Portrait of a Cardinal

“But in so far as the subject is an artist, he is already liberated from his individual will and has become a medium through which the only truly existent subject celebrates his redemption through illusion. For this above all must be plain to us, to our humiliation and our enhancement, that the whole comedy of art is not at all performed for us, for our improvement or edification, any more than we are the actual creators of that art world: but we can indeed assume for our own part that we are images and artistic projections for the true creator of that world and that our highest dignity lies in the meaning on works of art – for it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” Pg32 The Birth of Tragedy, F.Nietzsche

Francesco Alidosi, Cardinal priest of Santi Nereo e Achilleo in 1505 and Cardinal Protector of England in 1506; where he was a protector of Desiderius Erasmus and patron of the arts; a man that as Cardinal Pietro Bembo stated in 1508 "Faith meant nothing to him, nor religion, nor trustworthiness, nor shame, and there was nothing in him that was holy.”

He is the apparent subject of this small (79 cm x 61 cm) portrait oil painting that embodies not only the radiant joy of ambiguity, but also the historical reality of cruelty and perverse innocence through Christian reason.

While confronting the painting as art, as an explosion of beauty, craftsmanship and romance, you as a viewer are invited to explore its elaborate perspectival intensity by physically engaging with it, by creating a bond between you and the subject that goes far beyond any judgemental or rational urge; by holding his hand; a hand frozen in time, a hand that as history tells us, psychopathically murdered dozens of honourable Venetians without any reason but the God he created; this fiction was his masterpiece and his tragic input on society, it was an action of creation that allowed him to become “the monster” and to obtain orgiastic pleasures through extreme violence and probably extreme love.

Again, while appreciating the painting you transcend its historical baggage and enter the mesmerizing cosmos of the artistic impulse, of the psychology of form and colour, of the philosophy of the aesthetic and visual quality of the piece, where the painting does not belong to the material world any longer, it has travelled through the deepest and darkest corners of your perception. When confronted, analysis by categorization (history, iconography and technique) dissipates completely, it becomes irrelevant, thus is avoided subconsciously in order to let the piece seduce and take over your rational being. This artistic impulse, quasi-Dionysian, induces the world you were part of into a deep and calm coma; ultimately numbs reality and morality in order to go far beyond good and evil, correct and wrong.

This phenomenon of confrontation with the utter beauty of the object is not a sublime experience, art is not sublime; the artistic (here I refer to the Dionysiac experience) is all-inclusive rather than alienating to the viewer as a sublimating object. The sublime needs critical distance, whereas the artistic demands a closeness of experience.

And by saying that this painting is all-inclusive, I am not contradicting myself, but reiterating that a single piece of utter beauty embodies every aspect of existence as a condensed product. This immeasurable amount of complexity, which is indirectly being injected into your brain, deadens your being and clears your soul; the separation between the reality you live in and the historical fiction you are envisioning disappear in order to give way to their amalgamation and sudden destruction.

Ultimately, this insignificant portrait is nothing but an officially anonymous painting by a Renaissance artist called Raphael, one piece between the many he produced during his lifetime. I fell for it; I fell for an intensity that I have never encountered in any action of creation ever since.

Act 1.

When we love or kill, we look at our own selves, at the tragic action of creation, at the juxtaposition of our exhausted superego and our lowest and more primitive longings. This ephemeral truly creative action is re-enacted by art and architecture as a badly dubbed copy filled with Apolline material pretensions that “mirror” the suffering of the action… that is seen either as impure, sick, evil, uncanny, sadist and unchristian [KILL]; or as good, pure, virginal, beautiful and Christian [LOVE]. A human creation can’t be reduced to politically and socially correct beauty because it is the children of an impulse, of an extreme, of proto-civil actions that go far beyond ethics… this tragic act can only be captured in those great rhetorical-lyrical scenes in which the passion and dialectic of the protagonist swelled into a broad and mighty torrent; in the end it is only graspable in the act of failure, and the acceptance of that failure, not as an moral torment, but as a beautiful enlightenment; not as a lucrative product but as a painful reward.

Act 2.

