Panorama of the architectural thought .II. First Part.

Chapter 8 of the book ON THE CURRENT SITUATION OF THE ARCHITECTURE: GENEALOGY, DIAGNOSES AND INTERPRETATION. ISBN: 84-96377-37-7 2005. Debates for doctors’ formation. José Ramón Moreno Pérez, Rafael González Sandino, Carmen Guerra de Hoyos, Mariano Pérez Humanes, Carlos Tapia Martín, Félix de la Iglesia Salgado. Teachers and Researchers ETS Architecture Seville.

(Of chapter 7) Rafael:  It is quite easy to relate what you have exposed with my own theoretical field because, if there is something that is immediately answered and put in brackets, is that dominant technical reason in architecture in the XIXth century.  It is the general conviction, the pending task, although what afterwards they do is Bourgeois-Architecture, and the denial of Architecture in all that is the periphery in the nascent proletariat, in the substantial mass of the world.  A battle still to be won, that triumphantly was reborn at the beginning of the XXth century, where joy and affirmation are understood, because it is an unsettled question since the first Projects in the Illustration, to finally arrive at the real socialization of the technique that will take place at the end of the XXth century.

José Ramón:  But, what you have commented so many times, is very easy to see now.  When you affirm: “Architecture for everyone!, Architecture in everyone’s life!”.

Rafael: Mainly, for people living in minimum conditions, conditions in which we will all be progressively.  But this development takes over a century, that’s why, when it comes, it comes with such an emphasis.

José Ramón: And with that hope!

Rafael: We will finally use Science to improve those minimum conditions.  That is what’s right now in the Undeveloped Countries:  It is necessary to assure the minimum conditions of existence because they are still not settled.  How?  Teaching people the principles of hygiene, of basic conditions and how to build a world minimally inhabitable.  It’s that what, with the entrance of the other thing, is in crisis.

José Ramón: Notice that Science, Reason and State are.  Architecture starts reacting with Vittorio Gregotti, in the “Architecture of the conclusion”.

Rafael: To say it with his words, it would be the rational, almost scientific organization of the inhabitable space.

José Ramón:  Science, Reason and State are the three objective structures.  Now, functionality of architecture is understandable.

Rafael:  Indeed the theory goes beyond.  There are no theoretical projects that advance this, or that have become aware of this. And it is not that a bigger heterogeneity exists.  Because heterogeneity has always existed, that´s to say, fields absolutely diverse have always existed.  No, what exist are creative people willing to act and theoretical people who will come later.  It happens the same as with the romantics, a countercultural phenomenon where the creators have done it ahead of time, and the critics follow behind, with difficulty, trying to readjust their heads to a phenomenon that was not integrated.

Carmen: But to what extent has been co-ordinated what we have done in the first sessions of the seminar with what follows, because, if what we have seen up to now, has been history confronted between Architecture and Culture, in which it would be necessary to enter to see each moment, to study how they are specifically formulated.  But the first part of the seminar has approached the role the counterculture has played, how to dismantle Culture and how this impacts in Architecture and in Art.  It would be necessary to study if the History of Architecture could arise, as a crossing and interaction of these two lines.

Rafael: Here there is another entrance and another evidently constructive-productive element of the world.

José Ramón: The understandings that are made from the past, are understandings that are constantly implying the clarification of the present.

Rafael: Of course! If, for example, I have operated till now with a material to reach a target, what I didn’t bear in mind was the other cut that, when taking place, reorders the above mentioned statements and proposes another meaning.

Carlos: When you elaborate a diagnosis,  in a certain moment of the speech, a bifurcation opens up between continuators and breakers that, somehow denote the ruptures and the interference of so many factors, inaugurating a new understanding of the world, but there must be another factor.  I cannot understand how something that is so radically differentiating exists between continuators and breakers, because the world is essentially the same and, among them there is an overlapping or there is a thin line that separates them, because as well the media as all the phenomenons that you have described of the component of the virtual thing, concern as much one line as the other.

José Ramón:  We are talking about two changes:  nature for artificial and artificial for virtual.  In the development of artificial environment, with regard to natural environment, a conversion is given in infrastructure of the natural, and therefore a transformation that finally introduces it inside a plot. But in the second change, virtual environment won’t follow that dynamic, it will rather leave it to previous environments as opposed values, it will even act dissolving the previous plot and it will try to recover the radical difference between both.

If we carry out an endogenous understanding, that’s to say, if this is the crossroad of Architecture, the space in which it is playing is tiny.  It’s the space of present, we are talking of twenty years.  From the tranquillity that implies not being in that moment, but already from the perspective of 2002, what then happened can be seen otherwise, and we can locate it in the development that comes from the Illustration till now, with the understanding of Culture and Mass, and therefore the relativization of this phenomenon.  At that moment, we couldn’t exercise the analysis we are able to articulate now, because each one was very occupied with the business of their own life and their own present. These people are walking, sweating, drinking water.  These people are advancing, they are building a way.

Rafael: Insofar as the relationship past-present has not been given, insofar as the present Seville has still not appeared.

José Ramón: Of course, because neither critic nor theory has come from outside to make clear what was happening. Moreover because, also, as Rafael said, the dialectical past-present had been built with a general theory, but it hadn’t taken into consideration the local theory.  And then, since the 70’s what appears is the local theory.  These people are advancing therefore, when they arrive to the present they are thirty years out, because they have taken thirty years in that advance and its their biography that is committed.  What is more, the answer to this crossroad is an essentially biographical answer.

