Acta Technica Napocensis: Civil Engineering & Architecture Vol. 55, No.

4, (2013)
Journal homepage: http://constructii.utcluj.ro/ActaCivilEng
Special Issue: QUESTIONS - Interferences in Architectural and Urban Planning – Architectural Teaching and Research

ARCHITECTURE AND HUMAN NEEDS

assist. PhD. arch. Paul MUTICĂ 1,

1
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning,, 72 Observatorului
Street., Cluj-Napoca, Romania*

Abstract
Whether or not modern architecture and urban planning are in accordance to the needs of citizens
has been a subject of debate for the last five decades in the West. That debate is somewhat more
current in post-communist countries, such as Romania. Modernist ideas in city building have
proved to be less than perfect and urban segregation turned out to be a major problem we can no
longer ignore nowadays. In addressing these problems, architects and urban planers might feel the
need for an interdisciplinary dialogue with sociologists, psychologists and anthropologists. In
doing so, perhaps another way to see architecture would be to start from the needs of the
individual, rather than from the 3D model of the city landscape, as viewed from the air. No doubt
this endeavour would take time and research but it has to start somewhere so this article will try to
sum up a few of these “human needs” that should meet their answer in architecture even though
they are sometimes ignored in current architectural practice.

Rezumat

De peste 50 de ani au apărut în Occident voci care se întreabă dacă arhitectura i urbanismul
contemporan răspund nevoilor individuale ale cetăŃeanului. În Ńara noastră, ca i în celelalte din
blocul fost comuinist, această dezbatere este mai recentă, dar ideile moderniste din urbanism s-au
dovedit a fi nu tocmai perfecte, segregarea cartierelor fiind doar una dintre problemele pe care nu
le mai putem ignora astăzi. Într-o încercare de a rezolva aceste probleme ale ora ului, arhitecŃii si
urbani tii ar putea contribui la un dialog interdisciplinar împreună cu sociologi, psihologi i
antropologi. În acest sens, poate un alt mod de a vedea arhitectura i urbanismul ar putea pleca de
la om i nevoile sale, nu de la macheta la scară mică sau modelul 3D care redă perspectiva aeriană
a casei sau Ńesutului urban. Fără îndoială, un astfel de demers va dura mult dar trebuie să înceapă
undeva iar acest articol enumeră câteva nevoi individuale la care arhitectura ar trebui să găsească
un răspuns, de i de multe ori nu o face.

Keywords: urban planning, architecture, human needs, anthropology

1. Architectural Anthropology – A Solution to the Architectural Crisis?

Crisis is a word that has been on everybody’s lips for quite a while now and when speaking of a
crisis in current day architecture, one should differentiate between magazine architecture - those
few examples that won international prizes and most of what has been built in our cities, almost
everywhere around the world. While the first lot is certainly worthy of appreciation, at least most of
it, the latter and most important, because most of what we see built today falls in this second
category, is very different from a qualitative point of view. This gap between the few examples of
*
Corresponding author: Tel. 0264401845/ Fax.0264590255:
E-mail address: [email protected]
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good architecture and the many examples of poor construction has many reasons and explanations
but very few possibilities to mend.

But this major break between the few peaks in architectural practice and the majority of other
buildings is somewhat recent. True, there was a great difference between the baroque palace or
cathedral and the “slums” of the 17th century but today, those very surviving slums are La petite
France of Strassbourg, its most renowned attraction, or just about any other historical town centre
in Europe that survived to this day. Some of the most beautiful historical sites in Italy are old
fishing villages like Portofino, made with cheap materials and very utilitarian in nature, so one
cannot but ask oneself how come this great tradition in “small” or vernacular architecture has been
forsaken in the wake of contemporary architecture like the Gallaratese neighbourhood of modern
day Milan.

A possible answer to this question comes from a science that had very few points of interest in
architecture until recently – anthropology. From a traditional point of view, architecture was not
one of the most important aspects that anthropologists studied in indigenous cultures because
architecture was associated intrinsically with a certain technological progress and most of the
societies anthropologists were interested in until recently were non-industrialized or “primitive” as
we have derogatorily called them. Furthermore, these societies don’t distinguish between
architectural programmes the way we do in our occidental culture so for them there would be more
socially important buildings and less socially important buildings not hospitals, banks, theatres and
kindergartens.

