algunas reacciones

a las (de)gustaciones, desde luego, gratuitas

OTRO: miesinterpretations


BLOGTENDERENDA:Las vidas del Pabellón de Barcelona

[josé vela castillo]

Architectural teaching as practicing innovation

Maybe we should turn to a definition in the first place. Or more precisely, to return to it: according to the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (21ª ed.), we find, under the word innovación (that translates accurately innovation): acción y efecto de innovar (action and effect of innovate). This of course is obvious. But when we scan the word innovar (the verb), a sudden surprise arise. Because if the dictionary at first states the following: innovar. (del lat. innovare). Mudar o alterar las cosas, introduciendo novedades (to change or modify things introducing novelties), strangely enough as its second meaning we read: ant. Volver una cosa a su anterior estado (anciently. to (re)turn something to its prior state).
So innovation both could mean to introduce something new upon an established situation or to transform something into other thing by way of novelty, but at the same time, in a beautiful warp of language, to "un-innovate" by trying to return the same something to its former condition.
In the inextinguishable fire of the search for the new maybe we should cope now with innovation as returning, as the process of acknowledging the fractured condition of the present, in its struggle to anticipate, so to say, its own future, in the unending fight for making actual what is only a latency, and in so doing, destroying it.
Maybe teaching architecture now is teaching architecture as practicing innovation. And maybe what we need in the first place is to learn again what innovation means in architecture and what teaching architecture means. In the very play of innovation as throwing forward and returning the play of teaching and the play of architecture is accomplished. In the thin ice. Sans condition.
José Vela Castillo & María de la O del Santo Mora

AA/IE IMBA NOV 2010

Como en pasadas ocasiones, los días 10 y 11 de noviembre tuvo lugar el workshop cpnjunto entre la Architectural Association y el IE. Estupenda experiencia de nuevo. Estuvieron Ricardo de Ostos, Valentin Bontges, Theos Lalis y Liam Young por part de AA. Con Ricardo estupendamente, su dulce acento portugues (brasilero) en español siempre es adecuado! Por lo demás, muy buen trabajo.
josé vela castillo

post post post

EXPOSICIÓN
POST POST POST
Nueva Arquitectura Iberoamericana
DEL 11/08/2010 AL 11/09/2010
CCEBA SEDE PARANÁ 1159
Exposición organizada desde el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea de la Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, a cargo de Florencia Rodríguez, y en colaboración con la revista de arquitectura PLOT.

¿Cómo se piensa en español y en portugués la arquitectura contemporánea? El proyecto POST POST POST surgió como una plataforma para el análisis de nuevas arquitecturas iberoamericanas.
La exposición reúne obras de setenta estudios arquitectónicos invitados de toda Latinoamérica y España

http://www.cceba.org.ar/v3/ficha.php?id=75

¡no os lo perdais! luego girará por más sitios, ahora está en Buenos Aires (estupendo, Florencia!)

algunas imágenes más

ampliación colegio infantil y primaria "el peñascal"



arquitectos: maría de la O del santo mora & josé vela castillo

congreso enseñanza estambul

EDUCATING ARCHITECTS TOWARDS INNOVATIVE ARCHITECTURE
international conference | CALL FOR PAPERS

Istanbul 17-19 June 2010
Host:
Yildiz Technical University of Istanbul, Faculty of Architecture


