4 Make sure to only talk about food and drink Kierkegaard said about his hero Socrates, that he always talked exclusively about food and drink, but really he was talking about the infinite, while the others spent all of the time talking about the infinite in the loudest voices, while they really were only talking about food and drink. We believe that there is a deep sense of practicality that pervades the best architecture and that, well understood, summons that vertigo of the infinite much better than anything else. The infinite, as we know, can be infinitely large or infinitely small, and as such it is present in everything. Nothing converges to the essence of architecture as the potential clarified by the inhabitation it may suggest. 5 Our designs will be bettered by others One important aspect of a povera outlook is an interest for the living things of the world. The artists became interested in animals, plants, and even in the apparently dormant vitality of rocks and minerals, and of course in themselves and others. In that light a project must be left open to that vitality which then will have an opportunity to manifest itself by changing the architecture in both reversible and irreversible ways as time passes. When such openness is of a reversible nature, it may simply have to do with appropriately staging the potential of inhabitation. In the case of irreversible change, it has more to do with growth as analogous to biological growth, that is, not by fragments , which beget monstrosity and deformity, but rather by moments in a process of continuous transformation. 6 Maybe it is good not to be understood The Povera artist chooses the hard life of living amongst things, aspiring everyday to travel the distance that separates our knowledge from the essence of things. This is a trip undertaken in solitude. Every thing which exists, once known, can perform a function of communication; it has the potential to be conceptually understood and also bears with it the potential to become a sign. That sign is one more obstacle in the search for the true knowledge of things; that sign is one more enemy in the effort to attain an understanding of essences. In the 1930s, Ortega y Gasset spoke of the megaphone and the radio as the new enemies of man. Unrecognisable things –obscurity– point our consciousness in unknown directions, expanding the horizon of experience away from the familiar. Or, as Germano Celant, considering the alternative, put it, ‘Moving within linguistic systems to remain language translates into a form of cultural kleptomania that stifles the vitality of real daily life’.
7 If you want to do good architecture you have to be gullible St. Augustine said, ‘Faith is believing what you do not see; the reward of faith is to see what you believe’. 5 It is well known that the worst enemies of faith are the same as the worst enemies of art: skepticism and relativism. Skepticism suspects that nothing is true; relativism claims that everything can be true. They are both false. The belief in the effective existence of the object of perception or imagination is an aspect of their essence and the foundation of everything for us. 8 If you can’t come up with anything, you are probably thinking too much Embodiments of energy and the vital essence of all things were cornerstones of the works of Arte Povera , centering on an interest for the lives of animals and their existence directed by instinct as non-conceptual yet marvellous adaptation to vital problems. Intuition as a method of essential inquiry is related to the idea of instinct. Thought deals with things that have already happened, things executed and completed. If I move my arm, and I think about it, I break it up into moments of that movement. Intuition, instead, happens simultaneously with the moment lived, and thus it is aware of processes in their very unfolding.
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1 André Gide (1869-1951)
2 Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). ‘Three Dialogues’, by Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, p 21, in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays , ed. Martin Esslin. Prentice-Hall, 1965 3 ‘Yet it is not possible that we should remember that we existed before our body, for our body can bear no trace of such existence, neither can eternity be defined in terms of time, or have any relation to time. But, notwithstanding, we feel and know that we are eternal.’ Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677) ‘Part V. On the Power of the Understanding, or of Human Freedom’ in Ethics, trans. by R H M Elwes (1883), MTSU Philosophy WebWorks Hypertext Edition, 1997 4 Jorge Luis Borges. Collected Fictions , translated by Andrew Hurley. Penguin Books, 1999. pp 504-507 For the original Spanish version, ‘La rosa de Paracelso’, see Borges, Obras Completas, Tomo III . Emecé, 1996. pp 387-390
5 Saint Augustine (354-430), Sermons, 43, 1
Lecture given on the occasion of a solo exhibit of work by OBRA Architects at the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, 9 April 2004.
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Small Things
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