NEW EPISTEMOLOGIES. “SOCIETY THAT WOULD PRODUCE TO LIVE AND NOT LIVE TO PRODUCE”

I`m reading a fantastic architectural book this days. Last week I wrote about it in our blog, and now I would like to share a piece of it.

CRAFTMANSHIP by Richard Sennett: A tool for recovering the materiality of the physical environment.

In our own time, Ricard Sennett finds his craftsmanship`s phillosophical home within pragmatism. Its playground is not a idealized society to come but the real, physical environment humans inhabit. Sennett`s sound pleading for cultural materialism beyond doctriaire Marxist simplifications is certainly worth architects` attention. The urge to “do the job well for its own sake”, as opposed to “doing the job just to get the job done,” along with an interest in the process around making things, resonates with what architecture is actually about-from a single brick to the totality of our physical environment.

Of course, in considering materially and socially conscious architecture (and/or urban design) a craft, or in seeing architectural practice as something close to the medieval workshop, many questions arise: What is really new about the conditions that contemporary technologies and social relations provide on urban and achitectural scales? Vice versa, how does the physica (to an ever larger extent built, that is, architecturally defined) context condition prospective social and technological developments? Finally, aiming to recover the materiality of our physical environment, should we consider making architecture more of an individual act or collective enterprise?