Architecture Without Condition
1.
Innovation is an interesting word, indeed. In fact, is an innovative word, at least in some ways we'll discuss later. But, what is an innovative word? How relates word with innovation? And innovation in general? Could it be possible, in fact, something like innovation, something that appears as new, as novus (as the Angel of history in the well known drawing by Klee as radically quoted by Benjamin, innovation must continue is fool run forward although inevitably its face must be turned to the past), as radically new and then as not springing for its past but coming from the future as any real innovation must do? Is it possible?
2.
Of course, surely not. What is interesting in innovation is not innovation itself, but that risk of the possibility of its never presentation as such, or of its impossible recognition as such, the uncertainty impressed in its very being. As is known, any radical innovation, the radical innovation is an impossibility. Or, more accurate, the possibility of an impossibility. If something must be new, it has to alter radically what we know, it must appear as something never seen or heard of; but at the same time it must have a traceable genealogy, otherways it will be impossible. And is in this aporia, in this undecidabilty between its possibility and its impossibility that the game of innovation is played. The game of radical innovation, not as the becoming of the new, but as the iterability (that always implies a change) of the event. Innovation as the powerful event we are waiting for. Specially in architecture. And specially in teaching architecture.
3.
If architecture is not only compound of the various knowledges and multiples techniques that allows men to build a house to protect themselves, nor the physical construction made of stone, concrete, steel or plastic but, in its deeper sense the place in which the event could happen, if architecture is basically dar lugar (to give place) and in its giving place formalizing itself as the interruption of time in space, as spacing, it is in this giving place that the possibility of (real) innovation could happen. Radically.
So the first conclusion is that architecture is the place for innovation. It always has been, then, and presumably it always be. Or not...
4.
Maybe we should now turn to a definition, the definition that in the Spanish Diccionario de la Real Academia de la lengua appears under the word innovar:
innovar: Mudar o alterar las cosas introduciendo novedades. 2. ant. Volver una cosa a su anterior estado.
Its first meaning is of course the common one, "to change or modify things introducing novelties", the second one is rather curious, and is the one we are interested in: (in ancient use) "to return something to its prior state".
In our inextinguishable fire of the search for the new maybe we should cope with innovation as returning, as the process of acknowledging the fractured condition of the present, in its struggle to anticipate, so to say, its own future, in the unending fight for making actual what only is a latency, and in so doing, destroying it.
5.
We think that what is needed is a much broader reflection, a reflection not necessarily new, maybe not an innovative one, but a necessary one on the real nature of architecture and of teaching architecture. The question is not how could incorporate innovation to our teaching practices, or to the architectural curricula, or how evaluate or improve or implement or... The question is that we have to rethink architecture in the schools of architecture: in fact we must rethink the school as institution, as the institution of architecture. Without condition.

authors: josé vela castillo @ maría de la O del santo mora

acreditación aneca

en las figuras de contratado doctor y profesor de universidad privada, también de ayudante doctor: prueba superada!
aunque parecía lógico, hasta que no lo ves en un papel no te tranquilizas. pero sí, la evaluación ha sido positiva. un honor, y un peso menos. Por José Vela Castillo.

maestro aalto

Instituto de Pensiones, cafetería, helsinki, 7/junio/2010

excess

this is me and Kimmo Sarje



THE NORDIC SOCIETY OF AESTHETICS
CALL FOR PAPERS 2010
"ENVIRONMENT, AESTHETICS AND THE ARTS"
Lahti, Finland, 3.6.–6.6.2010 Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Aesthetics 2010

Este es el paper definitido presentado. Las imágenes que lo acompañaban son demasiadas para colgarlas. Entre el público, Karsten Harries. Todo un honor.

AESTHETICS OF ARCHITECTURE : AN ENVIRONMENTAL EXCESS

1.
This paper will try to reestablish some relationships between environment, architecture, technique and in some way ethics through the aesthetic appreciation of excess, in order to rethink the necessary construction that every environment is: its ever-lasting technicity. More to the point I'll try to approach in which ways, if possible, an architecture of excess, of waste, of gratuity (both as tip and as cost-free, which both obviously relate to gift), could paradoxically renegotiate our relationship with nature as a kind of restitution. But maybe renegotiate is not the right word, because in some sense it implies at least two statements you not necessarily concede easily as true:
-one that we can "negotiate" with nature (or Nature, with capitals), which is neither granted nor obviously deduced from direct observation and/or physical perception and intellectual apprehension,
-second that, since I used the particle "re" to qualify "negotiate", I assumed this negotiation in fact has happened, in a long distant past, in a primeval Golden Age where men seemed like demi-gods, before the Fall, in-between the forest full of apples where Adan and Eve walked hand in hand: in a time when in fact this negotiation doesn't need to take place, because men were no different from nature, because they were bound to rules that, so to say, matched them perfectly, without rest/remainder/residue/remnant or waste. But this relationship, in fact, came not as a voluntary one, but as an imposition, or more accurate as a constituent element of what we call "the human", so there were no transaction, in fact no intellectual knowing of the real existence of this rules. No negotiation then: only a subjection but one mediated through techne (not to be overlooked the rich semantic field opened by the word "subject").

