Archi-Culture Cafe NUMBER ONE

Hello :)
With this blog, I hope to reflect coherently on tutorial activities and readings set each week for a unit called Architecture, Culture & Space @ QUT. I am studying in my third year of a Bachelor of Design majoring in Interior Design.

The reading - Chapter 7 Making Culture Usable of the book Culture, Architecture & Design by Amos Rapoport- really helped me to understand what we will be dealing with in this subject. Before I read the text, I did think about "culture" as Mexican Sombreros and Japanese Sushi. I thought "how terrible that I have been stereotyping this whole time!". But at the same time I thought how I would not be able to design for culture as a broad term if someone asked me to. Although, it seems to me that dismantling culture as a concept should be the logical step for me as a designer anyway. The first part of receiving a brief would be, for me, to analyse and research all possible avenues and aspects (well, in an ideal world anyway :P ). So the reading was just a helping-hand in analysing and breaking down "culture" for design purposes. At the same time, though, it was a VERY helpful helping-hand that opened my eyes to the kinds of aspects that would be important to consider when breaking down "culture".
I feel inclined to put the word culture in inverted commas for the whole rest of my life, as I will never look at it the same way again.

The first activity in tute number one was to list ten things we would pack into a suitcase in a disaster situation. The things had to fit into a suitcase, ie no people.
I noticed that the people at my table all wrote similar things, with only a few extreme differences. This made me think of the possibility that the group I was in have all been raised with seemingly similar values, and how interesting it was that we only had a few differences. The results though, were influenced somewhat by our discussion of the task. There were a number of rotations of groups throughout the session.
The next activity was to discuss and record answers to questions as a group. There were a number of questions, but only the first one was explored as it was so rich with possible answers that both groups I was in got caught up spending all our time on it.
The question was How can the relationship between Architecture and Culture be understood?
In my first group we decided that the relationship is a cyclical one. The architect or designer designs for one of the subcategories of "culture" and the resulting design becomes an outcome or product of culture - visual evidence of culture. Within the group, the question was raised about how it came to be that culture and architecture mutually feed each other in this cyclical way. We discussed the fact that both culture and architecture have evolved over time. This little paragraph was the result of our discussion :)
At the beginning, it would make sense that architecture was all about protection from the elements. As time progressed, and as humans and seperate cultures evolved, the purpose of architecture still basically remained the same. However, values, beliefs, lifestyles, etc had to be applied as well. As the culture evolved, and its aspects were applied to architecture, an interdependence between the two must have developed.
In the next group we discussed the cyclical nature further, as they had come to the same conclusion with their previous group. We discussed that maybe the aspects of culture which were applied to architecture might have come back around to influence the culture itself. So, for example, the small spaces in Scandinavian architecture are there because of the climate - it is freezing and small spaces are easy to heat and keep warm. But potentially the small space could influence the social norms of that culture with regard to something like personal space.

So I think that overall, the relationship between architecture and culture could be understood as a very rich cyclic interdependence.

:)