We do not only rejoice on the death of the morally pure individual, we as a mere audience that is chastise from the utter pleasure of heroic existence, cannibalize the few remains of this, once beautiful and eternal, body; now deformed to sublimation by rapid ingestion. This heroic existence, of the being that surpasses all human temptations by embodying them all, is the ultimate action of creation. Thus, the hero only exists within the realm of tragedy, within the sphere of suffering and slow death; within the body of self-created fictions. We have to fictionalize the extremes of our existence in order to materialize them; truth and falsity are irrelevant, because they are mere earthly concepts that are immovable due to of their inherently paradoxical attitudes.

What makes the being surpass himself, is the creation and consequent destruction of an element that overcomes him completely, an entity that goes far beyond of his mediocre human comprehension; the creation of what he yearns for and what he will so eagerly desire that at the end he will, not only kill for, but murder.

The need for a clear and tangible appreciation of the heroic being, forces the individual towards a crime of passion. He commits murder in order to finally face what he thought was unfaceable, in order to tame the mystical beauty of the hero he once romantically created, in order to become a civilized animal on steroids that knows without knowing and feels without feeling. He sees himself reflected on the Tragic Hero because the later is a re-enactment of the death by strangling of the unjudged mystical existence he, once belonged to; his punishment is to watch his cold-blooded crime on repeat without acknowledging the action as death, but as creation.

The Salton City is a dreamy real state development that was realized yet not materialized; it is plastic surgery gone wrong; it is after all a disaster (for some a blessing) that everyone tries to avoid, forget or accept, either by a delusional idealization of its past by living its present (this includes ecologists) or by looking away; by looking at what makes sense and will never deform into a monster; the emptiness as an anarchical playground.

There are different types of inhabitants in the City, ones are all year long locals; they love the idea of the Salton Sea, however they avoid its reality by freezing it in time. They have nothing else but this Sea, thus they take a either freakily positive or accepting position on the clearly dysfunctional and abnormal Salton Sea. This hyper-normal attitude can be caused by the lack of a critical comparison of the Salton Sea/City with other Seaside communities; by the acceptance of the horror due to the over-suffering of the situation and feeling helpless about it (this is a pessimism hidden by a thick layer of positivist dementia); or by living in a denial that unlinks the inhabitant from the actual reality of the situation.

However, there are other (temporary) citizens living in this failed real state conceived city, people that did not see the glory of the Salton See through their own eyes, but through the eyes of their relatives and the press. They stay in Salton City during the winter for six to eight months a year. Retired northern Americans and Canadians that came in searching for tranquillity, a warm climate, cheap land, house offers, and for the vastness of the landscape (they avoid the sea, in fact the boat has been substituted by the motorized vehicle). Those elderly couples, which I call Tapperwared snowbirds, due to their tendency of avoiding communal “schizophrenic-like” events, are able to critically understand the Salton City because they don’t habituate the area during the whole year; therefore they acknowledge its reality and choose to consciously avoid it.

There is a third type of inhabitant, the drifter and the RV settler. They are modern day nomads that don’t emotionally engage with the site they occupy; they are mere users of the space and of the taxing bubble. By drifting from site to site, those caravans avoid taxes and a site-specific dementia that would make them fall in love with a distorted image of the, now distant, average community once they belonged to. A drifter becoming a sedentary inhabitant in a Salton City-like community is the equivalent of finding your future wife in a transvestite brothel; it is sacrilege to the politically and socially correct and coherent suburban values.

“Once you get off the bus in Salton City it never gets back to pick you off”

The Desert - Intermediate 1 - Arizona/California Desert Trip

Outsider: a person who does not belong to a particular group .A person who is not accepted by or who is isolated from society.

Renegade: a person who deserts and betrays an organization, country, or set of principles.

-The Desert is not historical; neither embodies history.

-The Desert kills history, as we know it in Europe and reconfigures it as a mere distorted shadow, ghost or past memory. In order to understand the myth of the Desert, we must look at what got lost in it.

Each grain of sand personifies and stages an epic battle between men and “The (titanic) Desert”; consequently a part of human history got burnt within its boundaries, within its mesmerizing peyote-like cryptic trips.

