How may we drive architecture along its right course? Which is the right course? Which are the driving forces?
Architecture travelled a long road without entangling itself in such hard questions, until it came to the modern era. From then on, in a conscious effort to advance its intended critical posture, it has continually faced such questions. The least loss born of the critical and quasi-scientific stance called modern was that architecture was split into two kinds of perception or apprehension — one belonging to the people and the other to the critics and theoreticians. A split that, in spite of differences in the degrees of taste and of perception within society, had not occurred before then.
Two languages: one for the profession, one for criticism
The split between the perception of the people and that of the theoreticians still continues. The intellectual and theoretical efforts of those who hold the free critical approach have given rise to the formation of the particular language customary in architectural schools and in books and magazines.
This language is other than the customary technical language of architecture, which has always been the working tool of the profession and the teaching of architecture, and which the profession and the teaching will never do without. Every craft and trade has built, alongside the common language of daily life, the language it requires. These languages take shape from the relation between each profession's mode of production and the use of its products in the lives of the people. In the case of architecture, this language takes shape from the relation between building and dwelling — a twin language, carrying both meanings belonging to dwelling and its customs, and meanings belonging to building and making. Ordinary people use only that part of this language in which the meanings of dwelling are more apparent, and which enters their perception and speech in the act of dwelling or use of architecture. Architects and builders, on the contrary, use the part in which the meanings of building and making are more apparent, and which enters their perception and speech in the intellectual and practical work of bringing architecture into being.
The technical and professional language of architecture is a specialised language unfamiliar to ordinary people, but it does not, at the foundation of perceiving architecture, set any distance between people of the profession and the people, since both feed from a shared culture. The language of criticism is not so. The language of criticism is a language not governed by a settled, deep relation like that of profession to its life — and frequently thoughts outside that relation pull it toward themselves.
The language of criticism, by virtue of the particular sources from which it draws — ideologies, philosophies, and their related sciences — is, in expressing the values of architecture, forced to borrow logical, analytical, and scientific forms which it is not easy to align with the unmediated experience of architecture.
Architectural values: unsayable for the people
For the people, the values of architecture are unsayable values, since they want architecture for life, not for saying; they perceive architecture through itself, not through its arguments. But for the theoretician, the values of architecture must come into speech, that they may, on the pages of books and magazines, take on the face of science or scientific debate, and become the marker of the cultivation of the people of that field.
The mode and the language of architecture are a reflection of the mode and the language of dwelling. The moment something not connected to dwelling and its customs is reflected in it, non-architectural justification and reasoning begin. The course of imposition, and alongside it the non-architectural justification and reasoning, has driven architecture into a fresh field of speech other than the language of the profession and of teaching. This second language, just as its growth outside its natural relation with the life and language of the people has distanced it from the natural culture and perception of the people, can return to that natural culture and perception only by drawing close again to the life and language of the people.
Architecture, an essentially popular art
Architecture is an essentially popular art. Being popular, for architecture, is no optional or added virtue — it is in its very nature. Architecture is not the art of particular moments and states; it is the art of all moments and hours, the art of a whole life. Architecture is not of those arts that can forget the people, or that can construct an image of life as they themselves wish, rather than as it itself is. Architecture, except in connection with the people and life, has no reality. Today, not only the arts but even the sciences and crafts are drawing away from man and his natural life in such a way that man's relation to them turns into a relation with objects external to him. Architecture, more than any other profession or art, refuses, in its very nature, this abstraction and externalisation.
The cold silence of the people before the jury statements
Unfortunately, the people who have a practical, non-theoretical relation with architecture, and who, by the feeling of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction, nurture a real evaluation of architecture in their hearts and souls — the world of their feelings and of their satisfaction or dissatisfaction is little reflected in the mental world of the theoreticians. They can only have a shared language with the architects who build for them, outside the technical language of the theoreticians, within the shared culture. Yet that shared language is little reflected in the language of the theoreticians.
Today our architecture, too, against the cold silence of ordinary people, has come under the criticism, judgement, and value-setting of the theoreticians. Critiques and views from inside and abroad, printed in architectural magazines; university research, which lately has been showing greater attention to the theoretical study of architecture; the judgements of competitions and prizes — all are means for value-setting and, more importantly, for arriving at value-foundations in architecture.
These judgements — the affirmations and the non-affirmations, the foregrounding and the silences — will leave their effect only when they can spread through the language and perception of the public. The repeated experiences of the judgements of competitions and prizes have less often attained such success.
Shared language, unavoidable
Today no one any longer thinks of repeating the experience of ideology-making for architecture. Yet the effort toward a shared language is unavoidable. Shared language brings the strengthening of forces. Without shared language, forces are scattered, and that is to architecture's loss.
One group strives to push architecture forward in the field of practice through more, and more serious, professional work. Another group strives, through criticism and research, to expound the values gained from the work of practising architects — for the whole profession and likewise for the people — that the perception of architecture in society may be raised. The principal driving forces of today's architecture are no other than these value-creating architects, the writing-and-research expounders of values and codifiers of principles and foundations, and the schools that teach those principles and values.
The fragmented and ambiguous language of criticism
The force of criticism and research is sapped by scatter-speech. We are in need of measured, correct judgement; but the exposition of judgement is more important than the judgement itself. Our language of criticism and judgement is a language broken and ambiguous — a language drawn from the abstract and unproven values of modern architecture and the architectures that came after it. The literature of modern architecture is a literature of metaphor, of pithy phrases and scattered speech. This is a fault that has been laid against the whole literature of aesthetics, in which no foundational and authoritative book has yet been written, and whatever is is scattered articles.
The statements of the juries of architecture's competitions and prizes — the products of the rare occasions of architectural value-setting — have unfortunately had little success in arriving at an exposition-language. The language used in them is more rhetorical than expository. Because of their fragmented, ambiguous, and abstract nature, they do not nurture a deep and continuous perception of architecture in their audience. The continuity of values is realised when one can place them, side by side, on a single value-vector. Values that cannot be added together, the alluring mind easily loses. One must be able to gather all values in a single general value-station such as good and bad, or right and wrong — values each belonging to a different value-station.
The people's experience as the source of value
We also know that the values of architecture cannot be obtained outside the experience of architecture. Architecture is just what is experienced by the body of the people. The judgement carried out by the jurors is not so that something outside the architectural experience of the people themselves may be imposed upon them, but to set up a shared language by which we may participate in the people's experience.