2.
Architecture in recent times has become obsessed with the question of its mechanical insertion in the environment, with its supposedly revolutionary becoming-green through the magical aid of technology. Filed under eco-architecture, bleaching green, ecoLogical and so on architects and technicians (but specially politicians), have become obsessed by (and auto-imposed with) a new green belief, that, nevertheless, in much more cases than I think necessary (and even sane) face the problem through the use, the abuse and specially the exhibition of the mechanical. Why do I say mechanical? Because, being technical (architecture is always technical), the answer some eco-architecture seems to give to the problem is mainly through the use of mechanical systems, by the enhancement of energetic efficiency through the display of more and more sophisticated engineered gadgets, by primarily addressing the question by a management of the expenses as if the solely question is finding the perfect machine of pure efficiency: by an strictly economical response, in the worst possible sense of the word. So to say: trying to undermine the excess always implied in technical production as only a byproduct of a not so developed technology and not recognizing its intrinsic value, its economical circulation, its impossible emasculation. Fortunately there is still enough good leading "green" architecture, but as always happened, out of the main economical building trends and policies.
But in fact... ever existed any architecture that haven't been mechanical? So to say, technical? Of course mechanicality is a particular aspect of technicity, though sometimes seems to absorb the whole field of techne, becoming its supplement, its substitute or its double (its specter in many ways). So, is it possible for architecture set itself outside the eternal circle of reapropiation of consume and waste, of the supplementary condition any techne always implies as part of its nature? Architecture as techne always have been mechanical, always have performed its tasks through the implementation of different systems (structural systems, comfort systems in its various forms) based in a certain kind of performance, of active-passive response to the external demands, in a technical re-action to natural environment.

3.
From the structural timber frame of any primeval hut to the different openings and moving parts of the same hut (the door, the chimney, the windows, the screens etc.), the mechanical answer formalized architecture from its very beginning, mythical or historical (not to forget that any structural calculation is a mechanical one, implying the equilibrium of gravitational forces and its transmission to the earth in form of foundation). Of course things changed from mid nineteen century on, when the development of technology (including mechanics) to an unprecedented level affected not only quantitatively but qualitatively its own essence. Although the implementation of new technologies in architecture (elevators, mechanical ventilation, electricity etc.) was rather timid at the beginning, at least from the point of view of design (or aesthetics if you prefer), enveloping itself in a pseudohistorical approach to architectural essences (not without much critic voices, from Ruskin to Morris), nevertheless this mechanical fever infiltrated architecture in its bit by bit better fit to what, maybe, could be called human necessities, or in fact human (or technical) desires.
The endless acceleration of technology, though, introduced an important nuance to the question: technology, in certain ways, became transparent. The different mechanical implementations that seems to make easier the life (and that indeed does), in its forefront visibility, nevertheless, in a kind of delightful perversion, hides its own real nature: its waste. If we thought technology came to fulfilling our lowest desires, surely it does. If we thought it was for free, we were clearly wrong. We must cope with this kind of double bind: the more visible, exposed, technology is, the more tries to erase its own tracks. Since the moment we cannot see the connections between the (mechanical) instrument and the necessary consumption of energy nor only for performing its function but for its construction, the trick is accomplished. Transparency, in this sense, implies a (voluntary) dis-connection: the veiling of the relationship between the turning on of a bulb switch and the huge process of waste that lies behind: enormous reservoirs of water flooding entire cities, massive scale electrical plants, tons of coal or petroleum burnedto ashes and polluting atmosphere.
Archigram and Banham superstructures (mobile and standstill) gave as a kind of idea of what we were talking about, Superstudio and Archizoom utopical journeys into the void spiced the mix. But... technological or anti-technological, utopias always missed the point: not that we need a kind of techne to survive or to improve our daily living in the nature, or even to colonize far distant planets, it is more than our very living, our more intimate way of being in the world, thrown beings as Heidegger pointed out, is technical. And it implies, in fact demands, at the same time shortage and excess. From language to architecture, or being is technical. And our (technical) being on the world generates waste: produces a kind of rest, an irreducible ash. In fact, a supplement. An excess. A waste excess.

