Does architecture insert itself into culture or is culture inserted to architecture?

             In “Preexisting conditions and issues of contemporary building practice” Ernesto Rogers thoroughly explains his “new program for architecture” from a rationalist perspective. Rogers is advocating that designers, “…insert the needs of life into culture and conversely, to insert culture into everyday life: this is the task of the architect…” (Rogers) I found this particular relationship between life, culture, and architecture to be interesting. I began to question what element in this complex relationship is applying the most force upon the others? Before any connection can be made we must first look back to the creator of the form, the architect.

An architect designs a form based on their own perception of what culture is asking for.  Rogers states in his essay, “Forms must convincingly document the subtlest ethical claims of collective and individual man, continuing the ancient discourse.” (Rogers) Representing the collective and the individual creates a problem for the architect. Culture cannot be defined by a single idea because it is composed from very different parts. Within any culture there are many subcultures: from politicians to anarchist, religious to atheist.  So the question becomes not whether architecture or culture is imposing on each other but how to impose them in a “convincing” form.

            According to Rogers the solution to the design problem is to look at every question in a different context, “One who today confronts a creative problem must insert his own thought into objective reality, which each time presents itself in terms of its own interpretation…” Architects should design according to the context of the project. This context is what makes a building specific and natural to its environment. Rogers believes that context can be found in the history of a place, “…the events of the past find their reason in the coherent consistency of the original acts that have determined them… the present is, in its turn, an original creation. That which, however, disintegrates history unifies it in a sense of continuity whereby the past is projected into present occurrences and the latter are joined together in finding their roots in anterior facts.” When architecture is rooted in context it is culture.

Ernesto Nathan Rogers, "Preexisting Conditions and Issues of contemporary Building Practice,"from Architecture Culture       1943-1968: A Documentary Anthology, edited by Joan Ockman (New York: Columbia Books of Architecture/Rizzoli,     1993) 200-204.