The Architecture of Measure

Ole Bouman

One of civilization’s biggest achievements are citizens’ ever-more refined capacity to measure. Measure represents our ability to combine, balance, compromise, restrain, reflect, scale and to moderate. Measure stands for our better self. It is also a qualification of character. Architecture has always been one of the most important modalities of measure, translating competing forces and interests into synthetical and final form. As such, architecture is also an instrument of peace, bringing together oppositions in one material reality. 

However, we live in an age in which measure seems to slip through our fingers, giving way to increasing tensions, oppositions, and even hostilities. From climate change to global power struggles, we seem to have lost our talent to foster this peace. Increasingly, architecture is having trouble to remain, literally and figuratively, on the constructive side. 

This lecture will explore architecture’s prolonged power to generate and sustain our life and world, going beyond its immediate expectations to become, once again, a civilizing force.

Salk Institute at night

Host:

Li Xiangning,

Dean, CAUP, Tongji University

15:00-16:30, June 5th

Auditorium A215,

 CAUP, Tongji University