How Architecture Tells – Oro Editions – Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design

Architecture

How Architecture Tells

“The architecture of the era became unleashed, fettered only by the limits of materials and imaginations.”

9 REALITIES THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY YOU SEE

On entering a soaring stone cathedral for the first time, we are likely to receive the message the architect intended: you are small, you should feel humble; this vast space is the home of something powerful. Early movie palaces conveyed an equally clear message: for a small amount of money, for at least a few hours, you will be entertained as if you were royalty. Similarly, an old-fashioned chrome-laden diner sent the message (after the 1918 pandemic): “We’re clean and free of germs. You can eat safely here.” All seriously designed architecture is trying to tell us something. We don’t even need to know explicitly what that message is.

Somehow, almost invisibly, we sense that we are being told where to go and, to some extent, how we should feel.

Architecture tells us how to use it with its own silent language. Instead of words, we sense intention: “Go here,” or “Pause here and reflect,” or “Here is the entrance you are looking for.”If we learn to “read” that language, we begin to become literate in architecture. And, with that skill, we can better understand the world we’re living in, and, if the architect is clever, understand their wit and even their jokes.

“A manifesto for architecture for the 21st century, Steinberg presents the 9 realities that every architect and constituent would benefit from”

When new eras begin, architecture tends toward the utopian. China, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, began to internalize its recent and astounding financial growth. The architecture of the era became unleashed, fettered only by the limits of materials and imaginations.

Tianjin is the fourth largest city in the country and the largest coastal city in northern China. For the Tiefangnanlu Development Competition, we unleashed ourselves. The district, when we began, was the old automobile center of the city, where one could buy a new or used car, get any kind of part, and have repairs from the highest quality down to guys bashing out dents on street corners.

We were inspired by the first waves of romantic automotive design — the 1920s with their lavish use of brass and leather, and then the postwar era, which unleashed land-yachts of fantastic displays of chrome and color. And we were inspired by winding roads, the most beautiful kinds of journeys that only the automobile made possible.

We were also driven to undo the vast damage across the planet that the automobile revolution had wrought: air pollution, congestion, and the demise of coherent urban life. We wanted to create a new space where the automobile could be becoming transformed into something compatible with the celebration of human needs for community, beauty, recreation, and green space.