Yet as the interest of anthropology slowly begins to shift towards the neglected aspects of our own
culture, trying to apply what it has learnt from other cultures to our own, it discovers a new
dimension in architectural approach – man as a human being. Anthropology has slowly learnt that it
was through architecture (or pseudo-architecture) that much of the rural population was forcefully
accommodated into cities during communism and it is architecture that has a great impact in the
subculture of suburbia today. Urban planners and architects were needed to turn many arable land
lots into buildable lots whenever the cities grew in size. We are the cities that we build and inhabit.

On the other hand, man has certainly not been the main point of interest in modern architecture, not
as long as we still teach our students on architectural models at a scale of 1 to 500 and not while we
make city plans disregarding the view from pedestrian level. We take man into consideration simply
by their number: how many people in this building and how many cars in this parking lot. What
width should then this street have to accommodate that amount of traffic and how many cubic
metres of gas, air and water are needed by the inhabitants to sustain their lives. This purely
“functional” approach is guilty of some of the most dysfunctional, repetitive and ugly cities – cities
built for “useful people” as Konrad Lorenz named them [1], nothing more than hens kept in
batteries to lay eggs in the name of efficiency. Its premises are wrong because they take into
consideration just the most basic of human needs, the biological ones. The reason we have been
condoning this practice is this so called efficiency that resulted from overcrowding and leads to
even more overcrowding, one of the main sins of modern day humankind, as feared by Lorenz [2].

Surely there are exceptions to this and we still recall great interventions from the modernist era but
they are just that – the exceptions. We have good quality modern architecture as mentioned before
but nowadays, because of the nature of building materials employed, good quality architecture is
mostly expensive architecture and, therefore, cannot be a long term solution to all our problems.
What is probably the greatest difference from building before the 1920’s, is that prior to
modernism, most people were involved into building their own home. Now, in the name of
“efficiency” we mass produce buildings like cars and then sell them for unreasonable profits. The
investors have even more money from this so they simply do it again and the whole process just
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repeats itself to no end. We cannot help but remember the examples of blocks that were sold
without being connected to the sewer network and people falling with their bathtub in their
downstairs neighbour’s bath because of poorly executed concrete slabs between stories.

Perhaps the financial crisis of 2008 was welcome just for stopping this real estate snowball. Surely
wounds in the urban tissue persist, traffic jams and unpaid mortgages still remain. So what can be
done in the future to alleviate this and to never repeat it? Perhaps a better understanding of man and
his needs in their entire spectrum, a greater implication from the local authorities in the building
process and assumption of some responsibilities from them might be a start. Let us hope.

2. Human Needs as an Alternative in Architectural Practice

From the architects’ point of view, we should be more concerned about our own problems, namely
architecture. But what exactly means to do good architecture? How are we to consider man in all
his aspects, precisely since it’s again the anthropologists that teach us that humans vary infinitely as
their background culture varies. Building a dreamhouse for a German will most certainly not satisfy
a Japanese or an Arab. A lot of researchers write about the need for quality architecture but fail to
offer concrete directions to follow. So what are we to do in this situation? The very first thing might
be to establish a starting point and, despite current architectural practice, we will not start from the
problem of funds nor from the problem of traffic, land lots or the city as a whole. These will all be
adressed at a later time. We will attempt to start by adressing the problem of the human needs of
both the client and the citizen that just hapens to pass by – the receivers and utilizers of architecture
and the city in the first place.

Firstly, we need to define some notions. By human needs, a phrase that will be recurrent in this
lecture, we understand a lot more than just basic human needs or biological needs. Saying that
everybody has needs might be mistakenly understood in the negative way of being dependent or
being needy, and we do not by any means want that understanding. On the contrary, the term human
needs refers to a lot more, from necessity to craving and desire, goal or ideal (we do, after all, have
the need for beauty in our lives).