4.
But, what, then, if the problem is the other way up? What if what architecture must do is precisely makes things visible? What if the problem, and not only in architecture, is efficiency? Of course recent ecological architecture (but not only architecture), at least in part, is a tricky one: if the energy consumption of a building could be reduced through the use of these mechanical systems with much better efficiency rate (better photovoltaic solar panels, better heating and cooling machines, better lightning systems with low consume bulbs, better systems of controlling "natural" ventilation, use of "clean" energy like that provided by windmills or geothermal energy, etc.), we could build much more buildings without disquieting our conscience (but not the environment). Ecological imprint, then, must be made visible through eco-architecture: architectural imprint has the moral obligation of showing its costs. Not only buildings must have letter classification, like washing machines and refrigerators, to assure its low consume: they must show, for being honest with its green concern, its whole ecological imprint, past and future.
Efficiency, although not expressed in this terms, is one of the leading ideas behind modern architecture, and as such, is the base of so much (sterile) functionalism, which today has turned into something like an ecological high tech functionalism. Obtaining the maximum employing a minimum, without any rest, any byproduct, any waste: but architecture, real architecture, has been always inefficient, indeed its definition could be inefficiency, because architecture always produced in excess. A building (like a book, like a painting) always gives more than was originally intended to, always produces something more, always leaves something to a future, to time to come. There is no straight relationship between what is given by architecture and what is inoculated at its origin. And that radical dissymmetry annihilates any possible calculation in terms of efficiency. In fact its efficiency could be either zero or infinite. Architecture is excess.
Post capitalist or globalized economy, as is known, is in search, desperately maybe said, of efficiency. Nor that this logic pointed to other thing that to a glorification of excess. The problem here is that this excess, the unmoral and pornographic quantities of money that the implementation of this logic of efficiency to market, so to say to working labor forces, has, then, a cost. A cost measured in terms of shortness, in terms of poverty. An unbearable one. The excess that works in architecture, instead, is for free. Is a gift. And that is what couldn't be obscured by this otherwise necessary rethinking of architecture in terms of its impact in environment. The line that divides the free excess, the gratuity and the excess that comes from obscene accumulation must be constantly retraced, but couldn't be forgotten or diminished as question of the past. In fact, is the question of future.

5.
Architecture, good architecture, always has been ecological without the need of displaying any technological gadgets. Its insertion in nature, its building up a landscape is a constant present in the architecture of ancient settlements, and could still be traced in the buildings of what rest of our recent agricultural past. Architecture, in its excess, con-formed the landscape, allowed for something to happen in a given place precisely by its careful insertion into the nature and by its never forgiving its technical origin. Put in a moral way: been respectful of what is found in a given place, acknowledging its own natural conditions and working within this context, architecture must give an answer not as imposition but both as collaboration but specially as offering and as restitution. Architecture helped to build a landscape: that in which human life could take place but also, in adding something, takes something. The final balance must be that it gives more than its takes.
Curiously enough the English word landscape is formed by the words land and scape, a derivation of shape: giving form to the land is then constructing a landscape, something necessarily man-made, both through the gaze and through the physical building (through agriculture and architecture alike). Now that greenerie is coming back, not landscape architecture, but architecture as a true landscape (including landscape as landscape of events as Virilio pointed out) and specially its re-defining what a landscape is, must be reworked. Because by now we can't rely in the old and safe opposition between wild nature (the wilderness, that Nature still present for example at Thoreau's Walden Pond but by then with a touch of nostalgia) and man-made nature, or if you prefer spoiled nature (and moral and ethics concepts arise, of course, in its substantial) to reassure our established ideas. In its becoming or re-becoming green in full a redefinition of nature is necessary, because nature is almost man-made now. Environment is, by now, a technical question. Nature doesn't exist any more in wild but as a constructed one. Landscape, in this sense, changed place with nature.
Anyway, the question is the environment: how this actual eco-architecture builds a new environment and specially how tries to be related with the preexistent natural environment? Must this relationship be changed through a different aesthetical appreciation? What is, now, a landscape, and how we could came to appreciate "other" landscapes, in certain aspects as natural as the "original" ones? For example third landscapes as Gilles Clement defined in a much substantial text . Wasted landscapes, where the intervention of humans, directly or indirectly, modeled their very ways of being, could be called landscapes? With which instruments must we approach to them as concerning its aesthetic value?
Related to this, I find really interesting the use by Gilles Clément of the word délaissé for the characterization of this third landscapes defined in his Manifest. Terrain délaissé, forgotten land: places that have been plowed, or industrial, touristic, urban places no longer in use, where a certain oblivion hided them of the common gaze (and of the economical radar), and precisely because that oblivion allowed them to embrace and develop a new life as a natural life, as refuges of diversity where prior nonexistent vegetal species could grow, where nature could in fact regenerate them and transform this wasted and exhausted lands in spontaneous gardens: again the excess of the waste. Places subtracted to anthropologized world: places where human techne has retreated itself, places where architectural excess in form of (apparent) exhaustion paradoxically allowed nature to re-green. Aesthetical gaze, then, retreated itself from the contemplation of this forgotten places, and exhausted and annihilated, needed the temporal distance introduced by the labor of nature (in form of time) in order to rediscovered its real beauty, in order to became, again, disinterested in its contemplation.

