We are publishing an essay from the catalogue to the exhibition "
La Città che sale. We try to build the future ", running at the
MACRO Museum in Rome until the 31st of January, 2008. The piece has been written by
Odile Decq, curator of the exhibition together with Danilo Eccher.
Odile Decq is one of the artists who took part in
Detour New York 2007.
We are publishing an essay from the catalogue to the exhibition "La Città che sale. We try to build the future ", running at the MACRO Museum in Rome until the 31st of January, 2008. The piece has been written by Odile Decq, curator of the exhibition together with Danilo Eccher. Odile Decq is one of the artists who took part in Detour New York 2007.
There were so many who believed, so many who hoped against hope for a precise, priceless future. They were so patient, so strong-willed. In their closed eyes, their visions were so clear-cut and so certain that their dreams could not fail to be prophetic. But their scripts were diverse and contradictory, and they became tangled up as the scenarios melted away in the uncertainty of passing time. The colours, too bright, faded and were washed out by too many concessions, too many doubts.
They are so disillusioned today... Ideologies are dying out.
Danger is the ravine of our regrets, it is making nostalgia a poison that paralyses, making melancholy the arbiter of our failures. It would be easier to cry, to shout, to scourge ourselves and ask forgiveness. It is so dangerous to let ourselves be terrorised by the future, letting go of the steering wheel at top speed, slamming on the brakes, closing our eyes tight shut in a voiceless
scream, ignoring all that comes after us and, through our own cowardice, becoming the very instrument of the collisions we fear the most.
It is true: the future is disconcerting, variegated, stratified, and cryptic, since we do not understand
the choices we have yet to make. But the fight against danger creates such life-giving energy. We do not need to know where we are going in order to navigate with passion over the ocean of uncertainties. We need objectives, not visions, desires more than convictions, values that give us freedom and responsibility more than principles that, by protecting us, limit our actions.
To build a future we need to give up the convenience of binary simplification and enter the boundless territory of subtle nuances. Opposing falsity with truth, the body with the spirit, and the abstract with substance in artificial wars prevents us from taking the high road of levelheadedness. Suddenly we have not finished investigating the essence of things, for the bonds between things appear to make the world go round. To be or not to be - this is no longer the question, nor how or what to be, but rather, in the infinite complexity of all possible truths, where are we, and what is the nature, the value, and the power of the bond between us? Neither true nor false, neither you nor me, neither real nor virtual. Simply between.
Reinventing courtesy means no more than abandoning the problem of all that is around to focus on what lies within. The relationship becomes what matters. It cannot be sought through analysis, but is obtained as the right dosage when collective desire precipitates into the unforeseen. Brought together by a policy of transgression, the sole, only slightly off-centre vertical of Christian de Portzamparc's Citadel in Almere lays a double foundation of conflicting centripetal and centrifugal forces that feverishly maintain its balance. Like the inaccessibility of a Zen garden dressed up in Western lyricism, the desire to create a space of shared intimacy is denoted more by a link of identity than by a social bond. The introspective places itself at the service of the collective.
From yesterday to tomorrow, the present may appear to be an unbreakable knot of fluctuating relationships that are frenzied, variegated, undefined, overlapping, and unstable... This is clear. No spirit, not even the highest, even if it were armed with a lie detector, could ever control everything and plan out a perfect future without the slightest variation. We know that, in the past, faith was the mother of all fanaticism, but even though science bravely demands to understand everything, we should make do with what is probable. It is the collapse of certainties. We need to be reborn from our ruins, never allowing ourselves to be chained up in prisons of precautions but, with great care and within the limits of our knowledge, embark upon the marvellous voyage of conscience through the world of the possible. It is not a problem of ecology but of survival, it is not industry against gardening, nor preciousness against vulgarity. It is not ethics against comfort, nor ancient against modern. It is not the old against the new, but the inherence of being responsible. If man could put an end to judgement and if - our lungs filled with courage, our eyes with demands, our footsteps lightly suspended in the precious beauty of our status like blind tightrope walkers, generous wrongdoers, and rational imbeciles - if only we could amaze ourselves!
