The search for a true architecture in a world of, as he calls them 'princes of repetition' the fatigue of repetition and mediocracy, the importance of getting as far away from preconceived answers as possible and liberating our minds to ask the right questions.
A manifesto so relevant to our time and worth citing:
"Architecture seen as the modification of a physical, atomic, biological continuum.
As the modification of a fragment situated at the heart of our immense universe amidst the dizzying discoveries made by macro- and nano-physics.
Whatever the scale of the transformation, of a site or a place, how are we to communicate the unpredictability of the mutation of a living fragment?
Can we domesticate the visible components - clouds, plant life, living organisms of every size - what signs, reflections, new plantings?
How does one create a vibration that evokes a hidden depth, a soul?
This is surely a task for poetry, since only poetry can produce "the metaphysics of the instant".
To work at the limits of the achievable - with the mysterious, the fragile, the natural.
To anticipate the weathering of time, patina, materials that change, that age with character.
To work with imperfection as a revelation of the limits of the accessible.
These architectures that kill emotion are not Louisianan.
They are that of globe-trotting artist-architects, princes of repetition.
Specialists in the perfect, dry perennial detail, a true confession of emotional impotence!
The repetition of the "controlled" detail as a proof of their insensitivity to the possible nature of an architecture in-the-world."
He goes on to write:
"In the name of the earthly pleasure, we must resist the urbanism of zones, networks, and grids, the automatic rot that is obliterating the identity of the cities of all continents, in all climates, feeding on cloned offices, cloned dwellings, cloned shops, thirsting for the already thought, the already seen in order to avoid thinking and seeing.
We must replace these generic rules, territorial and architectural (yes, architectural! For architecture exists on all scales, and urbanism does not: it is nothing but the mocked-up travesty of a servile architecture on the macro-scale, advancing to prepare the way for the myriad of generic architectures), with other rules based on the structural analysis of the experienced landscape.
We must establish sensitive, poetic rules, approaches that will speak of colours, essences, characters, the anomalies of the act of creation, the specificities of rain, wind, sea, and mountain. Rules that will speak of the temporal and spatial continuum, that will turn the tide towards a mutation, a modification of the inherited chaos, and take account of all the fractal scales of our cities.
These sensitive rules cannot but defy the generic ideology that leads to the proliferation of hegemonic, dominant technologies, creating dependencies, thus tending to hypertrophy all our networks of transport, energy, hygiene, to go for the bottom line.
By contrast, the ideology of the specific aspires to autonomy, to use of the resources of the place and the time, to the privileging of the non-material.
How can we use what is here and nowhere else?
How can we differentiate without caricaturing?
How can we achieve depth?"
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| Photo by Emelie Nielson 2016, from Assos in Cephalonia, Greece |
