
and living inside the greenery, in the "park", that people discovered in
the 20th century, is a precious
invention. We
do not simply condemn pre-fab houses because it is not statistically
proved that the housing estates are generally worse than the centre of the
town. When we can at times hear about their ugliness, it is good to
knowthat there are even uglier ones than in our
country. Let's
not humiliate pre-fab houses by putting pseudocolourful caps on them. They
are not going to have them anyway. Even the pre-fab house does not deserve
to be humiliated.
What are you today, architecture?
The average dominates, worse works appear in the world but even the
good ones. However, it is still valid that beauty, quality, and usefulness
are the fundamental principles of architecture.
U3A, 10 December 2001
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