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The AAI was founded in 1896 'to promote and afford facilities for the study of architecture and the allied sciences and arts, and to provide a medium of friendly communication between members and others interested in the progress of architecture'. It sponsors a public lecture series and annual awards. |
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Diagnosis and Prognosis
Michael Pike Saskia Sassen is a kind of diagnostician of cities, a sociologist who, through an amazing capacity for analysis and extrapolation of data, can cut a view, x-ray like, through the complex force fields that make up the contemporary city. She was able, within a few hours of arriving in the city, to describe Dublin better than anyone at the symposium. Other fields stress the importance of this kind of analysis - but not architecture. Architects, through their preoccupation with the unique and the individual, their concentration on singular objects, enclose themselves within their given boundaries. Don Murphy of VMX Architects attempted to present a different viewpoint, a movement in Dutch architecture which sees the value in utilizing socio-economic analysis as a way to grasp the highly complex processes through which society now organizes itself. Yet his contribution met with a certain hostility, an accusation that he was distant, cynical, amoral. A sort of weighty architectural morality was evident, a belief in the nobility of the unique place, indescribable by mere data. If the kind of interdisciplinary discourse which was aspired to in this symposium is to be successfully engaged in by architects, a common mode of communication needs to be found. There was a consistent belief expressed at the symposium that it was the designers who needed to be educated and not the general public. This education is to do with architects gaining a greater understanding of their interface with the complex force fields that now shape the city. It was interesting that the geographer Andrew McLaran was the only speaker equipped to deal with the issue of the edge city, through his extensive analysis of office development in the suburbs. Everyone else could only speak about Dublin in terms of its core, incapable of grasping the processes that have made Dublin a primarily suburban entity. A greater emphasis on research and analysis, rather than on artistic intuition and the pursuit of the unique, would help the architectural profession to contribute more significantly to this kind of discourse. It might also contribute to the search for a more open-ended, less formalistic architecture. Michael Pike has been working with Grafton Architects since qualifying in 1998. |
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Architectural Association of Ireland
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