EXP3 - Mash Up

MashUp: Multi-functionality 

"Form follows function" had become modernity's ambitious manifesto and detrimental straigtjacket, as it liberated architecture from the decorative, but condemned it to utilitarian rigor and restrained purpose. 
But could a building be a about a completely different quality? Could it be about a system that is more collaboration, rather than isolation? 
If form follows fiction, we could think of architecture and buildings as a space of stories of the people that work in these buildings. And we could start to imagine the experiences our buildings create. 
Architecture works on the principle of a pendulum. On the one side is innovation, and architects are constantly pushing for new technologies. 
This is the thing about postmodernism and symbols. They're easy; they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places. 
And it means that buildings will twist to the whims of nature instead of the other way around. It means that no building is too small for innovation. 
Because architecture is not about math and is not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places we occupy. 
Our buildings are real; they're an explicit engagement in physical reality and conceptual possibility.
we could think of architecture as complex systems of relationships, both in a programmatic and functional way and in an experiential and emotive or social way.
And it's not any single system that makes the work. It's the relationship, it's the dynamics between the systems, which have the power to transform and invent and produce an architecture that would otherwise not exist.
We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. 


References:

https://www.ted.com/talks/thom_mayne_on_architecture_as_connection/transcript?language=en

https://www.ted.com/talks/marc_kushner_why_the_buildings_of_the_future_will_be_shaped_by_you/transcript?language=en

https://www.ted.com/talks/ole_scheeren_why_great_architecture_should_tell_a_story/transcript?language=en