Secondly, these needs should be identified and we should discern which ones might find an answer
in good quality architecture. For this we might start from Maslow’s pyramid of needs, Maslow
being the first one who sorted and ranked human needs in primary, secondary, tertiary, etc. Of
course some needs, especially in the higher level spectrum, cannot be influenced by architecture
alone (like the need for morality) but others might be completely inhibited by poor quality
architecture (like the need for intimacy or socializing). Before hence, however, we need to
enumerate the negative effects architecture has on us and the reasons why they came to be.

Thirdly, we should make an important specification, namely that these needs will be considered
human universals. Yet the beauty comes when we try and give answers to them and we find out that
every culture on Earth has a different way of providing different answers to these needs. So every
individual, no matter whether he realizes it or not, is likely to expect some answer or another
according to his cultural background. Things also tend to vary in history as well and that makes it
even more complicated. For example Rubens’ idea of beauty or that of the Japanese geishas differs
very much by today’s standards. Thus the idea of a global or international style in architecture
seems just as mistaken as considering to repeat the same house on an entire street. Despite both
having economical justification, human beings could not and should not be governed by these
alone. Otherwise it would be most efficient if we all lived in trailer parks…
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Finally, towards the end of this article we should address the problem of the recipient of
architecture and that recipient is the human senses for senses are the only way we can interact with
the real world. Senses are the ones that make humans feels good or bad about being in a space at a
certain time, as Juhani Pallasmaa puts it in The Eye of the Skin, his book that is among the
compulsory curricula for architectural theory in most Western schools of architecture. Pallasmaa
claims that it is a grave error that we consider architecture just from the point of view of sight, not
from the perspective of a mixture of all our five senses.

3. Why Is There a Difference Between Magazine Architecture and the Way Our
Cities Look Like?
Without further ado, let us start with a brief analysis of the situation in our current building
fund. In this present urban cacophony, especially in Romania’s newly built neighbourhoods, we
have a great advantage: all these negative effects are so easy to exemplify and understand. It is in
situ didactic material which makes it a lot easier to ascertain these effects than in Switzerland, for
example. These current effects would be:

a. The lack of identity of our buildings and cities - Monotony. This is the first one, visible for
everyone who ventures by foot in these newly built neighbourhoods. It is a plague present
everywhere in the world, resulted from multiplying the same object (whether a house or block) over
and over again. Perhaps it was best satirized in Soviet Russia’s comedy “Irony of Fate” back in the
70’s when a drunken doctor gets on a different plane and lands in Leningrad instead of Moscow but
ends up in the same apartment in a similar block on a street with the same name.

b. The lack of vitality. Bedroom districts as they have been called are a direct result of functional
segregation promoted by modernist urban planning back in the 30’s. They are empty of people
during daytime when most of them are at work or at school and very quiet at nighttimes as
everybody is sleeping.

c. The lack of civic spaces and facilities resulting from a lack of borders between public and
private space. Romania is among the first rated here. Post-communist neighbourhoods have very
few urban facilities like kindergartens, playgrounds or sport halls and rarely have urban squares that
are little more than car roundabouts. At best you can find the occasional grocer improvised by
making a separate (and mostly illegal) entrance at ground floor level in some blocks of flats. Space
for these facilities is now scarce and hard to come by since it was not planned for ahead. The only
case of public and private space delimitations are found at individual residence levels but, even
there, because land is so expensive, the courtyard is transformed in an open air garage for the car or
cars. In these circumstances, an idea of community is impossible to develop because of poorly
thought out neighbourhoods.

d. The lack of human scale. Everywhere around the world large cities tend to grow even more and
the only vertical limit of high-rise buildings is given by structural constraints. We see skyscrapers
grow over night in the backyards of small villas. The pedestrian has to make his way through
several lines of double-parked cars and a walk is more risky than pleasurable.