From the Spanish Conquistador delusional gold-rush adventures in arid Arizona, passing through John C. Van Dykes “land of illusions and thin air” where “the vision is so cleared at times that the truth itself is deceptive" and Michael Foucault LSD trip in the Death Valley; to the smuggling tunnels controlled by the Arellano Felix Organization and the one-percenters motorcycle gangs long and noisy drives on Highway 10; the Desert eats up and consumes human events, illusions and delusions. -

-The Desert is considered to be the land of the outsiders and renegades because it is its actual superlative; the Desert doesn’t even belong to itself, it cannibalizes its body after making love with its own persona.

-The Desert makes no sense because it rejects identity and genericallity; ironically it feels all the same. It is trapped within the beauty of tragedy.

-The Desert is loved because it can easily kill its lover; it is the ultimate sociopath; it is the materialization of Saturn eating its children.

-The Desert is the land of re-inventions and temporal creations; it is the only way of erasing oneself from history and memory; of living a present that lacks of past and future; of death without dying…

The Portfolio/Santeria Altar

The Architectural Conflict

The Archictural Conflict

Conflict

A series of disagreement of argument, typically a protracted one.

An incompatibility between two or more opinions, principles or interests. (or architectures)

In the last decades of plurality in architectural thinking and modes of representation, conflict between ideologies has been constant. We haven't had any big, explicit disagreements, however tension can be felt. Wars are a thing from the past; guerrilla vs hegemonic world potence is a constant and well followed discourse.

Architecture is no different from politics or religion. There is an ongoing "guerrilla" battle that is being followed through the sarcasm and irony of architects. Statements or manifestos are written as architectural satires, as if they were Galician-Portuguese "cantigas de maldicer" from the 12th century. Direct confrontation is avoided yet present.

In this project I wanted to take generic social patterns and architectural "typologies" in order to recreate a metaphorical situation. The Corporation Headquarters vs Terrorist Base.They are two generic and extremely caricatured opposites.

They would be placed inside the same building, however they would interact and conflict indirectly.

The Seagram Building, would be the framework for this everlasting discourse. The Seagram is the stereotype of power vs social. It has a highly hierarchical office plan, and a public space, that act as two completely distant programmes.

This icon, would be split in half, leaving a void in-between. The top a Corporation Headquarters, the bottom a Terrorist Base. The centre would be a Neutral Zone, where the conflicting parts enter in a hypothetical agreement by de-contextualizing the individual.

The Conflict

The spacial organisation of the Terrorist Base would be completely different from the one in the Corporation Headquarters. Movement and circulation wouldn't be just vertical and horizontal. Ramps and corridors that overlap and morph with the floor plates would be used. That would create a disruption of the highly praised Miesian plan and skin. Like in a city the government cant allow obscene graffiti on Fosterean glass and stainless steal windows; architectural obscenities can not happen. When the facade gets disrupted by the ramps, the Corporation patches it by simply extruding the facade and "gluing" it to the ramp. Also, a commercial billboard can be placed on the surface (Why not?, it sells).

There is a constant dialectical discourse between those two opposing ideologies, however the conflict never breaks out of the envelope. It is contained within architecture.

Like the 11-S bombings or the major twenty-first century ideological disasters that we have all witnessed; direct confrontation as we understood it, is a twentieth century extinct phenomenon, does not happen anymore.

Everything that we experience is through the media documenting symbolic attacks; if in the 40's they called conflict war, and in the 50's they called it cold war, now it can be called acts of symbolic violence, or underbelly/indirect war (or as Baurillard would say just a hyperreal farce propelled by the media and our government stupidity)

The Erasing or Re-invention of Conflict.The Neutral in-between Zone

How to erase or re-invent context was the major question i had. The two social patterns are hyper-contextualized, even alienating. They are solid ideologies, where there is no space from one another. Collision, insertion, adaptation can't happen. Can't be utopian.

