A revolution in architecture wont come from architecture.

Too slow, too costly, too in the hands of the elite.

Its a dead beast. A beast with no teeth.

I think I've had some sort of a moment tonite. I don't think architecture is about resolution either.

I know I have written about the difference between conception and resolution and how they differ but they lead into each other. Still the problem with say, detailing, or concretizing ideas is that they are an exercise in resolution but not necessarily in communication. This means you can draw a floor to ceiling detail in 1:100, 1:50 or 1:20 but the idea is still the same, adding little or no information to your narrative (obviously is not with the builder that we are trying to communicate here). Rather architecture is a medium for ideas, a form of expression. No of expressive matter, but rather of conceptions.

I am happy to say that I can firmly believe again in the idea of conception over resolution. The issue here is that resolution helps the conception or refinement of ideas.
What will make a project interesting/exciting is if you manage to communicate what you are trying to achieve with the project. This is not about hypostatizing, but about the power of evocation. When concepts can be translated into something comprehensible and readable by others. That is what is all about, and that is what can drive architecture as a medium, and not as an ends.

To emphasize my argument I wanted to talk about the computerization of drawing, or the ability of technology to render architecture, which follows a logics of productivity. This is clear when we look into computer software that easily reproduce and produces form. That replicates and mirrors form...There is not love command or exasperation tab. The computer cannot translate devotion as it cannot reproduce passion. All it can do is reproduce the dimension of passion. If passion is a square, it can replicate it and copy it and past it. It can cross passion, it can fade it or even stack it. But it can't produce passion, as it follows a logics of mimics.

I cant believe I am having this moment, or revelation. It is nice, as it leaves me again free to my wild imagination but back with the idea of social responsibility, which is super hype in architecture now.
I am happy to think that the beauty of it all rests in the conception of evocative form (form being anything we can comprehend). This means that architecture can be performance... or music...or a spit. I am happy to remember. Oh dear. It is funny, but I hope this is not a rational deduction, but rather an intuition. I think from now on I can free myself from the straightjacket of rationality and the idea of a constant oppressive capitalistic order (not that I have forgotten). I am just hoping that I am not being pro-monopolistic in my discourse slash thinking process.

I am going to try to finish my submission which is due on wednesday. I have to finally make sure that I communicate what I have to say, and I know that by no means my message is embedded in the tone of the concrete, but rather in the sets of relationships that the architectural object puts into motion.

I have always been dismissive of the idea of the architect as an artist but I think that as far as that he creates he is most radically, an artist. But he obviously does not produce art, but a watered down version of a vision, as far as the built form goes...Idk this is funny.

To finish, architecture relies on drawing to exist, but has most markedly a tense relationship with the built as they stand as different apparatuses with their very own landscapes. To this I have to say I have an ambivalent relationship towards the importance of the line work, as it takes place somewhere between the physical (it very own presence) and its ability to be physically elusive.

The medium becomes its very own prophet, as it acquires a life of its own...a carrier of content. A carrier of meaning. Then it becomes autonomous and its a bearer of meaning. Autonomous because its no longer dependant on its creator (an existentialist relief) or a trace of own owns existence. But at the same time reliant, as the readings of this form will be affected by its cultural context as far as it remains decontextualized from its original milieu (here is where the cultural-masterarchitect should be attacking). The validity of the work its no longer then so much about its formalities, but about its message and the relevance of this message in the very situation in which comes to life, i.e. the drawing.
Again we end up claiming context, form and meaning as three interdependent fluid mechanisms.

I might fall short to further explain any of these thoughts, but better to write to think (LiveTrace or LiveThink), than thinking to write, again, writing as a medium. Not as the gravestone, but as the way to evocation, and most precisely, expression, which precedes emotion. And yes, politics have not been mentioned once. (Hard core-hard bore of all substances...)

There is a lot of  misogynous  and homophobic content on the internet and I DO NOT like it.

