Architecture, between design and art

Since I first stepped into a classroom at the university, I was given the task of locating the architecture in some area of human endeavor, as if professional work in real life depends in its classification. Several years later, with much more experience now, I think my first decision was correct.

Each space, full or empty, has a utility... some have been restructured by humans to fulfill their missions and others remain in their natural form, because the man has not come to them yet or because it must remain in its original way. That space, that anything or everything that surrounds us, serves a particular function we have given: we dwell it daily making of our own, we live it according to an infinity of sensations and experiences, or sometimes we suffer it because we not have the option to remove them from us, as a “necessary illnesses”.

That quality without name...

A virgin beach, which by definition would only be so when we are not at it, is a space for itself and its utility may be recreational, sportive, contemplative or in its natural state, an ecosystem that must exist to achieve a wonderful cosmic harmony that even with quantum physics, we don´t understand yet.  It has no design nor art or necessarily serves the human being but it is a spectacular space, even without describing; no matter the color or texture of the sand, no matter if the water is hot or cold, no matter its vegetation is desert or tropical... we all have an image in our head just hearing its name and that image becomes a set of emotions with a particular significance for each of us.

In city, no matter which one we choose, in any concrete and asphalt slab that was planted as Jack’s magic seeds, we all have a favorite place: our house, a square, a -horrible- mall, a skyscraper that touches the clouds in every sunset. That space we inhabit, we live it, we do it ours, we transform it and it transform us, making a magical bond that defines us as "urban" beings. The space itself is designed; is the ordered combination of a number of elements that are arranged in a certain way so that we could inhabit; has a clear goal: to satisfy the need for a space where we can make, at least, one specific activity.

But not all of those designed spaces are magical. Those “necessary illnesses”, which might probably have better design alternatives, also create links with us, either repudiation or discomfort, and we suffer them but equally inhabit. Its design may be right, as a chair of fast food restaurant that we have to leave as quickly as we can to make space for the next client, or may be incorrect, as a kitchen where every time we prepare the soup we spill it on the floor. But then, the architecture is only good or bad design?

Architecture is design because it solves a need, because it is –or should be– the result of an intelligible process with consistent decisions taken in an existing reality, using spatial experience, three-dimensional skills and creativity, –or sadly in many cases, just the ability to copy and paste our own or others solutions– to make a space as comfortable as possible and develop our activities in it in the most convenient, efficient, irreproachable and sustainable way.

But architecture is much more than just design. When architects not only bring intellectual processes but feelings, we endow each space with unique and unrepeatable properties and features that take it to the sublime. That space that attracts us, that fills us with life, that has a special meaning for us, cannot just be a design: it must be art. The architecture is art by the way we express through it and how it joins the human being, by the special arrangement of elements that fills us with sensations and feelings, by having a part of the human being in each piece of it.

And the architecture can be design and art, and may be nothing as well. A space without design, loses its architecture function and therefore become sculpture no matter how many sensations it gives to us; the design solves and the art expresses, and together must be a single element that is everything for us.

JPV