THE JOY OF THE UNEXPECTED
1.
Surely, after contemplating this image by the Egyptian artist Mona Hatoum and after a certain degree of surprise due to its content, we all know we are looking at one of the faces of the unforeseeable. Walking barefoot while dragging one’s own shoes does not seem to be a reasonable or advantageous situation, unless the aim is to transcend its literal meaning in order to open the door to other meanings which, having abandoned the known description of the world, metaphorically slip through our imaginary in search of other ways of thinking and describing it. Of other worlds which are also within this one as, inevitably, the centre of the world is where it is thought to be. That is, now.
Consequently, I invite you to make yourself comfortable, remove your shoes, and prepare to celebrate the joy of the unexpected to introduce us to the joyful territory of the creative processes.
However, I don’t aim to explore this territory from the point of view of its objective conditions of production but, amidst the scope of aesthetic knowledge, my interest leans more towards the subjective side which propel it and, especially, focusing on Architecture.
We all know that nowadays, it isn’t hard to appreciate the generation of disciplinary value from several approximations to the processes of design, but in each and every one of these, the intensity and quality of subjective and creative desires, are always latent and feed them, even though they, usually, represent the hidden part of the iceberg when the aim is to understand the nature of the processes of knowledge.
For obvious reasons of time, I’ll be more illustrative than explanatory and more suggestive than convincing while presenting my explanation.
2.
Gilles Deleuze says in his Alphabet that joy is everything that consists in fulfilling a force, in realizing a force of which I believed myself to be capable. Deleuze describes, thus, the joy produced by the free exercise of a personal capacity versus any restriction imposed by the sadness of power.
However, this personal capacity is not enough to produce by itself the specific joy of the unexpected. For this, it is necessary and essential, firstly, to inscribe it in the flow of an intense desire that coming from the core of our own existence. A desire generated by the illusion of a world and moved by the promise of its update within an open process that, due to uncertainty of life and far from an infallible and universal method, produces unexpected results.
But, as Deleuze says, in the same Alphabet, desire has always been a construction of an aggregate and one never desires something or someone, but rather always desires an aggregate. As an example, Deleuze refers to Proust when he says that desire for a woman is not so much desire for the woman as for a paysage, a landscape, an entire world that is enveloped in and associated to this woman.
Definitly, I’m convinced that at the innermost depths of our practice’s foundational desire as architects not only houses technical or projectual solvency, but, mainly, the capacity to illuminate, transfer and build a world as our most important commitment. Without this associated capacity, our practice vanishes in the mere professional management of what we already know renouncing, thus, to the creative regeneration of the permanent and unknown mutations of the reality.
3.
But, if we want to understand more about this human desiring competence, we only have to be attentive to Françoise Choay’s suggestive words as she has formulated, for the first time, the hypothesis of one competence to build: a competence which is engraved in our genetic heritage in the same way as another competence which is characteristic to human beings, which is the competence of language. In both cases, this competence is a virtual and generic power, identical in all humans, but that can only be updated performatively via the peculiarities and differences due to the diversity of human cultures.
Two basic competencies, language and construction; letters and artefacts; stories and buildings; words and cities, that endow our cultural specificity with the double capacity to imagine and fable a world through the language and, at the same time, to build it in the city. Definitely, we live and inhabit the language and the city being aware that cities without words wouldn’t be habitable and words without cities would only be a bitter mourning for their loss.
So, as telling stories is our predominant and ideological way to convey information and transfer experiences, any constructive effort as well all kind of technological athletics and sustainability policies, will be in vain and rendered useless if it is not accompanied, as well, by a poetic regeneration of the language and a prophetic intensity of our narratives.
Without this poetic and prophetic endeavour, we are doomed to build the imminent ruins of a civilization of which the angel of history, turning back while leaving, looks on, with despair and horror, because we are immersed in a gradually accelerated and irreversible process of change of our world, observing, painfully, how the increasing inadequacy of its old foundational narratives erases any credible promises of survival.
Orphans of the time we are living in a blurred and evaporated present where the past is only perceived as a loss and the future as a threat, and where now, that we know all the answers, the questions have changed. Therefore, if answering is an act of adaptation and asking is an act of rebellion and invention we are, now, in a desperate need of interrogation of the unknown: Where do we go next? Where do I want to go? Where do we want to go?
Because the answears, despite how beautiful and comfortable the Neolithic incursions may be, neither the shade nor the genealogy from the tree provide us with sufficient stimulus to shelter and incubate the seeds of the future.
Because, despite how marvellous the achievements of the industrial machine have been, today’s children no longer play with their artefacts to imagine a future.
Because, despite how magnificent the fables and tales provided to the imagination have been, thanks to a more than two thousand-years-old agreement between Plato and Kant, their stories are no longer a part of any lullaby to mitigate our lament and to help us to grow up.
Because, despite how beautiful and stimulating the objects and stories of the glorious and recent modern era are, they are no more than the best experiences of our parents’ world. And, despite still being recognisable, they have lost their clarity, although not their entire validity.
Because, despite the ruins of that historic soundness, which started to crack fifty years ago, in the past sixties, now paves impassable roads and despite the compassionate tenderness that allow us to survive for the time being, we know that it wont be enough to slow down the deterioration of our common house: the global home.
Because, despite moving forward tentatively amidst a clear confusion we must, urgently, start a process of multiple conversations to rethink our world accepting that, at large intervals in history, the mode of existence changes at the same time as the mode of perception of human societies and it is then when the joy of the unexpected as a subjective and creative concern becomes a promoter of change.
4.
