Architecture's Historical Turn

"I think that’s initially how Jorge Otero-Pailos intends it to be understood, as the lived experience of a person in relation to a building. The cast of characters that he’s looking at—the well-known postmodern architect Charles Moore, the architect and theorist Christian Norberg-Schulz, and others—are then trying to draw the association between lived experience and a cognitive conception; that is, some sort of intellectual understanding that arises out of lived experience. In some cases, that’s a kind of sensorial experience, but it can also be a sense of judgement based upon other inputs. These protagonists do again strongly prioritise the visual communication that is enabled through lived experience. But Otero-Pailos’ approach does also allow for the other sensorial dimensions of experience as well. This book gives us a way, I think, to think about modernism’s successor, postmodernism and postmodern architecture, in a broader and more complex way. Postmodern architecture as a style most often is reduced to historicist elements, so an architecture that depends upon and puts forward imitative forms of historical, largely neoclassical architecture. It also encompasses other forms of revivals, of historic forms of architecture, and assembles those into visual codes. These can be humorous and ironic, but they can also be very serious. Typically, these are visual codes that attempt to establish continuity with past modes of architectural expression. What this book says is that we shouldn’t think initially about historicist postmodernism. Rather, we should think about the fact that these architects were trying to understand physical experience, bodily experience, lived experience in relationship to architecture. This is a way to establish historical continuity—to see that the new forms of architecture in a contemporary moment could be drawing upon aesthetic experiences that were consistent over long historical spans of time. “Postmodern architecture as a style most often is reduced to historicist elements, so an architecture that depends upon and puts forward imitative forms of historical, largely neoclassical architecture.” According to Otero-Pailos, several of these architects argued that there were essential human experiences constructed by architecture, giving a particular sense of enclosure or movement, for example, and that these could be recapitulated over time in varying forms. So the buildings didn’t have to simply, literally repeat over a historical span. But then, an architect in 1960 and 1970 could be attempting to produce a sense of enclosure that echoed the work of an architect of the 18th or 17th century, precisely because both of them were trying to reflect an essential lived experience that was common over time and that we all share, even in different time periods. In pursuing this aim, these architects do emphasise the visual dimension of architecture. An architect may reproduce a lived experience, but the encounter with architecture is predominantly a visual one: what is designed, sculpted, shaped is movement, light, the unfolding of surfaces, and then, at a smaller scale, the play of visual codes of ornamentation across surfaces, to be interpreted not through a kind of abstract rationality, but rather by an actual person physically present in an encounter with the architecture"