Architecture of Pleasure

architect Will Alsop
project Queen's Mary School of Medicine and Dentistry - Institute of Cell and Molecular Sciences, London, The Great Britain
written by Alan Kostrenčić

 

Our work as architects, currently poised to
be able to give the world extraordinary
objects of desire, is under threat by people
who see the world as a dull and uncultured
place of day to day tedium and boredom.
STOP THEM.
Will Alsop

 

During many generations, each architect who intended or tried to enjoy the pleasure in architecture was labeled as decadent. – says Tschumi in his essay Pleasure of architecture. It is a fact that in almost the entire discourse on architecture and the theory of architecture, from Vitruvius to Modernism, we can find  the idea of the impossibility or immorality of architecture without any functional or formal / aesthetic justification. The architecture of Will Alsop, though, is primarily the architecture of the enjoyment of architecture. If we look at the theory of architecture through history as the development of the principles it has set, then the allure and the pleasure of Alsop’s architecture lies in breaking them. The game of architecture is a complicated toying with rules that can be either accepted or rejected and the more numerous and sophisticated the limitations, the greater the pleasure in breaking them.