... Wonder and see... see and think...
Facing a blank sheet of paper always seems to me something hard to fight, discern between all the possibilities inside my head and unravel them to create a fine thread to follow. I'll make the attempt.
“Losing the body to be inhabited by words. Losing words to be inhabited by the body.”
These are some of the first words that Silva-Herzog mentions in his book Walking and Seeing, Second Notebook, while he contrasts with the idea that existence is contained by beginnings and endings and that the question can cloud our perception. Are there other factors that can divert us from our focal point? Within a chessboard, which piece would architecture play?
In the time of Mozart and classical music, going to a concert and sitting down to listen to a piece that, without any words, could describe any emotion; was answered with the enthusiasm of the listener. Although after a while, that changed, being now that the audience was only invited to listen in absolute silence until the author gave some indication that the applause could start, imposing the change of sounds and confiscating the spontaneous response.
Could it be that we forget that our pieces, beyond art, are aimed at the viewer, whom we condemn to listen in an impenetrable silence, and that we ourselves forget to listen to the emotions that our work generates? a monologue.
Could it be that as architects we build characteristic spaces of forced silence, silencing the spontaneity of the one to whom the work is dedicated?
Why should we take a vow of silence instead of combining our emotions with space? Mimic ourselves.
The defense of enthusiasm is the discovery of a deep and lively voice, the interrelation of different times. Architecture is a discourse that explains its own narrative, links and weaves the thread of different variables to find the intersection of space, the pause before continuing to speak, but what is worth putting into words? There are languages without literature, but not without a poet.
The walls hear... the walls look... the mirror in which you portray yourself gives information about your space, we cannot escape. Placing ourselves in time allows us to talk about memory, about circumstance. We build an identity, the whisper of intimacy is not made public, the applause silenced.
Extimacy is intimacy inverted, made public by its own decision. The public and the private are not entities, they are social constructions, borders that currently tend to merge. The subject interacts, capable of being an entity by itself that claims intimacy, freedom from extimacy, a praise of enthusiasm.
Man is an animal that destroys, a man inflamed by the ideal: a romantic who believes in absolute freedom. We build a social mask with which we have decided to interact, full of preparatory facets that guide us to pubic appearance.
What would happen if that mask were transparent and those facets were addressed to our intimacy of being? To intimacy and not private. Because, after all, you can't build anything without first destroying it. Why not start destroying from within?
Could it be that architecture has tricky arguments? Like a political art, architecture opens and closes when wanting to procure it as a trophy.
“Architecture is a form of communication and, many times, a piece of propaganda. No message is as clear as the one emitted by tons of stone or glass silhouettes… it condenses an ideology into visible forms” -Silva Herzog
The windows are the openings to the public, which allow the external eye to enter. The individual becomes mass, we are data, we leave traceable traces that can be interpreted. The eye only sees what the owner thinks, vision is not an effect of passive perception, it is an intelligent process of active construction, a reflection of ourselves. Existence is made of beginnings and endings, everything that exists turns to its transformation, the perfect is cold. There is no dateable beginning or cutting end, it escapes its apparent triviality.
What we see is an effect of what we think, and at the same time, of what society thinks. The vision thinks. We must defend the value of that voice, the nature of the soliloquy.
In order to move forward, it is necessary to recover the memory of the objects that surround us, as Petroski, a civil engineering teacher, did. Seeing is not a natural act, we see and represent not what we want, but what we can. We only represent the signs that we can understand, that our context limits and places borders on our capacity to represent.
Being the architects who emulate "create" from nothing, archi: the one who comes ahead, the first, and tekton: craftsman. Thus being the "first craftsman" beginning to order the chaos of the cosmos, dwelling. It is absurd to think that life can be decreed, the world is an undulating space, a perennial swing, constancy is nothing more than a slower movement.
Every idea has to do with an experience, prescriptive thinking about what things should be. The public is the second dimension of the vital relationship that man has with space, absolute dimensions with which man relates as a spatial being. The ruins of the written and the ruins of the built, the memory of the visible, the eyes of the public.
In a world seen as an auditorium, in which applause is controlled and is only allowed at the end of a gesture, where sound is ordered, the architect has dimmed his mirror, forgetting the consequences of his stroke, the hateful self . Failure is not disappointment, it is the possibility of rebuilding. We understand while we look, the ability to learn lies in sight.
"All art implies an erotic fantasy: imagine and feel."-Silva Herzog
A conscious work, a sensitive space.