Architectural Delight | Beyond the Style Wars
About 10 years ago, when involved with CRAN leadership, I helped lead a project with the board to produce a position paper that would celebrate all styles of good architecture, as long as they related to their context. The conclusion was a CRAN white paper that we used as a guiding message for style inclusivity for years. (Addendum 1 below)
Through the years I have continued to work on this theory, lectured on it as it relates to the Picturesque movement in the 1700's, and now further developed the message to include cultural sustainability. We started a new complimentary group, in alliance with all, no dues, just friends, and are planning a Zoomcast which will be starting soon. Check us out.
Sign up at www.architecturaldelight.org
And Instagram @architectural.delight
It's rewarding to think that our efforts here at CRAN can spurn future movements to spread our ideals.
Thanks,
David Andreozzi, Architect
Addendum 1
Contextual Sustainability:
The True Formula for Judging Good Architecture
Architecture should be judged according to Vitruvius's Ultimate Synthesis. A "recipe" to what defines all good architecture; a perfectly blended combination of Commodity, Firmness, and Delight. It is our job as architects to tweak these ingredients, but at some point the cake simple does not rise, or the structure is NOT architecture.
Upon this age old paradigm CRAN suggests viewing this Ultimate Synthesis in a new updated genesis. An architectural order that relearns and reapplies the historic code of the architectural genome-commodity, firmness, and delight- but then adds to this matrix two more elements: vernacular, both cultural and topographic, and regionalism, in respect to natural resources and labor. It is a new architectural order based on an age-old formula that suggests that local materials, culture, and ideologies form the architectural building blocks to true idiosyncratic regional design.
The debate over traditional and modern is set forth by architects and critics that are territorial to their own style preferences and unable to accept exclusivity. Contextual Sustainability is a style blind code to judge all architecture, traditional or modern...
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David Andreozzi AIA
Barrington RI
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