Carlos: And they haven’t improved that biography.

José Ramón: So it is, there is no improvement of the biography.  Let’s see the most innovative phenomena, if you choose 5 individual positions and you watch their evolution, you can appreciate how -Miralles, Gehry, Eisenman, Siza or Moneo-, their biographies define their trajectories, fulfilling them with an enormous historical density, explaining each position at a specific moment.

Rafael: The revolutionary’s figure that manages to be on top, after all the given changes, that man who is totally alive and who resists all revolutions, could be identified with Siza. Siza is in all the junctures and he survives them all.

José Ramón: Siza is still more prodigious.  Siza appears in a country in a completely backward position -let’s call it this way-, regarding this phenomenon.  A country that hasn’t even digested the International Style, neither the Modernity; A country that has to digest it.  Then Siza is therefore in a local situation.  Said in a contemptuous way, he is a “peasant”, -something that he shares, at a given moment, with the culture from Seville-, somebody who comes from Agrarian Culture, because to Nature’s environment corresponds Agrarian Culture -ways, values, a materiality, a sense, a sensibility. Who operates the joining of the International Style with Agrarian Culture is not him but Fernando Távora, from a particular juncture, because Távora can leave Portugal, in a moment when that wasn’t easy to do; and then he contacts -the same as Coderch in the Catalan environment- no longer with the International Style, but with the Team X , that’s to say, with the critical revision, well founded in the existentialism of Jean Paul Sartre -where comes the phenomenological idea from, and Aldo Van Eyck- and therefore with a deep revision of Modernity, that pointed to what already Le Corbusier outlined, passing from the matrix to Ronchamp, that’s to say, encouraging the meeting of global, local and international cultures and, precisely in the juncture of the appearance of scientific-technique civilisation.

But, in the case of Siza, all of it in an undeveloped country. Therefore, all the emergence of the scientist-technique civilisation is filtered in this point.  It is supported in the agrarian and in the local environment, but with the introduction of rationalisation. This operation starts introducing Popular Architecture as an answer to the ambit of the international. Exactly what Aldo Van Eyck was doing, studying the tribes of the deep Africa, archetypal, structural. Siza realizes that Popular Architecture is committed by international Culture, because tourism is underselling Popular Culture and transforming it into image. Then he abandons it and it moves again to Rationalist Architecture, but without leaving the agrarian matrix. Alvaro Siza goes out determined from the encounter of those two lines and their synthesis.

Rafael: First phase: to make Architecture is to put it in the cultural context. Second phase: we are already in a trajectory, now the environment is the whole planet, then the direct context with which the architect will be related is the system of the world as a whole.

José Ramón: and, as he affirms, universal culture hasn’t been a culture of diversity. To be able to overcome this confrontation, the deep matrix of Architecture has to be involved. For that reason, Sevillian Architecture doesn’t overcome it, because it doesn’t implicate the deep matrix, that’s to say, it is surviving, adapting itself, while the others are flying high.  We see it clearly in the Galician Center of Contemporary Art.  In that work it is already.  But it is not only there, it is also in Lebwerentz from the 50’s. The leap takes place when the problem of the 50’s, confronted since the 90’s, with half of scores of the reafirmation. The last swan song of Architecture is the change from transformation to modification, which is what some people still continue to outline.

Rafael: Modification is a work that I dissuade you to use, for dangerous.

José Ramón:  I am using it as a historiographic term.

Rafael: Right, but even as historiographic term it is used strategically, it was spoken of culture and tradition of the new thing and of culture and Architecture of the modification that was exactly to build on already built.

José Ramón: Responding to Carlos, the current panorama is resolved with a chart of four entrances. Two of external requirements and two of interior requirements. In the four entrances, there are positive and negative positions. Then, Architecture is twice required, if you study the pair system-environment, it has a double requirement: its own internal and the external one as part of the environment. Architecture suffers an expropriation of the fundamental role that Architecture has exercised during its history, the ordination of space.  For example, in the urban topics, sociologists, anthropologists and geographers appear, and what about the town planners, where are they?  It is explained this way: if my category which is ordination of space is committed and it kidnaps the ordination of space, I am displaced as a town planner. The city starts mechanisms that expropriate the capacity of ordering space to Urban Development, to allow the entry of social processes, also subjected to the market.

Nobody wants to see this, and it is terrible. Because if, as Zevi says, this is this way, and it is assumed, it would be necessary to restablish Architecture from its basic positions.  Because this process also finds Architecture in a situation contrary to the one it had at the beginning of the century, that’s to say, detached from the Academy, detached of all the positions, let’s say conservative ones, and to create a new Architecture. Nowadays, Architecture is not able, not even to be constituted as an alternative part of the Society, because the media themselves accept any alternative as their own. Falsely, but they assume it.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Culture as Praxis  -  Baumann, Zygmunt  -  Paidos  -  Barcelona  -  1999

Después de 5000 años: la revolución  -  Zevi, Bruno  -  1968

Masse und Match  -  Canetti, Elías  -  Galaxia Guttemberg  –  Madrid  -  1960