They say that it doesn’t matter what happens, but how you see it. They also say that literature does not reproduce reality, but rather creates another. It all starts with an idea. Just an idea. Image and imagination go hand in hand, meaning they constitute the mechanism of human perception, thought, language, and memory. And in essence, architecture is nothing more than organizing ideas. The question is: how do we organize these ideas? Or rather, how do you see things? Is there really perception without social and cultural context? The short answer is no. The long answer involves interpretive anthropology, a bit of theory, and a great deal of criticism.
Interpretive anthropology, because we are talking about cultural analyses and we want to draw broad conclusions from small, yet densely connected, facts. As Geertz (2008) noted when quoting Max Weber, man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. He views culture as those webs, and its analysis not as an experimental science in search of law, but as an interpretive one in search of meaning. Geertz (2008) defends a semiotic concept of culture, in which historically transmitted patterns of meaning should not be understood as a closed system, but as an object of ongoing interpretation. In plain English: nothing remains exactly the same. Things change, if only a little. This is how it works with architecture, especially that which is recognized as cultural heritage. For example, El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires is both a bookstore and a tourist landmark, yet it was built in the early decades of the twentieth century to be a theater. Enabling this kind of transformation is precisely the role of architects, and the primary tool for doing so is a solid foundation of theory.
