Architecture has been defined differently by every culture throughout history, which indicates that people understand their built environment and the capabilities of their language. New students at architecture schools use their linguistic talent to express their ideas as a second tool for design. In addition, to the new terms we are experiencing, such as Parametricism, we are still exposed to new ideas and spaces. To define a personal view, language is used for verbal statements, while architecture is used for non-verbal statements. This text is about how the nature of architecture is limited and interpreted by our language.
Architecture history has been saturated with theories, still generating new ones. All are described by words and literature mechanics to explain the notions behind the design. Renders, pictures, and drawings spell out the physical features of a building, however, the concepts are clarified by words. The challenge is how the dynamic nature of language is affecting the representation and apperceive of architecture?
As Mies Van Der Rohe once said “Architecture is a language, and I think you have to have grammar in order to have a language. If you are good at that, you speak a wonderful prose, if you are really good, you can be a poet”. To understand and explain a concept, architecture plays a crucial role as a language; through the transition with written work, it is transformed. There were several factors involved in the development of this relation, one of them is the context in which society found itself.
The progress of electronic devices and new ways to communicate have affected Architecture realization over the past two decades. Are we going to understand architecture through new forms of language? Will new languages help us better understand architecture? Subjective forms of architecture may have been shaped in our collective memory by languages, but there is no certainty. If binary codes or emojis become a common language, the concept of aesthetics or function will be unified; the single accent of these languages will reduce the diversity of the concepts.
Similar to language, architecture is a complex phenomenon whose meaning changes constantly as communication technologies advance; it does not have a stable identity due to its evolution. The cosmopolitans of the future will discover unified concept and logic in the Architecture ideas through their united language, while currently, we must translate architecture products to our local parameters, as we do with texts.
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