exercises on loss, and intermittent crisis.
Academics, and other professionals, are certainly anchored in a prominent modernist context built around architecture as the tool to effectively settle the social, cultural, and political problems of our concurrent changing social norms. As is, from a simple process of observation, one can question which methodology of perception designates architecture (the tool) as intrinsically pedagogic.
Both institutions and individuals seem to tacitly agree (as agents of the discipline), that pressing matters such as mobility, housing, pollution, and energy, fall diluted by politics but by the ones of architecture. Almost unperceivably, the professed field and practice of architecture is somehow stranded on a lethargic sequence of faint and loss, untwining a perfunctory environment of mass dissimulation and lubricated transmission of information on a spectrum of endemic referentials. Normative and conformative, these dispositifs thrive as a relayed construction perceived in flattened images, project reviews and as the political representation of a commensurable set of powers embedded in our contemporary society.
Yet, the majority dares to impugn the autonomy and sovereignty of architecture, and consequently, the power it is, and has.
I occasionally can admit a sort of absenteeism of ethics, virtue, and principles – strangely dominant – as the aesthetics of the majority and disturbingly, almost normal. I must also confess, to recognise in only a few pariahs, the tendency to contradict this irremediable path into loss, though nothing more than denial. Intentionally, architects as practitioners, prefer to construct in a field of reflexes and old masters, endemically disseminating an antique craft and entente of the world as a sensible geometry of values that, in regard to power, were never truly professed. Refusing to learn by undoing, they (we, and I) are trapped in a cycle of redoing, relearning within a refractive medium, and never truly trespassing the field of an old practice.
Questioning (a)critical capacity, I find myself in a confrontational dilemma, contingent from a stranded perplexity on beauty, teaching, and public practice, as an intermittent pedagogical service. At last (!), a new condition for crisis in the field and practice of the discipline of architecture.