One good way to explicate a situation that is not logical and light-bound is to take a physical example of such, in this case Charlotte Perriand's Les Arcs ski resort, often perceived as futurist and brutalist.
These are just words, though, so it's worth going back in time - actually right back to the Roman Emperor Trajan! For a start, the Les Arcs villages are cantilevered from the slope of the mountain.
Perriand's goal was in overridingly functional design that has much in common with Roman forebears.
The buildings are offset on a slope so that each tier catches the sun. Ornamentation - both exterior and interior - is kept to s minimum as the principle is to allow the landscape to speak with its own voice.
The effect is to be almost precisely mechanical in much the same way Roman aqueducts were - or even the skeleton of an animal.
In a way, she designed it from.the inside with the view of enabling an equal view of the mountain, in egalitarian fashion.
This also puts one in mind of medieval castles, which are built mechanically to be brutally functional and with egalitarian spaces (for those in favour with the Lord, obviously.)
Because these types of mechanical buildings utilize the strength of the landscape, they have common features.
For a start, there is a natural sense of well-being, a boost to the psyche from.the feeling that the building is at one with the landscape, rooted or almost merged or emerging from it (within it.)
The power of the mountain is both physical, and affects the psyche. The way I want to put this is that the foundation of things is illogical. A mountain is an irrational force of nature (like the Danube or a castle on a crag.)
Through the genius of her design, Perriand uses trees and slopes - and also snow on roofs - as a type of camouflage so that the buildings can appear to disappear.
Trees in forest create shade, so one way you could put it is that the villages are designed half in shade and half in sunlight.
When.buildings are designed with natural forces in mind they have the internal logic of the irrational in their actual construction.
The American Frank Lloyd Wright designed in that type of way to forge elemental buildings over water and through trees (PS there's also a Japanese connection in that Perriand lived and worked there.)
A landscape tends to be composed of light and dark forces; a forest is dark, water is dark - or can also be reflective light - crags are moulded by shadow.
In nature this is highly obvious since there are very few straight lines and therefore there is a continual gradation in tone. Trees absorb light through photosynthesis and so actually create shade (foliage.)
All this is obvious enough, but the fact that sunlight is continually being destroyed in the natural course of events doesn't seem.to occur to our modern Utopia of electromagnetic advance!
The fact is we live in a logical world of straight lines and light, as opposed to an irrational one of curvilinear shapes and shade. Diana the huntress is only ever going to be a force in this irrational kingdom
In ancient days, buildings could be hidden by forest or natural formations because of the dominance of nature. Light is only half of the story; the other is the absence of light.
It's because we live in a logical world (of light) that that fact is consistentlt overlooked. A world of pure light could not have spinning objects such as Earth which is half in darkness (night, moon.)
The irrational tends to come less from building per se as from.letting things happen in inspirational ways.
As was noted back in Alternates5), the city of O'Henry was irrational but with its own internal logic. Desires are enabled to breath; drama is in the air.
This world is not thousands of years old but only goes back to the 40s, 50s, 60s. Inspiration comes from natural formations in the Art Deco skyscrapers of the 30s.
The foundations of nature are irrational, whereas the foundations of modernity are rational. It's more true really to see Perriand as a retro-futurist with one foot in the past. To her a mountain was physical and mental exhilaration, and her desire was to retain both.
In the modern order, both the physical strength of nature, and the psyche that makes people feel good are lost in the equation of real estate and the Almighty Dollar (be it Biden or his predecessor.)
