18 Ι THE FORM AMD THE IMAGE

The basic concepts that form the methodological basis of architecture are the form and the image, as first encountered in Plato, consolidated by Aristotle and later, mainly through the Greek Middle Ages [Byzantine times], but also through the Latin Middle Ages, reach our era through modern phenomenology of Çϊusserl, and mostly through the critics of Deridda, Ponty and Ricoeur as to the concept of the form, and finally through the analytical approach of Wittegestein regarding the concept of the image.

The former of those basic concepts, the form, defines the concept of the general and the universal, whereas the latter, the image, expresses the concept of the specific and the local. What is of particular importance is the relation between the two concepts. Thus, if for Aristotle the form represents the common and the diachronic, and the image, represents the specific features, their relation is effuctuaded by the incarnation of the form through the special material features of the image. Therefore, one could say that, the spatial element between the form and the image is the eidetic type or, even more abstractly, the eidetic trace. This, as an abstract spatial writing, through architectural creation, could intergrate special features into the form - abstract spatial model - , as a concrete, cultural, architectural image. The dialectic relationship between the form and the image is the relationship between the general and the specific. Thus, this relationship may provide a basic prerequisite for the creative passage from the specific, the local and the contemporary to the general, the universal and the diachronic, and vice versa.

In conclusion we would say that :
[a] at the level of the analysis, the probative quest of eidetic traces of architecture and the city in the form of eidetic models through the history and contemporanity of the civilisation of space would be the one that would be able to reduce the local and the specific to the general at the universal.
[b] at the level of architectural creation, the intergration of contemporary special features into the general, abstract and universal eidetic traces would be the one to produce the contemporary architecture of the city.