6.
Because if something is the aesthetical gaze with which we confront the (natural and build: as said both two are builded) environment is a totally inefficient effort, an unrestrained process in which consumption tries to exhaust every "artistical" index that, of course, is only there after we have learned to look for it. Maybe is a question of senses, of perception as aesthesis, of apprehension, but specially, again, a question of waste, of extravagance, of absolutely disinterested prodigality: prodigality, excess, gift that necessary has to be for free, without interest, disinterested. So, maybe at the end the same problem raised by techne, the question of exhaustion and waste, of supplement and gratuity is similar to the one posed by the modern aesthetic gaze. Of course we know with Kant, that the pleasure we find in beauty is directly linked to the lack of interest in the existence of this same object we call beautiful. In this sense, it is interesting to verify that this terrain délaissé identified by Clément, in its lack of use, in its lack of any economical or commercial interest, in the forgiveness it suffered, in the disinterest we feel to its very existence, paradoxically allow the aesthetical gaze to appear (a deconstruction is at work here, in the interruption of a given system, in the fracture of any solid belief: the abandoned terrain, the forgotten place in facts is what allows to renew our tired gaze, our wasted senses). But maybe something more is at stake. Maybe in the disinterest aesthetic judgment introduces to the real existence of things according to Kant, in the privative particle of this dis, lies one of the reasons of our negligence towards nature and of course a painful aporia: if we could find aesthetical pleasure only through disinterest, is this very disinterest in environment which allows its destruction.
Kant being mentioned, a last reflection allows us to establish a final relationship between aesthetics (and in certain ways ethics) and excess, or more precisely, of the contention of the excess. As is known, sublime judgment happens to appear when, confronted with nature, something in it overflows our intuition, establishes a distance impossible to cover between what our senses transmit to us and what our intuition could admit. An excess. And in paragraph §29 of the Critic of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft) Kant adds: "the judgment of the sublime of nature demands culture (more than the judgment of beauty)". Reason, that tries to cover the gap of this excess introduced by the sublime, happens to be the key. But what interest me is that precisely where the excess, the waste and the supplement appears, techne, in the form of culture, is reintroduced again. If we thought we were free of the technical when we approach supposedly wild nature, in the displaying of its major forces, in our being surpassed by them, it seems we were again caught in its trap. Because culture is what allows to cope with this situation, and rationalize in the form of the aesthetical judgment of the sublime (although it doesn't relieve us from the uncanny of the sense it wakes: that's where the aesthetical pleasure appears).
Maybe at the end the displaying of all those mechanical and eco-green gadgets architecture seems to be so proud now is no other thing that the necessary technical clothes any aesthetics of the excess are bound to.


