On Tuesday, 5
February 2013, as part of the programme of the "2013 ESARQ Forum cycle:
Atmospheres: The Sense of the Things”, organized by the ESARQ, Pau Pedragosa,
an architect and doctor in philosophy, gave the lecture “From Abstraction to
the Body of Architecture: Crisis in Architecture or Architecture as
Crisis?" in the UIC Main Lecture Hall.

According
to Pedragosa, architecture is in the midst of a very serious crisis. The
deep-seated reason for this crisis is that architecture is torn by two opposing
and irreconcilable cultures that define the contemporary world: technological
production and humanistic understanding. From the perspective of technological
production, architecture is conceived as an abstract housing machine that
rationalizes and standardizes human life, whereas humanistic understanding sees
architecture as a specific body that interprets the complexity of daily life in
the world.

Starting
in the early 20th century, the modern movement of architecture faced this
crisis and decided on technology, i.e. the housing machine, the rationalization
of buildings and our environment, but now, in a context of crisis that is
surprisingly similar to the one that occurred a century ago, it is time to make
up for the abstract approach to housing through particularization and
specification. 

Pau
Pedragosa was a teacher at EINA Design School and the European Institute of
Design (IED). He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of
Architectural Composition at the Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB). He
specializes in phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics and the theory of
architecture. Pedragosa is a founding member of the Phenomenological Studies
Group at the Institute for Catalan Studies (IEC) and a member of the Spanish
Phenomenology Society (SEFE) and the Organization of Phenomenological
Organizations (OPO). He participates in the research project the Topology of
the Contemporary Urban Context, which is sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of
Science and Innovation.