Manual for Becoming a Radical Architect
Radicalism in Architecture is not a simple choice and it’s not dominated by the lack of reason, an important idea now that Architecture has become, due to the new technologies and trending fashions, easily reproducible.
When we see what we understand as Architecture in general, it seems that the architect is trying to make the building talk, talk about feelings, images, people or love, and this is what makes the difference between construction and Architecture. Architecture does not need to say anything, it doesn’t need to talk, doesn’t need to express anything specific, and it doesn’t need, overall, to be needlessly “Radical”.
Architecture always has a meaning when it is created based on strong conceptual work, the project is there, a body of matter, showing itself immortal, personal, superior because of its inner qualities, those that can not be seen from outside and sometimes even from inside. You need to look at it, speak with it, interact, explore, touch, and at the end, for sure, admire. It is not done for a magazine page, and neither to hang in an exposition room and amaze everybody around because it is ‘beautiful’. Architecture justifies its own existence, it will emerge to create and show its own values, which at the end are completely rooted in life on this earth.
As I finally, slowly introduce this group of images, manual, involuntary parody, that makes emerge the greatest seriousness, I am still willing to remind the readers of the virtues of reading this document in the right way, that is, far from the untouchable, the divine and holy. The spirits of this writing are themselves descending all the time upon me, and upon some others, pulling ears and punishing blindness. The misunderstanding of this kind of writing happens to be the actual common ground, but what matters is that Architecture needs to go beyond the image, what is important is trying to find the difference between the ways of conceptualization the space and its relation with an infinite number of elements, a hybrid that will replace politics, moralities, and trending fashions.
