The Formal Operation of Architecture The Question of Abstraction

Forms in architecture are the result of an evolutionary process with underlying abstract constituent parts, a process generated and mediated by human cognition. If architecture is taken to be the art of creating inhabitable forms, the inquiry is mainly concerned with how architecture gives form to an intended expression or meaning and what theoretical framework can explain this formal operation. It is argued that the comprehensibility of the intended expression is dependant upon the logical correlation between the objective perceptual aspects of the formal operation with abstract ideas which are derived from the externalities of architecture. The nature of this logical correlation is predicated on abstraction.