Architecture as a tool for shaping consciousness

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Man is "woven" from curved surfaces; there is not a single right angle either in the cells or in the organs - in the whole body. This does not require proof. A person is pathologically unable to live in flat, cubic volumes, gradually without destroying himself.

Living in a virtual paradigm of a right angle that is pernicious for all living things, we inevitably approach the energies that these forms generate.

Please note: in our time, a person subconsciously begins to move away from right angles, however, so far in small volumes: the design of household appliances, cars - there are practically no right angles there, and they are very ergonomic, they delight the eye and soul, they are comfortable as in the womb, they are streamlined, they are organic. Many plastic lines began to appear in the interiors, and people living in them become more natural and harmonious. The time has come to build houses on the basis of curved surfaces, and maybe we will stop fighting everything that was not created by us …

We began to use round tables for negotiations, we felt that even the FORM of a small thing - a table - depends on whether it is agreement or war. At the round table - the world. For the square - the war.

This is what her majesty is - FORM.

Striking factors of the city

Statistics states that a person's physical health is influenced primarily by a person's lifestyle and the environment, and only then by various other factors (heredity, level of health care, etc.). Thus, the state of human health is significantly influenced by where he lives and in what conditions he lives.

Modern cities, unfortunately, are not a comfortable place for human living and development, since they are sources of many factors that continuously destroy the physical and mental health of a person. Here are just a few of them - modern architecture that does not reflect the principle of the golden ratio, dense electromagnetic smog, in which a person is literally forced to swim, polluted air, noise in a wide spectrum of frequencies, including the infrasonic component, etc.

The golden proportion is the fundamental principle of the construction of living matter, therefore everything that does not correspond to this principle is unviable and has a destructive effect on living organisms by its shape and proportions alone. The form, which is based on the combination of the principle of the golden ratio and symmetry, contributes to the best visual perception and the appearance of a sense of beauty and harmony. It is known that buildings, paintings and musical works are perceived as perfect only if the principle of the golden ratio is manifested in them.

The principle of the golden ratio is embedded in all forms of living matter, from cells to structural elements of the Form Field of the Earth and the Universe. This is the ideal norm for the construction of all living and developing. Violation or inconsistency with this principle always leads to depression, developmental delay, weakening and disease, which ultimately leads to the destruction of a living organism over time.

The shape of any object and its proportions are formed by lines that we perceive on a visual and subconscious level. Such a visual-psychological effect is known: from a chaotic set of points, lines or light spots, the human brain subconsciously forms ordered pictures, where the subject's attention is focused on groups of symbols generalized in this way. Then consciousness turns on and, for example, it outlines several luminous points in the sky and the person decides to call all this the constellation Ursa Major. When this image becomes the property of public consciousness with a huge history in many generations, people, even alive, and not just speculatively, begin to see, as it were, the thinnest glowing lines between the stars, forming the famous "bucket". This property of the joint activity of speculation and vision is their "binding" to the correct structures - systems of images, complexes of symbols, stable accents of perception of both the conscious and subconscious levels of the human psyche.

Thus, architecture, due to the combination of straight and curved lines, is able to create a certain mental state, which affects human consciousness and forms the corresponding type of social behavior. Consequently, architecture is a tool for the formation of the spiritual and moral image of a person and social consciousness.

With that said, let's see what external forms are surrounded by the inhabitants of many modern cities and in what conditions is the development of their consciousness?

Monotony with many "rectangular" twin houses and quarters, monochromatic in color and having a large number of homogeneous elements - bare walls, monolithic glass, asphalt pavements - all this organizes an environment that differs sharply from the natural environment in which it has lived and formed for centuries Human. As a result, human behavior changes, such "aggressive fields" of modern cities provoke a person to appropriate actions and contribute to the emergence and growth of crime.

According to statistics, typical development areas have the highest percentage of suicides, accidents and criminal incidents. In addition, experts have long noticed that child crime in the "sleeping areas" of Moscow is about 7 times higher than in its center. An unfavorable visual environment, when a person is forced to constantly stay among buildings with distorted forms, leads to the emergence and development of mental illness, a decline in morality and the prosperity of the base qualities of human nature.

New York provides a striking example of how the layout and height of a neighborhood's buildings affect crime rates. The most dangerous were large neighborhoods built up with buildings over six floors. According to the New York police, the number of crimes in skyscrapers increases almost in proportion to their height. If in three-story buildings there are 8, 8 crimes per thousand inhabitants, then in sixteen-story buildings - up to 20, 2. It is also curious that four-fifths of all crimes are committed inside the building: not the surrounding gardens and squares, but just the houses themselves are the most dangerous for their inhabitants. On stairs, in hallways and elevators, the increase in crime is even more impressive: from 2, 6 per thousand inhabitants in six-story buildings to 11.5 per thousand inhabitants in nineteen-story buildings - that is, more than 4 times.

The situation is worsened by the depersonalization of cities, which began in Soviet times and acquired a grandiose scale: several years ago, sociologists in Minsk conducted an experiment, comparing the names of streets in Minsk, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod and Donetsk. The result is an amazingly monotonous picture. The names of streets in Minsk coincided: with Moscow - 333 times, with Nizhny Novgorod - 336 times, with Donetsk - 375 times. In these four cities, almost 70% of the street names were repeated. The central squares in most of our cities, as a rule, bear the name of Lenin, less often the name of the Revolution, Peace, Victory. And what can you say about the faceless "typical buildings" and the quarters of the "Red Builders", which reproduce the dull monotony of Soviet reality?