What would Michelangelo think if, to preserve his David, we had surrendered his sculpture and
made
a copy the finest expression of art? To what level of decadence would a
copy of a copy lead us to? We have treasures in our holds but there is
an error in our heritage. If our contemporaries have not the slightest
understanding of their cities, they will walk through them as though
they were master-builders at inventory time.
A painting, a
porcelain vase, or a work of architecture are never of any interest as
such. It is only what they have that is authentic, creative, and human
that gives them their value. What curators protect in museums is not
the elegance of an object that will never attain the grace of a puff of
wind, or a ray of moonlight: it is the emotion of its historical link,
its confirmation of knowledge, its boldness of invention.
Respecting our heritage means continuing the path - whether with persistence or irreverence - always respecting the energy that has already gone into perfecting our world. There is a great human quality in the subtlety and resoluteness of Saving the Bacon by fnp architekten . Its creativity lies in the shifts of mood that create new forms of respect. Here, what is extraordinary is how history is respected so much that destruction is never interrupted. Only its use is rehabilitated by new additions. In the substantial gap that remains between leaving alone and radically filling in with a new breath, the seeds of poetry sprout and grow, trespassing on the territory of our conflicting desires.
For at least two thousand and seven years, the race has gone from father to daughter, from mother to brother, at the highest speeds and in all senses, in order to get there: war everywhere. Faith, skin, language, sex - nothing that stigmatises the uncommon escapes rejection. It is entirely our own fault, because more than surprise we prefer habit, the familiar, and conventionality, all that is predefined and, as a result, we accept the other as though it were an explosion. And yet we know that, once otherness has been placated, monsters reveal their appeal - and exoticism attracts us. Since they bring with them needs that disturb us or that reflect our mummy-like stares, many works of architecture are detested and their creators underestimated. And yet they proudly play their role as contemporary monuments, almost as though they were the representatives of a new state order, and yet they are deliciously provocative, silently ironic, naturally intriguing and worthy of our inquiries. Since they are based on our own impulses, they exasperate our limits and pose endless questions.
What energy, what gentleness, what violence, what love emerges from the peaceful sleep of the whale of peace. Cosseted by the roofs, watched over by the onion-shaped clock tower, cradled in the tenderly embracing arms of the village-city, the Kunsthaus in Graz is a colossal child that has never ceased to grow in our minds. Peter Cook and Colin Fournier have turned the enchanting world of ancient stories into the cradle of a future legend.
Seeking agreement more than harmony means putting pressure on immobility and struggling to get out of what is already here, introducing through discord a new form of perception and interchange. Conceptualising this agreement means imagining the other as a possible alternative. Perceiving this agreement means accepting the other. Without melting away into the most grotesque schizophrenia, architects with a bright future are contemporaneously both universal and unique. Having fallen from their mighty rostrums and having abandoned their arbitrary ways and elitist judgements, they have chosen to fight it out in the mud.
This is the pitch on which they play their game, fighting and keeping their collective compulsions to themselves. What is at stake is not to be a hero but to feel one is the rational extension of popular ambitions, because in this terrible parlour game of society, the value of the action comes as much from the quality of its position as from the precision of the steps taken to achieve it. As a result, in the perfection of the action and the uniqueness of the work, the architect refrains from bartering with our utopias. Attributing form and existence to human chimeras opens the door to exaltation
and to the hope of acquiring the happiness of the masses for oneself.
Look how almost all the stadiums built for world cups or international championships or games gleam with a universal passion, how crazy love pulsates, hemmed in by the confines of a heart that is far too small for it. The spectre of the Olympian spirit persists beyond sport, for it lashes out against the inanimate, commercial organ that forms the soul of nations. For the architect, sport means having a winning state of mind while remaining level-headed, keeping hope in one's words even while denouncing fear, and never giving up one's intention to change the world!
