EXPERIENCES AND QUESTIONS

Zumthor, Bruder Klaus Fiel Chapel, 2007. Interior experience and exterior object.

The architectural experience can be approached as a way to contest the hegemony of the vision over other senses in our contemporary world, and the consequent individual detachment from reality through countless and superfluous images. 

This drives us to an architecture guided not by the final object, the final image, but by the user experience of the architectural space.

However, every time I look at contemporary piece of architecture that is driven by these experiential premisses, no matter how much they move me, I can not help to struggle with several questions. Some of them are:

These projects are normally driven by two elements that have never really convinced me. One of them is the dependence on one single idea of one creative-sensitive author, and the other is the linear process of design. Everything is manipulated to achieve one initial concept without being questioned, tested or compared.

Finally, the effects created commonly rely on an interiority, which supports the fact that one must want to or be allowed to enter a space in order to experience it. I believe there is a way of bringing experience to the urban realm, one that would trigger social and political identification. However, I wonder if there is a way of putting together a collective experience without depending on a mediatic or facadist architecture.