BIG Architecture Conference: In Search of Beauty – Between Tradition and Innovation
For this year’s conference, we are inviting interesting characters from the field of architecture and its margins, to present their authentic quests on both professional and personal levels. We will listen to their testimonies related to remarkable works of architecture, which are perhaps not part of the mainstream of fashionable, trendy generic architecture, but rather personal, related to an author’s poetic expression and their own journey beyond the established framework and thus thinking outside the box. We will meet authors who are aware of the limitations of perpetual growth, who collaborate with local communities, who have a deeper understanding of tradition and its meaning, but who are also aware that we live in the 21st century, which drives us to search for both authentic and innovative forms of living all across the world.
At a time when we are facing difficult, multifaceted challenges, both globally and locally (from wars to climate change, the ecological crisis, and so on), even in architecture, mediocre, conventional methods barely ever catch on. At the same time, there are no universal recipes for creative paths and solutions, and thus we have to find them again and again in ways that are contextual, unique, “site specific”, participatory, sustainable, etc. This is what the life stories of our guests from different countries and different generations will be like: diverse, colourful, original, wise, inspiring and spiced up again and again by their creative actions, their specific spaces and times, their houses and gardens, their towns and villages!
Our five guests, with whom we will discuss these stories, will also be invited to reflect on the overall theme of this year’s Big SEE event and magazine, the phenomenon of “beauty”, in their own way and from their own perspective. This theme is eternal in the field of architecture, but it is also intriguing because it evolves and changes over time and is therefore difficult to capture in rigid canons. However, what is really interesting about beauty and aesthetics is not so much its superficial, fashionable or “cosmetic” aspect, which also dictates trends in architecture, but rather a deeper, experiential insight into the beautiful or the aesthetic (more in the sense of the ancient Greek word aisthesis, experience). When architecture is also a form of art it has a therapeutic effect on us as human beings, it inspires and heals us, and at the same time it offers us a safe, warm harbour to seek in the midst of our frantic modern world. This is, after all, what (neuro) scientists have been reminding us of in recent years, and what also places beauty deep within the perceptual, formative experiences of human beings.
The venustas of the classical Vitruvian triad is therefore not lost or forgotten, as may have been progressively assumed given the state of the world and of architecture in the last century, it only needs to be re-conceptualized, reconnected with life and with people, and dignified through a sensitive and responsible architecture!