Most surprisingly it also comes from women and men who are most probably uncomfortable or unsure about their masculinity, sexuality or other hidden insecurities.

I came across this spanish twitter account that had almost 7k  followers and is entitled Mister misogynous. He calls women bitches quite repeatedly and jokes about the clichés of heterosexual relationships quite aggressively. The surprise comes when some women follow the channel and say that is "one of the best accounts of the site". I mean what IS THIS?

I am hoping this is something a 20 year old bored guy does in his free time. But still generates something terrible, hateful statements and what is worst, spreads internalised misogyny and homophobia.

Why to be lost is to be humbled by your ignorance.


Yes. Long its been. But it is true that for the best effect of this argument I have to admit that I have had no or very little time to prepare.

Research is usually easy to conduct as long as you are rigorous about your choice of matter. Another big issue here it is how you handle records, how do you file them, how do you keep track of them.

Concerning analysis, this relates to the closer scrutiny of your further selected material, which is more specific and meaningful, in the rational sense. i.e. it makes sense.
Analysis is tricky because itself constitutes a whole new world, where de data you have collected starts to be charged with interpretation(s), namely meaning. This means that not only to look into your data, but that you move it around to connect it or to built and argument that brings you forward. At this point your material is creative material and informs the creation, creations or outcomes of your thing to be achieved or more specifically, brief.

Experimentation is something that deals with this creative actions you undertaken, in which a series of creative or non-creative options are laid out and tested, in order to choose the best option, i.e. I have 5 recipes for making chocolate; I make them, taste them, choose the most delicious, and explain why this is the most delicious (the amount of hazelnuts was just about right and was the recipes with the least milk). Therefore this laying out of options and will to find the best analytically should be a prevailing attitude where a comparative mode persists.

So have we have dealt with what generates your outcome, but we need to have a finished, marketable, end product. This then deals with something than can be conveyed and sold.
This means we are dealing with the resolution of a thing or thing of things. Here is where the end product is presented as a sole-standing entity. None of your research background will be directly visible, but rather will inform the outcome. This means that throughout the project there should have been, or should be at the end at least, a running thread across your production, that jumps from resources consultation, to making or producing a critical outcome that steams from your varied analysis to a sole-standing creation which artfully combines all the previous stages.
In this process not all is rational, and sometimes there are intuitive leaps which we should embrace, as intuition is a much powerful force than proven knowledge (long time to produce, sometimes dry, too assertive).

The toughest part of the process is keeping a balance between these stages and delivering a successful project in a timely manner, which come down to a calmly outlined plan, which always end up changing as the project runs, but that nevertheless should be carried out, as it provides you with perspective of the overall running of the thing.
It is important then, in terms of perspective not too get to manic with the minute detail of the project as it would be in detriment of other parts of the project. Like in a system, when too much energy is being put in an area, it means that other areas are undergoing a shortage of resources. Balance is key and it requires a zoom in-zoom out exercise to keep the boat running under control, to most precisely avoid the dry eyes condition,which means you have been doing the same for too long and that you should move forward.   Blind eyes condition also usually happens to me, as you get your eyes to close to an issue and you keep scratching your head around it with no resolution; being stuck but without realising. Running, sleeping, socialising, a walk, sex, food or a number of alternative practices usually act as clarifiers (not that we have to instrumentalize what we do in order to complete a project) in this process and help to zoom out. Important here to distinguish here between work and non-work, as non-work is that, a moment to enjoy other company, to empatize or whatever that it is, so it shouldn't be seen as a pro-work strategy, but as a way to keep a personal balance that is never stabilized and therefore requires shifting. There is indeed beauty in every corner (as well as dirt and beautiful dirt) as well as misery and despair, it is in this shifting that we encounter them but that we also manage to keep walking ahead.




xoxo

I have always prided myself of being compasionate. Something I have very much lost.

We in our current society, many times we forget about what is important, or relevant. The moment of solidified substance...Now.

It is extraordinary the times we spent or that I spend in self pity, or complaining about what I do, when I have always considered my self to be a privileged person.

