The Architect as an Object of History

Abstract

The paper problematizes the state of the contemporary architectural discipline, focusing on the functional crisis of the author, starting from the assumption that the dialectical form of the biographical approach in the analysis of architectural matter, in addition to its practical and pedagogical justifications, lacks the capacity to reveal its real historical purpose. The introductory part of the research explains the leading role that hermeneutic activity gained in modernism, thanks to the hermetic character of modern artistic principles as well as the pseudo-hermetic positioning of theoretical strongholds. The basic assumption of the paper is that in the present time, the system of values ​​is radically changed by the weakening of the integral text, which in the epoch of modernization preceded the existence of the work itself. The second part of the research sheds light on the origin of the status of the author, from the initial moment of individualization of ideas in the Renaissance, all the way to its rationalization and formalization in modernism, while the third part analyzes the primary foundations of the discursive architectural discipline, derived from a vitruvian essay about the philosophical education of architects. The fourth part denotes a crisis of values ​​whose roots are deeper and more elementary than the symbiosis between production and management, or the vanity of the performer, seeing it in the broader context of the specific state of Enlightenment culture and its world, as an inherent disintegration of a single notion of truth. The categories on which the modern epistemology of the architectural discipline rests inevitably set the condition for their own overstepping and destabilization, where the loss of the basic figure of identity and the stratification of the subjective horizon, as well as the disciplinary narrative, lead to either apparent or real anonymity of the discourse, by radicalizing creative acts and practice. The historical method in the paper is conditioned by the very nature of architectural objects, whose research engages independent sources of knowledge, differing from the paradigmatic models of some other disciplines that do not create forms but are exclusively related to the analysis of events.