Emotive stories exist behind architecture. The biographical intersects with the professional in guiding the digital pencil to help architects imagine a better tomorrow. Lyricism yields the understanding that the emotive is what causes architectural elation.
This state of affairs is a concoction of intuition, sensibility, aesthetic sense, subjectivity, and personal reflection. When carried to its ultimate architectural consequences, each project is partially an autobiographical account of its author. Modern architectural history offers already a powerful precedent of someone who, with his effervescent, carioca invention, challenged the severity of the hardliners when nobody else dared: Oscar Niemeyer. In his work functionality and sensuality found a unique synthesis.
Each commission jumpstarts a private reflection and design rendition of a reading of site, client, users, cultures, and the economics surrounding it. This mix is processed in a pot of environmental psychology, metaphorically speaking, to bring users to the center of the quest for placemaking. The result is a “Lyrical Modernism.” There is no mathematical formula, no scripting, no technical rationality producing a computer-generated design, estranged from the site it is supposed to occupy. Instead, it is a humane effort to bring together the computing paradigm of our time and the lessons learned in environmental psychology to make, at the most basic level, meaningful spaces for people to have a dignified life in them. Rather than choosing form for form’s sake, the lyrical modernist aims to attach stories to architectural form in order to yield the emotional meaning that the majority of people can relate to. In this respect, the lyrical approach to design is a case to preserve the unique sensibility of the subject to draw lasting architectural meaning instead of giving license to capricious space-making. It acknowledges that the individual is source and endorsement of choices inclusive of the rational without being captive of it. This position enables the creative coexistence of the lessons of modernity about the mechanical with the active realm of the self, originator of actions impactful on architectural form. It is the very reason why, despite innumerable attempts, architecture has escaped the procedural approaches of generative design. That angle amplifies the rational parameters while silencing the world of the affects, making it just an update version of problem-solving. Lyrical design is a living template to set free reflections, possibilities, and in the end designs speaking to the multiple aspirations the collective yearns for when witnessing the rise of a new architecture.