There is this bending of common sense currently. A really hard, metallic mesh that produces severe confusion. It is interesting how can one become blind, forgetting what is to be alvie, or what is worth living.

Death is obviously there, but it never comes...

I am missing my family and the idea of the bow, or an ultimate connection or interlacing, intertwining.

I miss the times when I was with Ainhoa thinking of how fun life can be, with very little.

Crisis are times to rethink the present. Some persevere and other bend in directions of self-betterment, which is the only way to truly change the world. From within.

Being sad is a bad trait, and is truly an abrasive agent. Solitude enhances this, as well as unacceptance.

Over the years is easy to cast a shadow in the light of betterment, or our truly self, that which hopes to live fully.

Over the years I have realised that the soul can be easily docilized, bending our real hopes and will. It is easy to then carve a cave to make a sadness repository, where one can place all that is dirt. Call it books, call it full moons.


Books are these spaces of solitude that allow for scape and projected realities, hope, projected futures. They are like windows, which function as holes in the fabric of our everyday. If you spot him looking through...It is an expression of his willingness to leave, to be displaced from his current misplacement towards an imaginary landscape, that of the exterior.

This exteriority is vital, and unwinding in the flatlands will make clarity flourish to make you regress back to you, to a place where you can live the present, or the embodiment of your feeling and thinking substance. What a beautiful world; embodiment, and yet so enigmatic or opaque.

This glasses that you are wearing...take them off. They will allow for the light to penetrate your retina, bounce off your soul and expel your very yourness to the world, which most obviously flees away from these ideas of arrogance, reclusion, pride, expectations and ambitions. A life with no anxieties.
For a minute lets stay with this image of the opaque, look trough it.   What can you see?

Aarhus architecture School craving for respectability

"What are my chances to be accepted?

Difficult to say. The rejection rate over the past years has been around 80 to 85 %. We do not accept a specified number of applicants, so being more precise is difficult as we do not know in advance how many will apply."

Maybe it would have been better to rephrase: only 20% of the students are successful upon application. Lot classier, lees kind of unnecessary.

To clarify this.

Anarchy is antagonic of architecture.

     Do schizophrenics really speak the truth? I mean, an altered state of mind allows for truth to be spilled out. Does that mean drugs as a vehicle for the release of the true spirit. Also I mean that this idea of the schizophrenic is awful, as no one is one, but has a lateral, or sectional arch to them, or a gradual or a grade of expression in them.

This sounds like bullshit and cream.

Identity as fluid. As substance. As something that has a two-fold relationship, expressive and retractive. Projective and implosive.

Truth then is momentary. We can call this non-calleable or a moment of disparity to all that that we conceive as solid instead of fluid. Or better put, Language. Oh what a word. It is also problematic as language cuts everything from its non-verbal form and also delineates the periphery of the object. So lets be honest, somethings you know you can only feel. Maybe its intuition. But most probably a mix.

Rum with cola, as that which unravels the right brain thinking, left right acting side of the body. Yes, neurology. But obviously not invented by me, because this is also a cultural invention and therefore traceable.

To then keep sanity, keep the booze moving, as we might otherwise all end up solidified schizo.

What Meredith Tenhoor calls the analysis of the political economy of architecture, its production, consumption and distribution. This sets a question that I have always struggled to vocalize but never been able to express as eloquently as Derrida does. I used to think of the bridge as a form of transgression, or as a form of redirecting flows. Some evident questions might be, how come the bridge doesn't fall? Why is it built in this or this other style? Which is the structural strategy? etc. But to me the most radical question would be, why is the bridge there? Why a bridge and why in this location? which is its purpose? what is this connecting or bridging? in the interest of who?

For so Derrida has been labelled as a forerunner of deconstructivism. I believe that an action of peeling apart is most evidently achieved, but creativity needs to appear propositive. We cant be merely pulling the pieces apart, or rearranging them uncritically.

