FOREWORD
ARCHITECTURE HERITAGE HUMANISM : THE BUILT ARCHITECTURE
Architecture carries the values of a society, its order, its aspirations of its culture. It symbolically manifests the metaphysical relationship of human society (what Le Corebusier aptly called «the relationship to Cosmos»), but also the very organization of this society.
Architecture was born, historically, from the will of the Great and the know-how of the project managers.
Eupalinos was an architect – master of the workers – and François Mansart, the greatest French architect, humbly wrote “The Art of Building Well at a Small Cost”.
Himself, or the Androuet du Cerceau, who were among the first to introduce the codes of the Renaissance in France, Or Brunelleschi, faced with the difficulty of erecting the dome of Ste Marie des Fleurs, did not envisage that architecture could be anything other than a sublime art of building.
When Suger, in the eleventh century French claimed that «God is Light» and asked Pierre de Meaux to translate it into stone (this is the birth of Opus Francorum, pejoratively renamed, four centuries later: «Gothic»), he did not foresee a gap between creative thinking and the work to be achieved … between the work and the work.
From this conjunction inspired by spirit and matter, so aptly said by Benvenuto Cellini, or Michelangelo Buonarroti (when he claimed that David was already existing in the material of the marble block he had carved) was born the European architectural heritage, now bearing a humanism “out of time”.
This sublimation of matter, on the order of the great, is found in West Asia (Middle East) in particular with the admirable work of the military engineer Sinan to whom Soleiman had ordered to design and build a mosque, even when, humbly, Sinan, the ordainer of matter, did not attribute to himself the knowledge of such a high spirituality. He made the Blue Mosque.
Moreover, in Asia, the very notion of the design architect does not exist historically. In Japan, for example, the architect is a carpenter, the man of implementation. When the Emperor of China wanted an architecture to pray for the fruitfulness of the harvest (Tian Tan in Beijing), he ordered the men of art to make a «work of art». So did the Manchu Emperors for the tombs of Shenyang.
This spiritualization of matter, from matter, is found in Africa and in America in the Mayan and Inca works.
Even though the Architecture of drawing appeared only at the end of the 19th century, in the West, it was highly Academician. This one, increasingly detached from the magic of matter, tends to invade the entire field of Contemporary Architecture, to no longer be, in the very logic of its evolution, a Design Architecture, then a simple design detached from the intense emotion of «things of life».
On this observation, different professors of Architecture of European Schools and of Asia decided to redevelop in their teaching, the taste of the Matter and the Technologies which are attached to it, as the very Roots of the Architecture : the Built Architecture.