"We must try to think of death as the same thing as when one goes to sleep and never wakes up. Everybody is I, when one dies, one gets born. The organism we live in is enormous, we are particles of sand in the desert. The electronic reproduction of life we run home to see isolates people, an invention of a mindless crowd".
Born is whoever feels an existence, (s)he tastes all the infinite flavours and sees consciously the marvels around the own self. Reality comes to us in very different manners, though it has wellbeen defined for us in multiple shapes that have been carved by our ever evolving idea of the present, past and future. We have been given the capacity to think so we need to imagine to gather these facts as "true truth" within our own being.
As Alan Watts describes along more than four hundred talks he has archieved during his teaching lifetime, we have constructed a reality which has little to do with what is really surrounding us. If we start analising the appetiations of our senses, we may be able to understand that other creatures in our planet hear, taste, see, smell and feel everything in such a diffent way to us, that reality becomes suddently abstract to us due to the complexity of its forms.
Gathering information to be able to understand the whole is the key to ensure a profitable existence..
A profound thinker, comunicator and "so
on..", Professor Slavoj Žižek lets us
figure out a slight different way to interpret the adopted Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe phrase "less is more", from a new point of view.
He states his particular upgrading of that concept to nowadays times:
"more for less", root of the congress he was invited to.
The excesses of our civilisation, he suggests,
guide our current views on social evolution, starting from a sexual approach to
mechanising the own act of making love to then continue through an analisys of
the architectural realm as a privatised volume of space. The
understanding of "the entire stretch" as a social entity follows the
aim to understand what he portrays as the gap between the inside and the
outside space of a building, that layer of reality which makes the whole notion
of volumetrical territory as something that belongs to a certain human status o
class in our highly layered society.
"I believe I do not believe in what I
would believe I believe.." is not a pleonasm he would incur into. On the
contrary, his overwhelming rationale is as clear as it is his critical
narrative, that which withstands the arguments of probably the most influential
post-modern architects of our time. He spends quite a long while analising
Alejandro Zaera's philosophical approach on his Yokohama Cruiser Terminal,
relating it to other works from great contemporary designers on the basis
of the public and private realm. He generates an interesting new concept for
space as the third field which excludes certain people from public spaces as
much as all servicing installations occupy invisible gaps within any given
building.
He finally concludes his talk warning the
architects as follows:
"When you are
making your plans, treck softly because you treck on the dreams of the people
who will live in and will look at your buildings".
Someone once said "a philosopher learns always from the poet", probably as Don Quijote learns from Sancho Panza.
As you suggest in your flamboyant and swashbuckling conference to all those who climb mountains to reach the top to then come down again (..when is way better to "stay down and read a good book.."), I would kindly recommend you to have a thorough read to Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, a book that has meticulously been studied by every dedicated architect of our times.
On one hand, that year 2010 Congress had the intention to investigate the keys to a fairer and more efficient architecture, that which would be able to cope with periods of crisis and optimize resources to achieve better quality with less costs, certain aspects, on the other hand, which are intricate along the process of designing any building since the beginning of our times as a civilisation.
The worry one extracts from listening to your speech would not be such if you had contrasted your socially biased views with the opportune thinkers of the architectural profession. These people would have shown you how accurate their own personal concern is on the basis for social needs through their work. Please, rest assured the design processes they fulfill from a small garden shed to the most intricate hospital building, a new urban development or a whole wide city, takes the human scale and its necessities much into their mind.
Also, I would humbly guarantee to you that your crap, as every other human being's, will always travel down the pipes hidden inside the walls and floors of a building, because no one gives a shit about where it finally and definitely goes to vanish.
As Mr. Bachelard stated in the Intimate Immensity chapter, the"inner
immensity (of one self) is what gives the real meaning to certain expressions
concerning the visible world".
"And with a stroke of the pen
I name myself
Master of the World.
Unlimited man"
Pierre Albert-Bireau
Interesting, though, the first five minutes of humbleness shown in your highly formative and amusing conference. I'd like to kindly ask you, nevertheless, to let the architects think by themselves upon what's best for our "post-modern" society, they are intellectually enlightened by the hard work they have been applying since their first step set onto their own university grounds..
