Green in Grey: architecture in hybrid mode
Green in Grey: architecture in hybrid mode _ Angelos Psilopoulos
Nature has served as a prime reference for as long as man has tried to shelter himself in building. From the cosmology of the primitive hut to the natural order of classical ornament, to be “natural” would practically mean to be true, or ideal. As humanity tried to emancipate itself from the inevitability of its “natural” habitat, nature still remained relevant even in the form of something opposite to which the human intellect would make its claim. In the industrial era technology defined the artificial in defiance of the natural. The quantification of processes and outcomes created a universe where man established his presence with short-term gain – e.g. financial profit. Similarly the “pasteurization” of everyday life1, namely humanity’s battles against germs, saw nature as something potentially unhealthy. Artifice became the new norm, and nature was to be tamed in the form of parks, zoos, collections, and other similar human achievements.
Urban How
Popular and Public
Popular and Public _ Alejandro Hernández Galvez
Architecture has always been a public affair, even before the notion of the public, both as the realm in which the political takes place or as an audience where common matters of public discussion. But one thing is to stand there in a space that is open for everyone which is the simplest and less precise definition of public spacer, to be a building that may be popular, recognized and admired by a lot of people, and another is to enhance the public life by way both of its shape and its performance. Therefore, to engage the public has for architecture, nowadays probably more than ever, a double sense: to invite an audience, a term that for a building would imply its users and inhabitants but would not be reduced to them, to open a space where the public, that is, the political and the civic realms, can take place.