According to the plan of the architects of the revolution, it was Moscow that was to turn into an "exemplary socialist city." During the reconstruction of the capital, an architectural environment was created, which was supposed to constantly influence the human consciousness and subconsciousness, forming a new psychology and the corresponding type of social behavior of people living in the city.

Building "skyscrapers" and communal "arks" of "social cells", renaming cities and streets, systematically destroying all the centuries-old originality of urban planning, Soviet architects thereby forcibly changed the way of life of urban residents. The natural environment, mastered in this way, began to gradually turn into a socially conditioned environment, a "second" nature, and the consciousness of this second nature is the most important function of architecture. Therefore, social processes are not only reflected in architecture, but also formed by it.

In the architecture of the post-revolutionary period, the ideas of constructivism were most clearly manifested, which mainly uses simple geometric shapes (pyramid, cube, cylinder) and is distinguished by the display of the structure itself and building materials. The founder of constructivism is considered to be the French mystic architect Le Corbusier, who abandoned the use of elements of the classical order system and switched to buildings made of glass and concrete. He used ideas that existed in the ancient world, the meaning of which was that some combination of straight and curved lines can create a certain mental state. In Russia, the followers of constructivism were primarily Moscow architects, the Vesnin brothers, Konstantin Melnikov, Vladimir Tatlin, Boris Iofan - a relative of Kaganovich, the main destroyer of the historical part of the city. This experiment, which was practiced in the capital, was subsequently carried over and replicated throughout the country.

One of the first tasks assigned to Soviet architects was to create a new high-rise silhouette of the city, it was planned to "blow up the space" with the dynamics of abstract forms. The literature of architects of that time does not directly speak of constructivism as one of the means of destructive influence on the consciousness and subconsciousness of a person, but it is recognized that if a person is “forced to look at unseemly and asymmetric structures that will cause base feelings in him, then he will be inclined to similar actions. For example, if a poorly designed building is erected in the middle of a city, unsuccessful children will be born in this city, and men and women, looking at ugly structures, will lead an inharmonious life."

The harmful effects of typical buildings, simple geometric shapes and buildings built without taking into account the principle of the golden ratio can no longer be denied, but architects continue to design them and continue to build buildings that create additional psycho-emotional discomfort in our already not too calm society. One of the examples of such construction is the Forum pavilion of the exhibition complex on Krasnaya Presnya.

By architecture, one can judge the processes that arise and will occur in society in the future, since architecture directly affects human consciousness. Researchers of a particular period in the history of architecture can assess the moral priorities of society and its elite, the presence and adherence to certain views, the economic well-being of society, as well as the vector of movement as a whole - in the direction of development or degradation.

Architecture is an objective judge in the historical ring. Discreetly revealing the essence of the political system, cleaning off the husk of slogans and deceit, it objectively evaluates the life of society. And, as “the word embodied in stone,” she can kill or give life.

Arkhipov V. V. Resurrection square of Russia. Criminal revolution

Skyscrapers of modern cities are visible symbols of the spiritual and physical captivity of the people, destroying the centuries-old originality of urban planning.

Chicago is one of the centers of US architecture, the birthplace of skyscrapers. The Chicago Embankment …	… and its Moscow copy. Buildings of the business center "Moscow City" on the embankment of the Moskva River.

Some governments are already taking concrete steps to improve the urban environment. In 1974, in St. Louis (Missouri, USA), an entire residential area was demolished, one into one similar to a typical quarter in any city in the Soviet Union. The Pruitt-Igoe residential complex was then called the most ambitious post-war residential project in the United States.

In the press, the area was dubbed a high-rise suburb, the quarter received the first prize at the prestigious competition "Architectural Forum". "Pruitt Igou" consisted of 33 11-storey typical residential buildings. The area was designed to accommodate 12 thousand people. From photographs it seems that you are in the American state, and somewhere in Moscow Cheryomushki … The purpose of the complex was solving the housing problem for young, middle-class tenants.

The opening of the residential complex took place in 1956 and at first everything looked rosy. The concept of the quarter was planned to be scaled across the United States. However, a year later, the quarter began to turn into a ghetto, vandal-proof doors and lamps had to be installed, the police began to refuse to come to the area on call, in 1970 the city was declared a disaster zone and the resettlement of residents began. Abandoned buildings were filled with drug addicts and homeless people. Due to inhuman living conditions, demolition of the Pruitt-Igou residential complex began in 1972, which was completed in 1974.

The above examples indicate that architecture is capable of influencing human consciousness and forming the corresponding type of social behavior. Understanding this fact allows a fundamentally different attitude to the construction or acquisition of a house in which each of us will live or work, because the psycho-emotional state, health status and the fate of a person as a whole will depend on this.

Rough wooden architecture

In traditional Russian society, the entire architectural appearance was meaningful: Tradition dictated form and content. The environment carried a meaning, was a crystallized expression of man's understanding of the World.

See also: Motives of Russian architecture

An analysis of absolutely all ancient structures, starting with the Egyptian pyramids, shows the presence of the Golden Ratio, and the multivariance of its application is confusing. And the freshest of the surviving gold-cut structures are ancient Russian churches and temples !!! From ancient times and up to the 18th century, in Russia they built according to the golden proportions! Only Peter I put an end to the "disorder" by equating the state fathom (217, 6 cm) to 7 English feet (213, 360 cm). In 1835. Nicholas I banned the rest of the sazhens altogether, and in 1924 the metric system was introduced.

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