e. The lack of intimacy. We all know how it feels to be awakened by the neighbour who decided 6
o’clock would be the best time to start drilling into concrete walls. This would not be a major
problem (since he isn’t likely to do it every day), but the fact that you can hear him all the time,
during his daily activities in his own flat, you can feel the smell of cooking on the staircase, you can
see inside another neighbour’s flat from you window.
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All these effects are fairly visible and are the cause why a lot of us feel a certain aversion to walk on
some streets. These streets are condemned to be passed by only by those who absolutely have to do
so, which deprives them of the vitality they should have. The fact that all these effects (with the
exception of the last one, probably) are only felt in the new neighbourhoods, never the old, makes
one wonder why do we keep building cities this way? A few possible reasons might be:

a. The financial/economic reason. Overcrowding, civilized humankind’s greatest sin according to

Konrad Lorenz, the destruction following two World Wars have inevitably led to the necessity of
cheap and speedy reconstruction of buildings that would house more and more people. But this is
not enough to justify what followed in Romania or Italy since England and Germany, countries with
a higher density of inhabitants than ours, have managed to enforce individual housing in suburbs
rather than standardized blocks of flats as we see in our own cities. Lack of money is not an excuse
either as we will see in the following sections.

b. The lack of morality and superficial approach of investors, architects and the local
authorities. We see three main actors here, all three guilty of the current situation. The investor will
not settle for less than 200% profit for his investment so he wants everything cheap but he cannot
have his way if the other two would only object. The architect does not object because a free market
would only mean that the investor would find himself a different architect who would do his
bidding and the townhalls suffer from a total lack of interest (or the mayors suffer from a direct
interest, in some cases). However beautiful it may sound, simply trying to educate society without
enforcing some rules of conduct is prone to failure.

c. The lack of civic responsibility. Because we mentioned the three actors responsible for the
current state of our cities, we cannot omit the general population that fails to take a stand and is not
yet ready to live in cities. Encasing your balcony illegally and painting your part of the façade in
bright pink even though the rest of the building is pale green means that you fail to understand that
the façade belongs to the city and not to you.

d. The difference in opinions between architects and society on aesthetic matters. It is one of
the reasons that we, architects, tend to overlook to easily. Besides the good effort of educating
clients through a well meant Guide of Urban Education [3], we must also understand that we should
first answer the client’s needs and only then our own aesthetic principles. It is sometimes an endless
negotiation on these terms.

e. Modernism and the negation of cultural identity and architectural context. It is perhaps one
of the most important reasons. Modernism meant a total break from building tradition. It
emphasized the role of the architect as a demiurge, which meant an obligation to “reset from an
empty sheet of paper” and to design the city as he saw fit (as in Le Corbusier’s plan Le Voisin for
the centre of Paris [4]).

f. The pride of the demiurge-architect. Directly derived from the above, the pride of the architect
is best seen in the fact that he keeps to his principles of life instead of those of the client. He thinks
he knows best and that people should be thought how to inhabit. That is why most of the manifest
architectural objects in the modernist era are habitation buildings, mainly villas. We can see this
point by starting from four such examples1, all of them architectural masterpieces in their own way.
Of these, only one actually came to be long term inhabited by someone. Two of them have become
the object of litigations between the architect and his client and three of them actually prefer a
natural setting to the built context of a city that would attract some constraints in the making. All of
them are treated from a formalist point of view, like beautiful sculptures and are therefore
considered iconic for modernism and present in all architectural history books but this is their very
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problem – most architects nowadays prefer treating architecture as sculpture. Sculptural architecture
might look good in a magazine but it lacks when it comes to being harmonious in a certain urban
context. The discrepancies between the metaphysical geometry of the iconic house and the
traditionally prosaic realities of life are brought under question here [5].

g. Neglecting many of the individual needs. Finally, the last reason is the somewhat shallow
perspective we have on architecture, the problem we found out in the first place with the current
functionalistic approach.