While looking at urban and non urban typologies like the gym, the church, the chat-room and the prison,one can tell that something architecturally and socially beautiful happens. There is a ephemeral moment before or while entering them when ones mind-set is re-formated(Porticos in churches signal and celebrate this moment). They are places where the hierarchy you were part before (ideally) does not matter anymore. Ideally, everyone has the same rights. The architecture of this moment would be a solution to the problem i had to deal with. Conflict would be erased through de-contextualization.

By making the individual step away from the context he was part before in order to look at it from a different perspective is the goal of this architecture. He would act as the performer and as the audience in a cycle that would transform him momentarily.

This is what is being said about the space in between in this drawing.[Contextual Potlatch]

"The aim of the space in-between is to make possible the insertion of two conflicting ideologies, spatial organizations, programs and architectures. This space illustrated in this drawing is nothing but that the architecturalization of the process the individual that enters a generic urban and non-urban typology like the gym, the chat-room, the church, and the prison follows. They are architectures where identity is reinforced and at the same time re-invented, and where hierarchy (ideally) is irrelevant. The visitors mind set is completely modified before entering them; from being a solid part of a specific network or group, to extrude oneself from it and look at it from a “comfortable” spot. From hyper-context to fuck-context.

The Neutral zone will erase or substitute temporarily the super-charged and dense hierarchical context where the visitor was before.

In order to fuse two opposing generic social patterns together (Terrorist Base & Corporation Headquarters), my architecture will re-invent their context.

This is achieved by creating a symbolical architecture that accommodates a contextual potlatch, a place where ones ideology is replaced by its satirical caricature.

An architecture where one passes from being the caricature of him/herself to be the one that caricaturizes, and looks at the process that he/she already took part in order to “complete” the de-contextualization.

Again, my architecture is nothing but the representation of something that happens without being architecturally celebrated; this is the materialization of an evident architectural happening that does not exist in the built or representational form (maybe only in the Baroque Porticos)."

Programatic Violences

Rhino Fun

The Narrative of the Hyperreal Paradise

The direct confrontation of our daily horrors leads to a different and in a way simplified or purified ideal of paradise.

The Story told by the architect in the eyes of the experiencer

The Kidnap: This is the moment of sudden abduction; the rapidity of it generates confusion and does not allow a progressive adaptation to the space. Disorientation is enforced by the fact that there is a black bag covering your face and separating you from your daily routine and from your real problems.

The Solitude: You are left inside a dark room, however you can see a light shining at the end of this dark space. Intuitively you walk towards it, curiosity leads you.

The First encounter with the Hyper-Normality: After darkness a sudden domestic lightness contracts your pupils rapidly. When you are able to perceive, analyze and judge the space you are surrounded by, a weird sense of normality, of generic domestic/community life becomes peculiar and at some level bizare. This social environment is disrupted by the simple fact of its correct and ultra-polished seemingly-mundane scenarios . This is the moment when you start questioning what you see and stop questioning where you are.

The Horror: The more you walk, the more you experience bizarre and now humanly intolerable acts. The situations taking part become more socially unacceptable, until they reach the point of unbearableness.You are separated from the play by a simple wall; you are not taking part on the intensity of the actions going on. You observe it, the “screen” separates you from it, however this time the story is not being told by anyone, you are directly experiencing what you have read or being told before; this will change your perception of what this thing is forever. In a subconscious way the more you see, the more you want to see, however before you can get used to the intensity and the violence of the situation, you reach the ignorance or acceptation room.

The Acceptance: After experiencing the horrors and pains of community life in this way, you are enclosed in a dark Vietnam – FARC – Al-Qaeda kidnap jail, where the acceptation or ignorance of everything seen before takes place. Fear is ignored or accepted, passion is erased, ethics are re-evaluated…

The Paradise: When the acceptance is achieved your mind will be free of all judgments’, of all prejudices; the horror will be embraced. When that is done, the ideal paradise will be reached by simply getting somewhere better than the place you where before. Like people that have experienced war directly, their ideal of happiness is re built by large doses of its extreme opposite.