José Vela Castillo

cardiff / zoontotechnics: animality/technicity

http://info.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/newsandevents/events/conferences/zoontotechnics.html

Zoontotechnics (Animality / Technicity)
Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory / Cardiff University
20th Anniversary Conference
12-14th May 2010

La pudeur et la demeure : architecture and the animal

Of course the question of architecture is, also, the question of the animal. And of course, it needs some explanation. Or, more precisely, demands it.
Maybe I'm not sure I could offer this explanation in full by now, but I hope this paper will unfold some different traces and reveal some disguised tracks of what this partially neglected relationship between architecture and animality could offer to rethink not only (what Derrida calls) l'animal que donc je suis (The Animal That Therefore I Am-More To Follow-), but also the inherent animality-technicity architecture is a product of.
And of course, this rumination points to a much broader context, so I expect that pointing and tracing this particular relationships will also illuminate certain aspects of the architecture and technology problem, and in so doing between this and the origin of society (and the greek polis), inscribing the whole problem in a much broader political (and in some ways ethical) context. A context in which technology, animality and architecture will be intertwined in a somewhat economical circularity that will point to a reconsideration of our own constitution as humans and to the rights, if any, of our prosthetical way of live.
What will follow are, then, some short reflections that try to capture, at least part of the ways in which architecture and the animal relates to our being as animals in build space.

1. Maybe we could say that the question of architecture is the question of techne, and in some ways, specifically the problem of the origin of any techne, of any fabrication and of any instrument(ality). Origin that, as Heidegger reminds us, is not technical, and indeed could not be technical, but origin that could be linked to the main question of man inhabiting the nature. It is frequently stated this necessity of technique for the man to survive in the open (we'll later verge on what Bernard Stiegler calls The Epimeteus sin). Technique delves then into a second nature or (sobrenaturaleza as Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset states in an important lecture in 1933, "Meditación de la técnica"): for one hand a kind of necessity that separates us from the animal (as language does although in other ways, nevertheless being technical), and for the other, and that's important, a kind of orthopedics or orthopaedia that both supplements and corrects human living in order to transform it and in fact to make it possible (again Ortega y Gasset, now in his "El mito del hombre allende la técnica", his lecture in the Darmstädter Gespräche of 1951, the day after Heidegger's "Bauen, Wohnen, Denken" advances the concept of the technical as a "fabulous and great orthopaedia"). It should be noted that orthopaedia comes from Greek orto and paideia, so it traces an interesting relationship to education: orthopaedics correct or allows to avoid the deformities of human body both through different devices and through different physical exercises. So what we usually term as only technological and external is, indeed, mainly internal: techne as machine and as practice.
At this point is important to distinguish between orthopaedics and prosthetics. Because we should not mix up what is specifically a prosthetic addition and what is a kind of enhancement through education and expertise. The prosthetic is what we need to replace (and sometimes to repair) a missing organ of our body, and as such is caught in the undecidable logic of supplementarity: as is known, the supplement both adds and replaces. So the prosthetic, in its technological deployment.
(We leave aside now the, in any case obvious, intimate relationship of architecture to orthopaedics, its intimate interlace)
And is precisely this ambiguous condition of the prosthetic not what distances us from the animal, but exactly what tries to fill the gap with them. The animal, so to say, inhabits its world just as being in it, no orthopaedics or prosthetics needed. The human on the other way needs precisely this supplementary condition of techne just for trying the (impossible) way in which the animal lives in its world, the natural manner of the compound body-nature the animal shows. So is this supplement of the technical, and specifically of the technological (the prosthetic), this hybridation what precisely, in a desperate (and ultimately futile) effort, is suppose to make of us an animal: one who inhabits the world as the animal does. Though, the problem arises when this supplement takes position not only as an addition or enhancement, but in fact radically impersonating what supposes to only assist.
In this way, the known statement by Descartes about the animal as a kind of blind machine, that only could respond mechanically to the external stimulus in order to survive in the nature, only a mechanism that blindly follows a technical set of instructions (build in its DNA, for example), is more accurate than we usually think, but indeed must not be applied to the animal, but to us the humans.
And this is one of the usual perversions that we apply to the animals: in order to seem and behave just like them, we need this techne that in fact open and abyss between we and them. The animal as the other, the absolute other, then, as the one taht do not need any prosthetic devices to live, to inhabit a (the) world, this alterity of who is our neighbour, is what precisely joins us in the (same) animality: the animal, from its untechnical life demands us an answer. The question is not if the animal could answer, then, but if we can answer him. And hold on his gaze.