4. What Human Needs Should Find Answer in Architecture?

The following list enumerates some of the individual needs that architecture should answer.
It is most probably incomplete but, hopefully, a starting point:

a. Primary needs (the need to breathe, eat, sleep, for drinking water, sex, bodily functions and
hygiene, the need for thermal comfort, natural light or the need to be able to evacuate in case of
danger). All these are already normally taken into consideration by architects. The belief that
architecture should be primarily determined by answering these needs gave rise to architectural
functionalism. The problem is that this functionalism is only limited is we take into consideration
just these most basic of needs and this is a reason why it had been criticized for the past decades in
the West.

b. The need for safety. Jan Gehl discerns between two distinct needs here: the need to be safe and
the need to feel safe. While the first is easily solved by locking doors, fences, alarm systems and
video cameras, the latter is inhibited by sensing these security measures as alarm signals for a
possible danger. One associates these with a risen criminality in the area and this can only be
alleviated by a permissive and well lit public space that is teeming with people. Well lit streets and
shop windows during nighttime, a clear distinction between public and private space and the
presence of people are but a few ways to make this happen [6].

c. The need for intimacy. We also have two different situations here. Intimacy inside the house
should be solved by phonic isolation and cosy rooms that offer a relaxing setting for day to day life.
But just as important to this is the need for outdoor privacy in the form of a small garden or terrace
just for oneself. This can be the backyard but never the front balcony that sees the busy street and is
generally used for drying clothes on a rack. Personally I have not seen anybody use the front
balcony for any leisure activities because of the noise and dust that it is subjected to and because it
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lacks a feeling of intimacy. Public and semi-public spaces could have a certain dose of intimacy
provided by well placed urban furniture and a distance from the main traffic routes. A park like the
Central Park in Cluj is not suited because it is clearly too small and overcrowded.

Creating more intimate space is possible by removing illegal garages in the backyards of apartment
blocks, thus leading to semi-private gardens in front of ground floor windows that would in term
lead to a higher value for these apartments. Children would also have better and safer playgrounds
and the back alleys would not look as bad as they sometimes do now. If only we would manage to
build garages underground for all our cars…

d. The need for communication. Man is a very pretentious being. He needs intimacy but
sometimes he needs socializing. From this point of view, Central Park of Cluj is much better suited
as it provides the place for gathering and spontaneous communication between people who happen
to bump into each other. Also the aforementioned gardens from the backyard of blocks could
provide a place for leisure and sometimes for spontaneous communication.

Jan Gehl is world renowned for his role in the shifting paradigms of contemporary architecture and
urban planning. His books all speak of the human as a beneficiary of the city, a city that should be
filled with life. For this purpose, Gehl identifies the need for communication as a resulting activity,
spontaneously derived from the other two types of activity: the compulsory and optional ones [7].
So, in order to satisfy this need, he finds it necessary that:

• the street front should be permissive, of high quality and should therefore provide plenty
points of interest to pedestrians. A commercial street is likely to facilitate spontaneous
communication among acquaintances.
• spaces for pedestrians should be sufficiently wide so as to provide opportunities to stop and
chat whenever the need arrives (which you obviously cannot do on a crosswalk)
• urban spaces should be furnished correspondingly. Back-to-back seating doesn’t favour
conversation but inhibits it because people cannot see each other and should be avoided

e. The need for human scale. Is self-explanatory and, in its absence, spaces cannot be appropriated
by humans as we saw earlier. Man needs to relate to the surrounding built environment. Because of
physical constraints, human fields of view are more developed horizontally than vertically. This in
term means that we seldom realize what happens on the upper floors of a building, unless we are a
considerable distance away from it.

It is through adequate scale that we can solve the need for intimacy at urban level. Obviously,
nobody feels intimate in Unirii Square, Bucharest but a small terrace in Lipscani or in Museum
Square, Cluj, places that are more “down to earth”, closer to human scale, provide such an
opportunity. Thus a pedestrian square with continuous façades becomes a sort of urban room, an
ideal place for a small respite during daytime or nighttime.

f. The need for identity. This is also present all around the world. We can differentiate between
levels here also. Most visible is at city scale where iconic objects like the Eiffel Tower, Statue of
Liberty or the Dome in Florence not only symbolize the city but also leave their mark upon its
silhouette, becoming major landmarks for passers by and even being used on car plate numbers.