Again, I think this question is or should be the base of any enquiry that hopes to be truly radical.

Maybe Architecture...

attempt1# the hypostitation of concepts into phyisical relationshiops


attempt2# devising relationships trough hypostatization or reification

attempt3# the concretization of a concept(s) into a set of relationships

CONTENT GENERATES MEANINGFUL FORM

FORM GENERATES FORM

ARCHITECTURE TAKES PLACE AS SOON AS IT IS BUILT AND TURN INTO FORM, AS A CONTAINER OF CONTENT

FORM GENERATES FORM

FORM TAKES PLACE AS SOON AS IT IS PHYSICALLY BUILT, AS A BEARER OF A CRAFT OR CONSTRUCTION PROCESS

FORM GENERATES FORM

FORMALISM IS THE EXPRESSION OF FORM OR OF FORMAL CONCERNS, IT IS THEREFORE NOT ARCHITECTURE

FORM AS A FORM OF EXPRESSION

FORM AS THE EXPRESSION OF THE SELF

FORM AS SELF-EXPRESSION

FORM AS EGO

FORM AS THE REPRODUCTION OF THE COLLECTIVE SELF RATHER THAN THE INDIVIDUAL SELF

CONTENT AS THE CONCEPTION OF THE INDIVIDUAL SELF

HUMANISM AS THE CONTENT OF FORM

ARCHITECTURE TAKES PLACE AS SOOS AS IT IS BUILT, TURNED INTO FORM , AND OCCUPIED, SET IN MOTION BY ITS USERS

FORM AS THE BEARER OF WAYS OF LIVING OR CONCEPTIONS OF THE ORDER OF THINGS

FORM AS AN ORDER OF THINGS, A SPATIAL CONFIGURATION

MEANINGFUL FORM AS THE TRANSLATION OF AN IDEA OF ORDER OF THINGS INTO AN SPATIAL CONFIGURATION THAT ADDRESSES THE INDIVIDUAL FROM WITHIN

ARCHITECTURE AS THAT WHICH LAYS WITHIN THE INDIVIDUAL...

Student Halls, BorglumKollegiet, Aarhus, Denmark

Please don't take me seriously.

I have realised there is a lot of drawing, thinking and writing on the idea  of density in the metropolitan areas of the future. How rural will increasingly become urban, etc. What no one seems to mention is the economic feasibility of this density. I mean, if this architecture of concentration is going to occupy or cram these spaces, how are the resources going to be played out. Think of the decaying nature of economically/ethnically/culturally segregated suburban areas of big cities, like Los Angeles.

If anyone is going to draw, they will have to draw these too...

I wonder if anyone has ever felt as slave to its creativity. I have been feeling a strong duality between what I want and what I do. But I have found what I do fascinating and powerful and driving in spite of all the self-creating misery that arises from it.

Although I am aware that I am developing a fundamentally wrong project (i.e. the proposal deals with a plot rather than a series of unused spaces which are available on site) I have realised that this architectural object, this new addition could be incredibly exicintg, and in fact beneficial in some ways to the community, (i.e. not all that produces is wrong ).

It is difficult to survive, or to have a life, as some of my class mate say, when you are so absorbed by a set of abstractions, or ideas. But this vibrancy that lays within cannot be dociliced or toned down.

I have to quotes here which I believe describe the situation:

"once the mouse realises he is in a trap, he never stops trembling".-Laurie Anderson

"what you resist persists".-Bjork 

Both deal with this idea of inevitability; the mouse cant stop trembling, he either stays within society or flees away. 

Maybe about desire, something you are holding back keeps you wanting it, or coming back to it. And this when coupled to imagination could really make for a big post here where we talk about limits

"where are the limits?".-Marina Abramovic

This is a question that has always resonated with me. It is important here that we draw line. That thee-dimensional box that keeps us in a trap, a space of resonance with the following vibration. You might wonder about the reach of this echoing waves, and I believe they are the will of the hand autotuned  with the vibration of the spirit.