2. La pudeur et la demeure, we said.
Let's begin with a short citation from Levinas: le sujet contemplant un monde, suppose l'événement de la demeure, [...] le recueillement dans l'intimité de la maison. [...] La naissance latente du monde se produit à partir de la demeure as cited (and abridged) by architect Benoît Goetz in his book La dislocation. Architecture et philosophie. For Goetz, then, the house, architecture in its broadest sense is not so much a technical instrument but a precondition of our being into the world, of having a world: an structural framing for the subject. Inhabiting the world is being at home in a home, in a place of residence, seems to say (both Levinas and) Goetz; a situation that of course could only be achieved as humans: le sujet contemplant un monde couldn't be an (the) animal, because, it is known, animals have no subject (or so we say). And of course, as we stated before, this house/home is necessarily the result of a techne or an orthopaedics (despite the ontological priority Goetz seems to asses), because in Goetz's view l'architecture aménage des lieux pour l'habitation des hommes .
But, in a second instance, yes, we will be surprised to recognize that the word demeure relates not only to the notion of (human) residence or inhabitance of a place, but also with the cavern, grute or the nest or den of (what the man calls) animals, specially (Littré) in hunting: Endroit fourré de bois où se retirent les cerfs. It is interesting to note, then, that we could trace a not so thin line between human residence (in form of architecture: usually demeure relates to domicile) with animal inhabitance of a place or a land, but not trough a kind of anthropocentrism that attributes to the animal some of the characteristics exclusive of men (the house) but through its own way of being in the world, through its same (own) demeure. Demeure could be thought, now, not only through the building of a house, but through an absolute opening to the world, that of the animal who makes its nest; the event of la demeure is not something that happens to us, human and specifically human as subjects, but to all living being in its being naked (before any techne, specially the dressing one, because animals have no techne as such). In this sense it is not the technical dimension of architecture what is at stake, but it's being event: it's giving place "donner lieu/dar lugar" as an opening to the be-coming, "a-venir/por-venir". What the (question of) the animal allows to think is architecture not as techne (or not only) but as opening to the other and as opening to the world, and finally as an opening to the event, as space of be-coming, at its radical incertitude about what's going to be. As its apocalypses.
The animal inhabit the world as radical mortal as we do (and do not forget another use of the french demeure: La dernière demeure, la sépulture, the final residence, the tomb), but as we, they do it in the form of opening to a be-coming, and the place of be-coming is framed as architecture: as the interruption of time in space, as the absolute openness to the other. Indeed, the animal is, also, this other.
The question, then, is not if the animal could make a home, and then, as Levinas through Goetz says, in the intimacy of this build house open itself to the (latent) naissance of a (the) world, that we know not, but the acknowledgment that it already has happened, that the animal (and the man) inhabits a world not through the presence of a techne (or the different questions about land property, for example) but through the exposition to the other. And this other, indeed an absolute other, is in the form of the animal. If, as Derrida will state, is the radical impossibility of the appropriation of death what constitutes the indebtedness I have to the other, I have this indebtedness to the animal as equal as the animal to me. The animal is as mortal as I. And in its eyes I find a certain answer, in its very gaze I could recognize the other of mine: to look is then to experience death, the death of mine in the death of the other. To look: to be turned into stone. Gorgona: the animal as the absolute other.
In this sense an interesting excursus could be done through the concept of track, the imprint (and trait) that the animal is continually leaving behind, tracks and imprints that, we suppose, couldn't be (consciously) erased by the same animal, tracks that in certain aspects we could account as a kind of animal architecture, a spatial framing of the territory that relates to notion of property or priority. As is known, architecture as techne always happens as an imprint, as a physical imprint in space that, as said above, establishes a house/home or place open to the event. But at the same time, if we usually deny the animal a superior status in the evidence that the animal could not erase its own tracks, could not disguise it, what we forget is that, as Derrida will point out , the tracing of any track always implies at the same time erasing (of another track): the structure of the track always implies a tracing that is erasing. In this sense the tracks couldn't be erased by anybody, though indeed the tracks are erased, continuously. Architecture as track testifies then its own erasing, but not through the man nor the animal, but because its own structure.

