Language and abstraction

Abstract

There is a point where training of the architect and education of the child meet. Criticism has never questioned such a point that keeps Froebel and Bauhaus together: the contribution of these two moments to the construction of what we call language of modernity is clearly evident. The purpose of this essay is understanding how the pedagogic and progressive function of such convergence, which has its primary base point in geometric abstraction but its purpose in design and educational action, has finally removed the spiritual component inherent in abstraction. In other words, it is as though the linguistic combinatorial process, or the insistence on the configurational possibilities of a language reduced to few elementary signs whose sense lies in the world, had sterilized the mystical power of abstraction. Such considerations crossbreed with the issue of language understood in a speculative, figurative, verbal, as well as social, broad sense and justify the need to address language in an issue devoted to the relationships between school and architecture.