Architecture, Art of Belonging

Abstract

The most pressing challenge for architecture is to recover ways to connect our formal obsession and global capacity for novelty, to local cultural values and habits, letting formal decisions emerge “from below”. Finding ways to incorporate the already meaningful habits that are present in our human cultures and to make them part of our design practices seems to be crucial to allow inhabitants to belong and even make sense of their personal lives. Architecture is not “the aesthetic object” since it speaks both at pre-reflective and symbolic levels. Therefore, the architect must be not a technician or a self-indulgent artist, but primarily a humanist, possessing a deeply grounded culture in philosophy and history.

Keywords

• Embodiment
• Local traditions
• Belonging
• Meanings in architecture
• Symbol