Image: City of Culture of Galicia, Peter Eisenman

The American architect Peter Eisenman He is leading a new edition of the Contemporary Architecture Course, which will analyze, over seven sessions, the complex network that links the architectural discipline with construction and design. The architects participating will be... Pier Vittorio Aureli, Jeffrey Kipnis, Carme Pinos, Luis Fernandez-Galiano, Anton Garcia-Abril, Andrés Jaque y Alejandro Zaera-Polo.

Design today is a goal-oriented practice that, through aesthetic and economic means, seeks to draw mass culture toward ever-increasing consumption. In this sense, it has become a unique, ubiquitous, and all-encompassing activity. But this has not always been the case. Sometime in the 16th century, the Italian words draws y color came to mean terms of contrast used to describe the typological differences between Florentine painting (draws) and the Venetian (color). But draws It was also, and very importantly, a dialectical term. It was considered draws to the type of work that began with the drawing of an outline or the shape of a figure, whereas color It was used to suggest the importance of color, which took whatever form was necessary without any prior outline or formal content. draws It was considered from the beginning to be more rational or conceptual, while the color It was perceived as something more emotional and expressionistic. In its most general sense, draws It was the correct relationship between the parts and the whole.

Thus, draws It did not refer to painting itself, but to a trend in painting. It was not until later in the 16th century, with Vasari's idea of Art of Design, (literally, Design Arts), when design became a comprehensive discipline and painting, one of its functions. That is, the idea of ​​design evolved from a dialectical and analytical category to a synthetic one, a comprehensive attitude that contained the seed of the ubiquitous design activity of today.

While design It became an operational term, and the same happened with the concept of architecture. Before the 16th century, the disciplines of architecture were considered to be governed by a transcendent will, until the work of Brunelleschi and Alberti on perspective, which established the human eye as the mediator between the architectural object and the subject. Alberti's reasoning was the first human initiative to differentiate architecture from construction, considering architecture as the symbol of something. According to Alberti, a structure not only had to support something, it also had to have the appearance of supporting something. This idea of ​​appearance, along with the idea of ​​the history of construction and a series of articulated formal rules, gave rise to what is known as architectural theory. immanent metaphysics of architecture, its disciplinary core or basic autonomy.

The symbolic function that distinguishes architecture from construction is essential to the argument that requires a distinction between architecture and design. Pier Vittorio Aureli argues that Alberti's reasoning on architectural principles is a way of establishing architecture as a logical, rational procedure that cannot be reduced to mere construction. In these terms, architecture is something different from construction; therefore, if construction is the result of a design that responds to certain requirements of shelter, comfort, image, and meaning, then architecture must be something different from design. This does not mean that design does not exist in architecture, but rather that the objectives of architecture and design, and therefore the objects resulting from them, can be different. And it is the nature of this difference that the course Architecture versus design It doesn't try.

Time: 19:30 p.m.

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Interview with Antón García-Abril on the CBA Blog