THE SUBSTANTIVE GENOME OF ARCHITECTURE: FROM UTILITARIAN FUNCTION TO COMMUNICATIVE MISSION

Abstract

One of the key features of the phenomenon of architecture is associated with its essential specificity and meaningful quintessence of being the embodiment of meanings and values that go beyond the everyday pragmatics of life of both an individual and society and humanity.Architecture does not aim to provide utilitarian, tactical and opportunistic needs – it sees its calling in generating worldview hierarchies and ideological strategisms. This is its fundamental calling, which is laid down at the level of the substantial genome, fixed at the level of millennial social practices. Therefore, it can be confidently asserted that architecture has something to say. The deep affinity of architecture with philosophy is due to its ideological and worldview richness: we can say that philosophy is a kind of Alter­Ego of architecture. As for the difference between architecture and philosophy, it lies in giving priority to different articulatory means: if philosophy’s way of representing its «I» is predominantly verbal, rhetorical and discursive, then architecture resorts to the services of a more sophisticated communicative toolkit – signs, symbols, analogies.Such communicative means are not simple from the point of view of both the implementation of articulatory functions and the correct perception of articulated hierarchies of meanings and values: they require an appropriate level of communicative and general cultural competence.