But identity can also be expressed at smaller scales. Obviously the huge Casa Poporului is not the
only possibility to play this role. For the inhabitants of a small neighbourhood, a little church, like
Stavropoleos or Biserica Icoanei, provide a certain identity. In Western Europe, where urban
communities have an older tradition, even small streets teem with small identity elements. For
Catholics in Italy, Spain and Southern France it is common that streets and squares bear the names
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of patron saints and these saints are sometimes remembered through the use of small statues, often
in niches above a small passageway or in a corner. They not only make the small street or square
charming but have had a utilitarian purpose for centuries – that of maintaining the identity of that
particular street or square within the city.

g. The need to belong to a community and the need for (urban) context. Architecture has
always had a sacred role, besides the more profane use of sheltering man. The village centre or
urban square are, before everything else, physical centres of communities. Today it may seem
absurd to speak of Defense community in Paris or of Mănă tur community in Cluj. But, up until the
interwar years, villages that have turned to urban districts over night or even older neighbourhoods
were rigorously structured, most of the times around a central public building like a church or
sometimes a townhall. That urban structure was in most cases superimposed on a social structure
and thus it was coherent but today we cannot say the same about modern developments. Today, the
same building is commonly shared by very different people, from workers to teachers and from
retired people to emo youngsters that all came together by chance.

One probably wouldn’t feel this loss unless experiencing it in all its vigour in the past (village life
of yesteryear is not a myth and, although not ideal, it might have been preferable to what happens in
rural Romania nowadays) or present smaller settlements in some parts of the world (we do not
mean just the non-industrialized people here but examples can be found in quite developed
countries like Italy where community is still strong in some settlements).

h. The need for affirmation. Somewhat connected to the prior need, the need for affirmation
involves a certain status or pride. Whether it is the Venetian Palaces on the Canal Grande, or the
Gypsy “palaces” in Huedin or the megalomaniac villas in Certeze, the idea is the same. Their
aesthetics, as perceived through the filter of today’s viewer is obviously not of the same quality but
that too might or might not change in the centuries to come. Ugliness comes in the latter two cases
from the lack of craftsmanship and utility but this is an entirely different discussion; what stays the
same is that they represent the physical manifestation of a personal need – that of affirmation of the
social status inside the community. Sometimes, lacking traditional common sense, this need might
reach preposterous dimensions like in the case of the aforementioned Certeze village. Most people
here immigrated to France to work and live in misery so they can make the money necessary for
these futile villas they build in their home village where they will never get to live again [8].

This example is but an extreme side of the need for affirmation. It can take any form, from the
desire to have a house more beautiful than the neighbour’s, to the pride of caring for one’s garden
(which has become almost an obligation in German or Austrian suburbs).

i. The need for show and iconic gestures. As one of the seven arts, architecture must convey
human emotions and allow for them to develop in the spectator’s heart (spectator is preferable to
viewer since architecture does not address only sight but most of the other senses as well). Thinking
of it as an enterprise, only in terms of profit, or subjecting it to urban ratios like the plot occupying
percentage or the ratio between the height of two buildings and the distance between them risks
burying architecture, as Schopenhauer viewed it, “under a pile of beams, bricks and mortar” [9] and
takes the creativity out from the architectural process.

I remain true to the idea that architecture should not be envisioned as a gigantic sculpture. The
Japanese idea of space is closer to reality in this context, as they see space as an object in its own,
not residual as we tend to see it. The show of architecture can be better perceived if we imagine
architecture as the background, the limits that define a certain square or street or interior space. For
this we can refer to the example of a theatre hall. Architecture is perceived at an average of 4 mph,
the average speed of walking, and this leads to concave spaces that offer more to view being more
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appreciated than convex spaces that need a lot of walking around for less information.

j. The need for play and creativity. Architecture is and should be interactive. The architect’s need
for creativity is no less important than the need for creativity of its user. The first process takes form
a few days to a few months but, if done correctly, it can trigger the second for many decades to
come. A water filled gutter for kids to play through or a surprise splash of water in the summer will
make generations happy.

