Architecture and its Metaphors. The Poetic Form as Experience

Résumé

While language can be understood as an expression of the phenomenal unity between the world and man, it is the poetic form that has always explained both mythical and physical phenomena of the human experience (Paz 1973). Following the idea of a primordial connection between poetry and understanding, I aim to explore the possibility of expanding the poetic model to other human cognitive experiences, and the architectural one in particular. The metaphorical relational structure between signifier and signified at the core of poetics can be translated in architectural terms in multiple ways: the relationship between container and contained space, built materiality and its experienceable in between, and many more. In this way, space as an external object becomes part of its subject: this is the limit and only possibility of knowledge. The emphasis given to the experiential dimension of the spaces we inhabit shifted the focus from what architecture is, has or does, to how its users feel and, ultimately, on who they are (Klingmann 2007). From the Situationist International to Antonioni’s cinema and experience economy, this contribution addresses architectural forms as part of a social life which determines use, reception, and participation by communities, renewing the attention on experience rather than function.