Planteamiento ≠ resolución

Conception ≠ resolution 

1#Reflective practice

positioning (planteamiento*) ≠ resolution

I have noticed that in my practice of architecture I am good at resolving the positioning or planteamiento of a project, in detriment of the resolution of the project.

I have seen very good, beautifully resolved and presented projects that lack a strong foundational positioning or critical framework from which the project starts. Then we could argue a project is fundamentally wrong.

On the other hand, it happens to me that while I try really hard to contextualize and make sense of my program, agenda and strategies, I forget to develop the architectural object or spatial design. This previous comment also has to do with a misconception of the ideas of positioning and resolution, as it thinks of them as two separate segments, however, a project needs to understand its form meaning in parallel (I am not developing the role of the unconscious here or the idea of the derive).
This parallel development moves away from a linear project development, instead, it establishes a two-way relationship in which each party constantly feeds the another. (Also avoiding an argument on the possibility of the idea of a middle ground or liminality here).

To conclude, this idea of the two-way relationship allows for a development that goes hand in hand and  permits a substantial development of the whole or the project, this would avoid me turning up in the crits with papers no one wants to look at.




*planteamiento
Approach, plan, proposal.-wordreference

Jean Nouvel's competition entry for the Tokyo Opera House in 1986

Ode to a Failed Contextual Model

A residue of insecurity and change of minds. It tells a lesson to be learnt and not forgotten; a) to conduct an exhaustive survey of available sites/options, b) to choose a site, c) to STICK TO IT.

                                                                                                                                                                                   detail

By Nicolas Marchiaro

HOW can architecture promote or encourage interaction between people or the creation of new social relationships?


CAN design eventually perform to this effect?


TO WHAT END or what is the agenda behind this intention?

1#The Internet

"It’s not really a thing, per se. No one thing represents the Internet; there’s no center. There’s no single laboratory where the Internet was built. It doesn’t come in a box. In a way, capitalizing it as a proper noun is misleading, in that “Internet” is not a singular, unitary thing, but an ever-growing giant aggregate of most of the world’s computer networks. The term is an abbreviation of internetworking, a term that remains confined to the world of network engineers."-Motherboard

Privatisation of public space

Privatisation of private information

Privatisation of agriculture/seeds

Privatisation of Nature

furniture as a commodity

fashion as a commodity

food as a commodity

entertainment as a commodity

family as a commodity

love as a commodity

sex as a commodity

friendship as a commodity

evasion as a commodity

comfort as a commodity

identity as a commodity

communication as a commodity

Early evening blurbing


Concrete is obviously a thing of the past, when it comes to the idea of authenticity or modernist purity, as it is structurally less efficient and therefore less indicative of its intrinsic qualities, i.e. structural form.

If authenticity paired with clarity, we can think of visibility, and of how gracious iron is in showing its lines of force.

Further down the line in the efforts of dematerialising architecture and in parallel, trying to reach its essence, i.e. architecture as volume > architecture as structure > architecture as void > architecture as comfort, both mental and physical.

Towards an architecture of air was an essay by Klein in collaboration with an architect (not sure who now) in which air conditioned spaces created the space for an architecture of leisure.

Now or then, that architecture has liberated itself from the concrete or the physical, we might have to turn to a poetics of materiality, since this dematerialisation is for now, fictitious.

I want to think that architecture can have hope both in reality (realism), in a practice that is critical (it learns from the past), contextual (it understands it milieu and it many layers of (built) fabric) and in the unravelling of the unconscious, as a counteraction to the much detrimental hypocrisy and bullshit built by the enlightenment or reason/problem-solving/top-down/white-supremacist approach. An appetite to what it craves the stomach.


This again, I hope to develop in the future, when I have some time to spare for referencing and to write more properly.

I am hoping to be able to finish properly my graduation project as a self-aesthetico-ethical critique.

Hopefully I will be able to upload the drawings and post a lengthy reflective text, looking back.