An urban space that offers flexibility and opportunities for playful thinking to its citizens has all
chances to attract a lot more people who come out of pure curiosity and will thus facilitate all those
activities that we can sum up with the term “urban life”. We can find such examples all around the
world, from the trompe l’oeil of the Renaissance to the silver bells of Curtea de Arge monastery
church and to Bernard Tschumi’s folies in La Villete Park.

k. The need for symbols and sacred. Also derived from the previous need, the need for symbols
epitomizes the highest level in a potential pyramid of needs that find their answer in architecture.
Although present everywhere around the world as a major difference between human architecture
and animal nesting, the symbol, as cultural dialogue between architect and spectator, had a lot to
suffer from the misinterpretation of Adolf Loos’ manifesto against ornaments2.

In reality, all major architectural works claim to symbolize something. From Stonehenge and the
infinite circle to the pyramids which stand for the primordial mound upon which the Sun first stood,
from Heavenly Jerusalem – the Axis Mundi, to Sidney Opera House with its iconic sails,
architecture has the role to organize the urban landscape, to rank it in importance, to make it
different from the amorphous and profane fields that margin the city. As long as it is viable, symbol
must not only be allowed but enforced as it is quintessential to good quality architecture.

l. The need for nature. Last but not least, the need for natural environment can be felt in each
house and every city. Though deliberately left as the last need architecture addresses, the need for
nature is among the most important ones. If all other needs fall in the cultural sphere, being thus a
result of man’s creation, nature cannot and should never be replaced by the work of man but should
harmoniously blend with it (or the other way around, to be more precise).

For millennia, man has been adapting to live in nature and is now prisoner in an antiseptic world,
governed by air conditioning and deodorants. Instead of trying to appease the senses with nature’s
scents and sounds that we are genetically accustomed to, we deprive ourselves of it on the pretext of
squalor (dead leaves, poplar fluff, pollen etc.) or allergies (when in fact most allergens are
synthetic).

In fact, architects rarely take into consideration other human senses besides sight. One of the
reasons we feel Romanian cities are so different from those in the West, particularly from the
Mediterranean ones, is the fact that these offer a symphony of fragrances, from the smell of freshly
made bread or coffee to oleander, honeysuckle and orange blossom [10].

So it is an unpardonable error to consider architecture as a purely visual art. In his book, The Eyes
of the Skin, translated in most languages, Juhani Pallasmaa challenges the supremacy of the visual
in architecture as well as in daily life, stating that sight alone could not account for much if it didn’t
work together with the other four senses. Our constructed world would become nothing more than a
“hedonistic but meaningless visual journey” [11].
 Paul Mutica / Acta Technica Napocensis: Civil Engineering & Architecture Vol. 55, No. 4, (2013)

Notes
1
the four chosen iconic objects are Falling Water House of F. L. Wright, Vila Savoye of Le
Corbusier, Farnsworth House of Mies van der Rohe and Schroeder House of Gerrit Rietveld
2
actually Loos stated his famous manifesto against the excessive ornamentation of habitation
buildings that, instead of conferring the intimate atmosphere required, were lavishly and uselessly
covered in meaningless motives and ornaments

5. References

[1] Lorenz, Konrad, Cele opt păcate capitale ale omenirii civilizate, Ed. Humanitas, Bucure ti, pp. 32-33.

[2] idem

[3] Ghid de educaŃie urbană: http://issuu.com/marius_huza/docs/ghidul_de_educatie_urbana

[4] http://www.fondationlecorbusier.fr/

[5] Pallasmaa, Juhani, The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses, John Wiley & Sons, London, 2005,
p. 56

[6] Gehl, Jan, Ora e pentru oameni, Igloo Media, Bucure ti, 2012, pp. 96-103

[7] Gehl, Jan, ViaŃa între clădiri – utilizările spaŃiului public, Igloo Media, Bucure ti, 2011, pp. 9-14

[8] for further details see Mândrie i Beton, www.mandriesibeton.ro

[9] A. Schopenhauer apud Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” in Goodman, Nelson & Elgin,
Catherine Z., Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences, Hackett,
Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1988, p. 31

[10] Hall, Edward Twitchell, The Hidden Dimension, Anchor Books, New York, 1990, p. 50 i p. 144

[11] Pallasmaa, Juhani, op. cit., p. 22