Not like a Hercules or a Prometheus, but like a butterfly - the insect that, through a long line of chaos, leads to the hurricane of consciousness. Victory is knowing how to start the revolt or employ passion almost without the slightest need. It means annihilating the weight of violence and turning the world on its head while maintaining perfect balance. It means drawing strength from our weaknesses.
The immodest skin of Didier Fiuza Faustino's "One Square Meter House " in Paris shines through
the light and exhibits the flesh of our solitude. Among our childhood memories as astronauts, an
impending need for density in our habitat, and our misanthropic inclinations, Faustino creates a
capsule of irony, a wave of questioning sensuality - the intermediate invention that mixes together good and evil in a desirable interpretation of the future. Twenty centuries to digest movement and suddenly everything starts accelerating. Speed. Speed everywhere, bringing everything into question. Breathing, balance, and mastery flutter in the wind.
The sensation is intensified by fear as pleasure pierces through our anguish. For architects too, the data are compressed and the points of history and of the land dangerously lie close together. But, in Gas Natural in Barcelona, Enric Miralle and Benedetta Tagliabue go one step further, acting like bullfighters in their rebellious ardour. They capture the acceleration, breaking it down and multiplying it to restore it to us in a hail of peaceful shooting stars that murmur the subversive litany of a lesson of pleasure invented through mastery over pain. This point of view may seem strange and almost masochistic, but it is curative or at least medicinal and not that far from the need to recognise the merits of otherness that we mentioned earlier.
Because what so often prevents us from living in harmony is our resistance to changing our point
of view and the weakness that induces us to adopt standard opinions. Like Jean Nouvel in the case of Nemausus in Nîmes, we need to:
- work on social issues,
- introduce a surgery of clichés,
- mend our inability to meet, using spatial plasters,
- use lasers to thin out our short-sighted visions to see what we have in front of our eyes,
- prescribe massive doses of powerful images that liberate our power and together reinvent our shared freedoms.
The sclerosis of popular taste, which allows us to choose nothing but tribal, proto-plasmatic or marginal forms of beauty, is healed by the invention of contexts that are so innovative as to make
people react by redefining their behaviour.
It is because Man has the ability to multiply his strength tenfold, surpassing his desire in the most
incredible creations that architects remain the custodians of a paradoxical power to create the impossible. The more the project flirts with lunacy, the more the building will bring hope, magic, and intensity. Coop Himmelblau 's Musée des Confluences in Lyons bears grace within itself. The
suspended waltz of tons of steel and glass extracted from the earth bites the sky in a fantastic struggle against weight. It challenges our condition by striding over the fear of a fateful end. It is hope that vaporises matter. Where does this power come from? Where do they draw their faith from? Where are these warriors' weapons? In the immense reservoir of pleasure.
They recognise the energy of a line and the elegance of a crack. They shiver as they stroke the sky
and could weep for joy when they see the shimmer of a reflection in a puddle. God is not form and
form is not God. And yet we would willingly risk the metaphor in Pascal's words. Since architecture systematically leads to the design of a shell of utility - since fortunately we all have a body and are not simply spirits - the architect inevitably has to formalise. Why do badly what one can do with bravura? What archaic obscurantism would inevitably have us believe that pleasure and seduction are signs of the devil? We hope that pain, sacrifice and frustration are not the holy trilogy of the future.
The concept is quite clear to Massimiliano Fuksas . Working like a mischievous pixie, he clings to the levity of children with the perseverance of a scholar and, whatever the commission may be commercial ornament or passionate embrace - he enchants vulgarity with the beauty of his gesture. In the case of the Nardini centre, Fuksas imprisons the impact of the unexpected in the sensual volutes of a motif that resembles that of a restaurant tablecloth. He brings economic fortunes and the sumptuous elegance of inalienable futility into relationship with each other. His multiform bubble-edict puts its seal on levity and encapsulates it. On the verge of asphyxia, our bitter world clutches at his bubble of air and breathes.
