Site´s nostalgia. On the relationship between architecture and contemporary sense of place

Abstract

Architecture is enriched when it goes beyond the fundamental act of construction and achieves an indissoluble unity with the site where it sets root. The architect´s work becomes more delicate and intense when making reference, not so much to the building itself, but to the invisible complementary space surrounding the architecture object. However, the notion of context and place, understood in this way, hasn´t received the same consideration either in architectural history or within modernist criticism. Much of the architecture of the twentieth century has exhibited a strange ambiguity about where it is located, due either to a violent or reverential obedience to the site. Today the nostalgia for site appears as one of the few instruments in architecture that still create significance and avoid the emptiness of sense.