Manifesto

Architecture is not just a walk through arcades, walls and columns, although such movements are necessary in discovering architecture's most basic condition, that of interiority. Architectural experience, as a mode of knowing, originates and exists primarily in direct experience, the "being here" of bodily experience. It is the disembodied quality of many recent developments in architectural theory that I try to balance my work. Neither is architecture mere shelter, protection from nature's elements. If it were, we would not have taken the time and effort to improve upon life in caves or similar primitive shelters. Such a utilitarian definition has led to the reduction of architecture to problem solving, dominated by a naive causality implicit in the deterministic model. I will not expand this theme here since this was extensively done by the postmodernist critique. Nor is architecture simply the phenomenological description of so-called primary building blocks of human experience. The possibility of finding such an ontological ground was just another mythology, known as the "myth of essences."Questions about the beginning, the primal past, and visionary propositions about the future are seductive and occasionally stimulating, but ultimately limiting. And, no matter how tempting and politically correct, defining architecture primarily as theater or ritual, be it social, political or religious ritual, is too rigidly normative. For even when architecture finds itself as a means for self-knowledge or self-expression by an individual or a group, it betrays its intrinsically nonrepresentational nature and become self-indulgent and sentimental. Furthermore, when architecture is treated primarily as communicative action (language), as it has been for postmodernism and deconstructivism, the act of design becomes subsumed to the act of interpretation, leading to a dominance of the architectural critic over the object maker. Nor is architecture just a utilitarian, information-mediating device akin to the typewriter or the fax machine, as some have suggested recently. Such a view would only follow the many failed attempts at redefining materialism in a less reductive light. To them I say, Good luck. Architecture is, of course, each of the foregoing, but also more. Architecture is a pretext for critical considerations, where, starting from an architectonic detail, one quickly succeeds in establishing a law of expression manifested in a concrete abstraction. This, in turn, becomes an intersubjective territory from which will spring the powers of imagination and inspiration. Today, the most critical questions are epistemological. In other words, how specifically does architecture empower humans to construct and transmit knowledge? Architecture as a mode of knowing - is an act of measurement. Architecture helps us construct a new scaffolding for a family of relationships bridging from one culture to another, and from one age to the next.