So what? More than ever before, now, we should focus the best of our practice on studying and exploring this intense and emerging subjective concern, individually as well as collectively, which provides visible life and strength to the new concepts and percepts which accompany the current process of change.
Consequently, I firmly propose to provide academic shelter and research protection to this prospective melancholy which has spread everywhere in order to promote laboratories where by means of all kind of experiences and simulations driven by a collaborative desire of knowledge, we could find some fragmentary answers to the question that Toyo Ito so intensely asked himself: “Can I, as an architect, provide this invisible other city with a visible image?”.
This is the real tipping point we should be looking for, because if we accept that the representation (necessarily finite) of a complexity (presumably infinite) is one of the fundamental fruits of knowledge, we will understand, easily, what our main task may be: the representation (necessarily finite) of another city and another world (presumably infinite).
A task which, for us architects, does not represent any mutilation of our own disciplinary corpus. Architecture is based on the complex elaboration of concepts, percepts and precepts, or if you want, conceptions, perceptions and prescriptions, using in each case the corresponding system of knowledge: philosophical, aesthetic and scientific, according to legibility, visibility or livability considered for its product.
My first teaching experiences, now more than thirty years ago, were focused on exploring the preceptive certainties derived from the application of scientific knowledge to the matter’s behaviour. It proved to be a good way of generating useful criteria in order to tackle the intractable complexity of architecture, especially in the first academic year. But, now in a post-degree situation, I believe it is an ideal time for all of us, beyond any known scientific objectivities of our practice, to start exploring the subjective uncertainties of creative desires.
This is only about re-orientating our disciplinary complexity towards those aspects which, being more decisive to produce thinking, criticism and utopia, are more prone to the creation of sense rather than muscle.
But, in doing so, it is not just about attending to the announcement of the virus of poetic language, but to receive it, celebrate its arrival and bring it to life. That is, makes it legible and visible, accepting that we also learn and produce in the laboratory of language, knowing that language, this visible emergence of thinking, is the reality in itself, as well.
Along with Juhani Pallaasma, we believe that architecture relates, mediates and projects meanings and along with Adolf Loos, we enjoy being builders a lot, but there is a urgent need for improving our Latin language in order to provide an outlet for the contemporary City of Babel.
It is precisely from Architecture where it is easier to carry out this dual action, because our practice, as stated by José Luis Mateo in the BIArch Journal, is probably one of the last activities that derive from general thought, enjoying the privilege of exercising both competencies: that of the language and that of the city; from the power of desire itself and through the attentive observation of historic change. Narratives and cities; desires and changes.
5.
Let me, finally, some remarks about how to explore subjective desires and city’s changes.
In this way, the exploration of the nature of desire should be carried out, primarily, on two specific linguistic states which go beyond the mere descriptive use of language.
The first one is individual and pre-linguistic, acoustic and gestural, and houses the pre-linguistic tattoos that hold the innermost truth of language. Human beings are not only individual conscience but, from birth to death, they also live with an impersonal and pre-individual element. Between both, it is housed the germ of the poetic, our specific genius and the creative potential of our own look: that is, our own and unique world.
The second one is collective and post-linguistic. Its consideration is born from the emerging reality of the new information society: the feedback derived from the infinite potential of links within our reach produces a ritual of communicative autopoiesis that bring about the creation of a non-traditional, mixed and mutant collective language.
To explore these linguistic areas, both ecstasy through an introspective intensity as a permanent unfolding of the reality through its superficial proliferation, may propitiate a highly suggestive production.
Finally, to explore the nature of change we should focus, especially, on all of processes of exchange that weave our coexistence and, at the same time and no less important, on the promises that move them.
But, if it is easy to understand the relevance of the processes of exchange it may be harder to understand what I call promises. Let me set an example to finish off this first part of this lecture: The promises (narratives) which have supported the value criteria of the 20th century’s modernity are based, I believe, on three narratives: amnesia, as a cut-off from the past and seeing our time as starting point of the history; autonomy, as isolation from the environment and as affirmation of the work’s own criteria (as shows the model of lonely cow-boy derived from hollywood) ; and abstraction as industrial city’s specific language.
All of these were legitimized, more than one hundred years ago, as a reaction against a previous historic state and were born as new questions versus outdated answers. Today, these paradigms no longer operate with the same strength. Amnesia is starting to be mitigated with stories and practices which are closer to memory and continuity with the past; autonomy is starting to be mitigated through stories and practices which vindicate empathy because we know that it is the relationship with the context that produces meaning and provides value; and abstraction as an inherited modern language is being enriched through other visible narratives which are capable of providing better user instructions to inhabit our changing world.
A world, however, that always appears fragmentary, firstly, because our human competencies, remember, can only be updated via the individual peculiarities and differences due to the diversity of human cultures and, additionally, because although any work of art is an entire world in itself, only a fragmentary part of it becomes visible at each moment bringing about ephemeral emergencies, underneath of which there is plenty of darkness that constitutes their historical reserves of meaning. In any case, every emergence is, always, a great opportunity of knowledge and a signal that we should take advantage of it, because definitely, all depends on us.
Therefore, we must be attentive, patient and cautious, because the joy of an unexpected world associated to our practice is neither hidden within great gestures nor within bombastic declarations of love, but in small perceptions and in small changes, as, wisely, Leibnitz wrote down, three centuries ago: “these small perceptions are, thus, more efficient in terms of their outcomes than one might think. They are the ones that make up those inclinations and those images of the quality of senses, which are clear as a whole, but confusing in parts; those impressions that the surrounding bodies print on us and which hold the infinite and link that everything has with the rest of the universe”.