What about my popular taste, my democracy, my society, my tribe, my group, my family, my couple? What about me? How can we all be satisfied? One fact is clear: it is stupidity that aggravates the averages. Offering to feed our envy of life with mixtures that are neither too compact nor too soft, barely elastic, neither salt nor sweet, and seasoned even less, colourless, tasteless, odourless, bordering on appalling silliness. It is closer to the horror of a paradise for plants. So what is the solution? Nothing could be simpler: I do not need to like everything, and all that I love does not need to be liked by all, but the pleasure must be intense, invigorating, generous and communicative.
There is nothing transgressive in this, and certainly nothing creative: diversity is only natural. It might suffice to understand our own nature better and we would perceive the inevitable character of abundance. It is hardly surprising that, ever since modern architects tamed space, and ever since this space has been filled with a social dimension - called "place" by the post-moderns - our architects
should now start examining the climate. They do not simply attempt to dominate increasingly expanding spheres in order to satisfy an increasingly lively ego: it is because present-day cultural and scientific interaction between the innate and experience are so strong that convictions about the nature of animality waver no less than the truth about buildings can be seen to falter. Climate bubbles are not primitivist, for they basically investigate the problem of the environment and
attempt to adjust the concept of architecture as a container of life. Since walls have always had the power to guide the masses, the fight against potential urban tyranny also involves these experiences. The problem of artificial climates goes beyond mere technologies. Prior to the actual packaging, it first offers a definition of the conditions and creates a bond between the active body and its context.
Sometimes nature becomes a model around the great problems of mathematics and biology, simply recharging our imagination. It once again ties the conquering spectre and the substance to be tamed. It is in the almost puerile carousel of a flight of bubbles and in the stamina of our brains - which devise geometric fractal models that only nature had been able to create up to that moment - that the Watercube - the National Swimming Centre in Beijing by architects PTW - acquires its value. It has the traces of a challenge because it skilfully combines these two elements.
The earth has been the object of all desires, of all share-outs. Frontiers, closures, and plots are the signs of avarice and greed, of human baseness. They are the festering wounds that we consider as our history in as much as they are the war strategies, the political marketing, the exoduses, and the expropriations that have lacerated the surface of the earth. The dividing up of cities and countryside, and even that of the oceans, driven by police-state or xenophobic tendencies, fencesitting or protectionism, inundate the surface with regulations. Even the space outrageously referred to as public is a monitored residence. It is the devitalisation of the earth through the exhaustion of its resources of freedom. At this point, architecture thrashes about like an insect that has fallen into a poisoned soup. Like slices of fried lard, buildings rise up, twisting and bending, and creating indoor landscapes within their own shapes.
The situation is not desperate yet, because so far architects have not given up - they unearth poetry in the incredible and they still dream of wringing the neck of barbarity with the elegance of a pirouette. For the Rossignol headquarters in Moirans, near Grenoble, Isabelle Herault and Yves Arnod have managed to recall snow. Its thick covering, now everlasting, protects a factory that creates the dream of speed. From coercion they have extracted pride, reinforcing ancient professional skills with an armour of pleasure for battles to be won. Lucky are those who will live under a roof of frozen ski-runs against a sweeping landscape. With his Tour Phare at the Défens e in Paris, Thom Mayne shows us the way to the sky. Since air is not filled with archaic values, agony and nostalgia, his tower laden with hope tickles the belly of the clouds with its angelic crest. It is an erotic seductress. We can bet that the flimsy and wanton veils that stand out in relief on a building inhabited by a Marilyn of steel will move us for many years to come. Let us hope that the ballet steps of this vestal virgin on the burning mantle of Paris may await our consciousness.
May desire never, never die out.
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