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Defining architecture

4/09/2014
 

 CCTV building

       What is architecture? One thing is clear: if the word is to serve a useful purpose we must be able to distinguish architecture from building. Since building is the more basic term, it follows that we must say in what sense architecture is more than building. The essence of our definition must say what architecture adds to building. The commonest ‘additive’ theory is that architecture adds art to building. In this analysis, building is an essentially practical and functional activity on to which architecture superimposes an artistic preoccupation which, while respecting the practical and functional, is restricted by neither. The extreme version of this view is that architecture is the addition to building of the practically useless and functionally unnecessary.1 The more common is that builders make buildings while architects add style.

      From the point of view of finding what people ‘really mean’ when they say ‘architecture’, there are serious problems with these views. The most obvious is that it defines architecture in terms of what is normally thought of as its degeneration, that is, that architecture is no more than the addition of a surface appearance to building. Even if we take the view that this is what architecture has become, it is surely unacceptable as a definition of what it should be. Architects believe, and clients on the whole buy, the idea that architecture is a way of being concerned with the whole building, and a means of engaging the deepest aspects of what a building is. If architecture is defined as an add-on which ignores the main substance of building, then architecture would be an addition to building, but would not be more than building. On the contrary, it would be considerably less. If we accuse architecture of being no more than this, we imply that architecture ought to be much more.

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