Page 46 - META

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ISSN 2309-0103 www.archidoct.net
Vol. 7 (2) / February 2020
course in relation to the senses: emotion, opposed to intellection (butequally essential for an understanding of the world and Mankind),also claimed its relevance.
In this sense, discourses arose in Europe, such as Condillac’sTraité des systems (1798), or Berkeley or Hume’s ideas, and, at the end of the century, there was shift in interest towards sensory dominance, which can be perceived in Locke’s ideas.
So we can witness two parallel visions: an enlightened science, and another more ro- mantic science of expressive capacity, which travelled on different paths but were also interlinked, because although they may have seemed antagonistic, they didshare, as Tarnas explains,goalswith regard to questions such as the appreciation of the poten- tial of Man within his context, forms of individualism, criticism of habit or an explora- tion of hidden structures in nature (Tarnas, 1991).
And between these two poles, architecture also progressed, so that while it stayed in touch with aesthetic aspects, it gradually granted more attention to questions such as ways of building; thus, for example, the tectonic approach of Perrault and, later on, that of Laugier.
It come across an assumption of the laws of mechanics and, later, an interest for living forms, as well as inherited visions of nature that are more poetic, leading to somewhat entangled step-by-step developments. As an example of the miscellaneous of these two visions, we might mention Blondel: a superlative example of academic rational- ism, but also a thinker who revealed echoes of the expressive traditions of Ancient cosmic harmony. And what aboutBoullé, with his appreciation of architecture that is endowed with a capacity to move us, as reflected in Essai sur l’Art.
The Contemporary Era: Natural Science and Major Advances in Engineering
The Contemporary Era revealed, through the auspices of engineering, some extraordi- nary advances regarding new calculation procedures applied to fields such as geom- etry, mechanicsor construction, based on numerous theoretical and practical writings that brought descriptions of new technical approaches. For example, the famous En- cyclopédieby Diderot and d’Alembert (1780), orDurand’sPrécis des leconsd’architec- ture(1802), presentedthe earliest formulations of the standardization of architecture.
Similarly, this was also a period of progress regarding the natural sciences. Lamarck defined biology as the study of living beings, and he explained evolution as a ten- dency towards complexity and progressive refinement, based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics and environmental adaptation,as well as the concept of use and disuse (Lamarck and Martins, 1873).
This is described by Collins,in the same sense as Sullivan’s functionalist expression in the twentieth century, as “form follows function” (Collins, 1998, pp. 188): in our matter referring to formal aspects (Labrouste, Viollet-le-Duc or Gaudí, etc.), and to structural aspects (Sullivan, Wright, etc.).Later on, Thompson would also contribute to the idea that this inheritance is not exclusively responsible for morphology, given that it also depends on the forces exercised and the optimization of energy (Thompson, 1968).
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Systemic Considerations. Regarding the Importance of the Pre- in the Post- on the Path Towards the Meta-system
Adolfo Jordán