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In my encounter of Peter Zumthor’s Seniors’ Home and Kolumba Museum, I found architecture to affect well-being within the daily course of life. I saw the Seniors' Home contribute to the dwelling of the entire being of the elderly residents within the challenging yet hopeful season of life they face in aging, while at Kolumba Museum I encountered an experience of aesthetic embodying meaningful knowledge that addressed not only my mind but also my heart. Centered on the inherent operative dimensions of aesthetic at these two buildings—as an intervention, as a material reality, as an image, and as something we are positioned in and move in—and deepened by aesthetic philosophy and spiritual readings, I seek for an awareness of the way architectural decisions influence the human journey through space and time, and for principles and considerations that supplied and realized this architecture to be vitally contributive. The thesis is a meditation on the vitality of the medium, searching for a relevance that can justify architecture not as mere shelter that barely satisfies nor as inessential excess, but as an efficacious act that can satisfy the human being who encounters it and truly improve well-being in its existing. The thesis posits that architecture is fundamentally a craft and an act of giving a gift to the other. Its created existence in space and time is capable of producing lasting good in the world, if the design of architecture, through love, is primarily concerned about its affect on the other and the world rather than its object.

Confronted with issues, whose (socioeconomic) causes cannot be resolved through the modification of the built environment, architectural interventions may often inadvertently aid the reproduction of the problems they seek to resolve. In eliminating symptoms of social inequality, alienation and marginalization, architecture can legitimize the social order out of which they arise. In such situations, architects’ attempts to concern themselves with narrowly practical concerns are insufficient even to their own aims, and in order to properly address the issues facing it, architecture must simultaneously operate as a vehicle for social critique and political emancipation. In the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a critical-emancipatory intervention corresponds to an emphasis of a constitutive tension and discord (“the gap”) within what is commonly perceived as a stable, neutral background. Critique strives not to explicitly reveal existing problems. Instead, it reveals an inherent inconsistency within an implicit, ideological fantasy of order and harmony that allows us to naturalize these problems. Consequently, the critical-emancipatory potential of architecture resides not in its programmatic content nor in its representational image, but in its capacity to disrupt the reassuring affective texture of ideology. Critique resides in a formally subtle (concerning architecture in its narrowest definition as an affective structure), yet politically radical shift in how problems of everyday life are interpreted and processed; re-introducing a minimal sense of disquietude that is both critical and emancipatory. The disquietude, that marks an absence of a fantasy of order and harmony, can, paradoxically, only be sustained as a product of a formally (representationally) ordered and harmonious appearance. The critical-emancipatory disquietude is not a compromise of the order and harmony, but rather a reflection of its uncompromisingly egalitarian nature.

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