Internet Exchange Points (IEP) + Iconoclast Terrorist Organisation Base

Brainstorm

Nature: the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations

Landscape: all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal

“For although limitation when we consider the immensity of nature and the inadequacy of our ability to adopt a standard proportionate to estimating aesthetically the magnitude of nature's domain, yet we also found, in our power of reason, a different and nonsensible standard that has this infinity itself under it as a unit; and since in contrast to this standard everything in nature is small, we found in our mind a superiority over nature itself in its immensity. In the same way, though the irresistibility of nature's might make us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in the kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.” Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge MA: 1987. Page 120.

“Hence if I am judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength…” Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge MA: 1987. Page 121.

“Hence nature is here called sublime merely because it elevates our imagination, it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its own sublimity, which lies in its vocation and elevates it even above nature” Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement.Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge MA: 1987. Page 121.

Nature is and has always being an ideal; a romanticized utopia of greenery and pureness. A place of utter virginity where a dissolution of human rationalities and creations takes place. Human beings accept the loose of control over it by the fact that an unknown metaphysical body [God] created the ideal canon of perfection on earth. The idea of classical Nature is the space where men have never disrupted its elements and where a synthesized control over it doesn’t exits.

When nature is overlooked (as if the human being is God) it looses its real essence, it becomes a territory, and it becomes landscape. When this process takes place the viewer claims that what he/she overlooks belongs to his/hers persona; this is when nature as an ideal dies.

In the past this only happened in a small scale. The appropriation of nature took place by overlooking at frescos, standing at a high-elevated viewing point or by popular narratives or stories (religion). This appropriation was very vague and distorted. Lots of gaps were filled by peoples’ imagination and “irrational” explanations. Nature was still alive in the inaccuracies of the information and knowledge being absorbed. All those stories (including religion and popular culture) generated an embracement on doubt by believing in an absolute explanation that lacked of any rational explanation. Every question leaded to one single answer. The genius of this irrationality was its weakness. The inaccuracies of the idea of nature kept it alive by accepting that the individual did not know about it in a physical matter. The vague explanation of the unknown gave at the time a sense of control, yet this last one was achieved by embracing doubt. The idea of Nature as a physical body still existed by simply accepting it and not claiming its ownership.

The way we experience nature nowadays has radically changed; in the twenty-first centurys’ Baudrilardian Hyperreality we pre-experience nature due to an excess of information that poisons our understanding of it by creating early preconceptions of the element. Reality through a screen becomes a farce. Nature is owned, does not belong to a superior entity anymore (God) belongs to a corporation. This is when nature as the idea of utter virginity collapses, instead nature becomes landscape due to its modification. It is not physically modified, however media and popular culture use direct references of it to sell or tell their own perspectives of nature or natural as if they were universal and privately owned.

All the presumptions made of nature without facing it are generated by the overconfidence we have on science, photography and video (all of them are contained in the internet). The absoluteness of God can’t be compared with the absoluteness of the image seen through the net. The imposition of the idea erases it completely.

This is the death of nature as an untouched physical space separated from humanity and idealized by it. The absoluteness of knowledge, globalization and the market economy killed the concept of nature as the unknown. Nature is theorized for us and it’s presented on a silver plate for quick consumption. Nature is a good to be sold and bought.

However this is not Nature. Nature has died. Death means the end of a physical body; this gives the opportunity to the substance or essence to arise. Nature as an essence, as a metaphysical being, as a feeling felt by the individual and not hold by the masses is the argument to be posted.

Nature is not green anymore; it is ephemeral; it belongs to the threshold of what appeared to be and what it is after taking control of an unknown and uncontrolled situation. It is the grey space between the rejection and embracement due to the understanding of the element. From having a sense of ownership on a pre-conceived space, to confronting and sensing the unexpectedness of it; to finally accepting and understanding the before misunderstood space. This is Nature as a process of confronting what before was virtually known.

This must not be confused with The Sublime, because nature appears when the object or space experienced is idealized and known before hand. The Sublime is interdependent of what we know; it is inherent on human beings, its not achieved through knowledge or idealization, it is triggered by a space, action or object that appears to be magnificent as "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us" (Pg 28 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant). Nature as an essence is a pre-known element that while facing it control is lost.

Architectural experience is part of this, the way architecture behaves on photo or text is challenged by the way the architectural space is read and confronted.

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Marrakesh Field Trip