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.

[...]

Marrakesh Field Trip

The art of GlassBlowing| Encapsulated Unscripted Scenarios Part I

This is a hybrid between a life user and life itself. However in this case ”life itself” is the user of a whole network that is giving life an opportunity to emerge.This is an architectural experiment. Architectures are being enclosed in capsules. Those capsules are architectural scenarios that are powered by a fuel that modify the molecular layering of those atmospheres.Unique situations are arising from those capsules. At some point, when architectures cannot be contained any longer inside of those enclosures, they are going to break out and collide with each other in order to conquer the whole network of pipes and connections. The end is conquering the medium.

THESE ARE ENCAPSULATED UNSCRIPTED SCENARIOS WHERE GROWTH AND SITUATIONS ARE POWERED BY A FUEL THAT CARRIES AN ELEMENT THAT MODIFIES THE ORIGINAL MOLECULAR STRUCTURE OF OF THOSE ATMOSPHERES/CAPSULES. ALL OF THEM ARE BEING ACTIVATED BY THAT SAME LIQUID, YET EVERY CAPSULE IS GOING TO DEVELOP UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS THAT AT SOME POINT ARE GOING TO COLIDE AND RECONCILE IN ORDER TO CONQUER THE WHOLE STRUCTURE.

Dear Patrick

Put the Parametric Design back in the Toolbox.

Ghost Dance Times. Architectural Association

Architectural Plurality and what may be its apotheosis and subsequent downfall.

Architectural plurality is a reaction against the purism of Modernism; it pretendeds to democratize architectural thinking and architectural intentions. The Situationists, Team 10, Archigram… were some reactionaries that subsequently were going to become the victims and the heroes of a more contemporary and dystopian plurality lead by people like Rem Koolhaas. This last one seems to be in constant crisis, however it rejoices in that crisis, it feels comfortable in it. The indirectness and ambiguity of this last plurality acts as a magnetic shield that protects it from decay; whether it is relevant or needed anymore is a big question in nowadays-architectural theory. From the absoluteness of a model, to anarchic solutions and theories; from the unique truth to the everlasting doubt on everything, architecture and its purpose have been in constant change since the beginning of the XX century more than ever before. The rapid social, economical and political changes have helped architectural plurality to reach a point where indifference becomes its main substance. The solution to the question is avoiding the answer and commenting on this question as if it was some sort of zoo-like creature out of its natural habitat. This approach to the question is a result of excessive attempts to fix the seemingly unfixable, to fight against the “inevitable”.

Nowadays architecture seems to be tired of that fight, of that struggle; we embrace the inevitable, we embrace the generic. We find satisfaction on the indefinable because it offers multiple ways to escape failure; yes, we are scared of failure, we are terrified of being ‘wrong’; that’s why instead acting we are observing and analyzing. Instead searching for hope on the utopia, we refuge under the ambiguities and contradictions of the dystopia. Even though both of them rely on cynicism, skepticism and critical thinking about the immediate present, dystopias act as a reality check on our most idealistic and utopian dreams. Architecture can’t escape from its context anymore, if it decides to break up with the terrene and conceptually coherent, it becomes a (non-lucrative) Disneyland; or even better a Persian Gulf coast line city that is reinventing what has never been invented, resulting in a monstrous flesh-eating capitalistic (progressively desert) oasis. Architectural imagination can’t be incoherent any longer; our feet are chained not to a single block of white marble, but to millions of formless branded icons that intend to fix the cracks of our plastered society, however those cracks are becoming visible on a metaphysical level.

Until now, indifference, skepticism and cynicism have been celebrated as the way to look at the architectural world that surrounds us; however hasn’t that criticism overtaken its original purpose. Instead of giving optimism for the new generations, it floods their minds with pessimism that subsequently generates apathy. This indifference creates a zombie like youth, where the only way of achieving all their desires is in the post-city; a multidimensional space better known as ‘the internet’. Architectural and social indifference is caused by a saturation of data. The power of choice and critical thinking gets diluted in between infinite movements that act as magnets next to compasses. Confusion is the first symptom, indifference is what comes next; finally the inhabitant sleepwalks until he reaches a multidimensional device where he can escape reality.

Three cracks are identifiable in XX-XXI century architecture. The first one is the crack of the White Marble; this is not a physical crack (the physical crack would be the demolition of the Pruitt Iggoe building in St. Louis, Missouri) but a conceptual crack, a questioning of the whole movement and its relevancy.During this first crack play was incorporated into the formula of architecture by the Situationists and Archigram, however its superficiality leaded to a counteraction (the second crack). What Andrea Brazzi calls a “radical” movement emerged from a lost and self-repeating deciduous movement that was walking on circles avoiding a bigger picture that was becoming too bright and large to shun. For this “radical movement”, architecture and urbanism couldn’t exist without the existing city, that’s why since then people like Koolhaas have put such an enormous effort on describing the entropic situations and complicated phenomena that happen on the (Generic) city. There is a third crack, this one, as said before, seems to be invisible thanks to the ambiguities of the architectural hyper-plurality that exists nowadays.

This third crack can be felt, and appears physically during moments of extreme social crisis such as September 11, the Big Crash of 2008-2009 of the global market and the consequent Flash Crashes of 2010. The world is changing yet something or someone is grounding us from criticality by saturating us with choices and banal decisions that at the end of the day result in nothing more than insignificant proofs that we matter (?). The realization of that results in apathy and indifference (or idealizing the past in order to forget the present), the real virus of the XXI century.

Alvaro.

I am not a Chronicler; I want to disarm superficiality and apathy. Being right or wrong is going to be the aim of my architectural journey. Being right and wrong is the attitude that generated indifference in nowadays society. I want to be wrong, I want to become a criticizable subject instead of an everlasting, ambiguous and idolized anti-hero. The answer is the real question. This answer is not going to serve as a guide to anything, its main purpose is to light up criticism and to create a dialectical environment within architecture.

How to do that? I have a remotely vague idea