Concretizing the spirit of place : an examination of the concept of rasa and its application in architecture

Abstract

"Architecture belongs to poetry, and its purpose is to help man to dwell. But Architecture is a difficult art. Architecture comes into being when a "Total environment is made visible", to quote the definition of Susanne Langer. In general this means to concretize the Genius Loci. We have seen that this is done by means of buildings which gathers the properties of the place and bring them close to man. The basic act of architecture is therefore to understand and the "vocation' of the place. In this way we protect the earth and become ourselves a part of comprehensive totality. We only recognize the fact that the man is an integral part of the environment, and that it can only lead to human alienation and environmental disruption he forgets that. To belong to a place means to have an existential foothold in a concrete everyday sense." Norberg Schulz, C. 1980, p23 2.0 Observation 2.1 Problem statement Architecture has been defined as " concretization of existential place." In each and every space there is a context and a spirit of place and it is essential to respond to it. Other wise there will be Architectural pollution i.e. Buildings which are not in harmony with the context. Even though the foregoing principle has been obviously accepted, Architects continue to impose his own style on the site, in place of giving way to that demanded by the client. A further practice is to copy a preferred building and import it to some other site. In short, the practice of responding to the spirit of the location seem to have given way, to other practices much to the detriment of the site and the sustenance man can derive from an inviolated site. It is not enough to know that there is a spirit of place and that it should be concretized through Architecture. There should be a mechanism of application. The skill in choosing the appropriate tools (mechanism), which provides a means of transferring that Spirit of Place in to a design, is not very clear, there fore this seems to be the most probable reason for this problem. It seems to be the lack of skill/awareness in capturing aesthetics of a place and transferring in to a language.