3.Interestingly enough, demeure also translates stay and/or remain, a certain delay or retard, a kind of linger on, and in fact what we could term as a certain awareness of what will come (l'avenir), though precisely in its not coming yet (or maybe in its coming from behind, its coming late).
This demeure, this structural delay that is etymologically linked with the residence, then, implies some interesting questions, in the sense it insert this displacement or disjoint that actually is working in any time and in any space, so to say in any architecture and in any conception of living/inhabiting at the center of the problem animality/technicity. A delay that we, as thrown beings in a (the) world only could but certify: always too late or too soon, the Dasein is always being thrown into the world, from a time that it's not its own, in a world that always survives him. And we only could recognize that, in its having a mortal existence because its having (a) name, a name that already yet survives them, this structural delay works in the animal as animal, being human or not. The name, its name, signs its own disappearance . The question, then, is not if animals have time (as Heidegger will put in doubt in Sein und Zeit), but how the structural delay, la demeure, implied in time is at work in the technical dimension of architectural demeure and if this same delay , and I think so, is also working in the animal demeure, so to say, before any architecture.
Finally, demeure as retard also introduces a kind of manque or lack, a missing or a shortage (is necessary to say that in French the word is applied for example to a retarded person), that of course usually is thought as constitutive of animal being: its mind being a special kind of retarded mind, (including the case of great apes or whales), its having only a diminished mind or a defective language, supposedly confine them to be only a simple living being. But I'm not sure if in this deformed mirror through which the animal (mind) reflects us, the question at stake is the question of their animality opposed to our humanity but rather the other way up: precisely this degradation is not their own missing something, but the argument we use to treat them as "animals", the same we treat human animals in torture or extermination camps. It's our own missing: the lacking of aidos, pudency-honesty-demureness (decorum).

4. Finally, La pudeur. Yes, la pudeur, the pudicity or pudency, the decorousness that in some ways Derrida feels when a cat (his cat?) stares at him in the bathroom, being naked (and naked himself), sets now in motion another intriguing and related set of envois, in some ways a political one, but necessarily an architectural one, since we are now intimating with architectural techne as cloth and dressing as much as building, as protection of the (human) animal and as making social the animal (human), zoon politikon as the result of both a zoon logon ekhon and zoon arckhitekton, that of course is a zoon tekhnikon. But that, nevertheless, not only remains an animal, but in constituting a/the society necessarily address the question of the animal in its origin, as its origin. Both through domination of the techne of the arts and the techne of the political, man separates from the animal, because its lacking, so to say, because it's not being totally an animal: just in order, in some way, to be an animal. Now, is precisely in this very lacking that supposedly rest is right of domination.
It is well known the myth narrated by Plato in the Protagoras (320d), the story of the disastrous error committed by (the demeured -retarded- 321c) Epimeteus, that, forgetting the man in the distribution of the different resources to the species of animals, obliges his brother Prometeus to stole fire and the arts from Hephaestus and Athena (which of course deserves a severe punishment). His fatal oblivion demanded the necessity of a techne that could supplement (both adding and substituting as we know) what the man have not in order to survive in the open and to compete with the rest of the beasts in the struggle for life. But the question is that this techne, that began through the building of altars to gods and develops through speech and house building, still lacks something: the faculty of living in cities, the political knowledge that allows it. The source of that is now Zeus, who established the necessary two pre-conditions that the man will need to live in common and build a city, to establish himself as a zoon politikon (in the already known later Aristotelian words) : aidos and dyké, pudency (or honesty) and justice.
The birth of the political and of architecture as the art that develops the frame in which the political would happen (and it is very important to recall the unavoidable simultaneity in building up the Greek agora of politics and architecture, the build void at the centre of the city being the necessary counterpart to the political breaking of the democratic polis) could be understood, then, as the imposing of two conditions that, in a undecidable movement, transforms the lacking of something in its very opposite, the owning of everything, turning the man in lord and master of nature. Maybe it's time to understand that both aidos and dyké oblige us not only as political animals between ourselves, but as political animals in general. That the use we have to do of pudency (or honesty) and justice in order to become humans (and survive as race) necessarily applies to nature in general. That both honesty and justice is what we are indebted the animals for, and in so doing, acknowledging the debt that we have with them. Only that, with the gift Zeus gave us because the animals, of course, we are in a way damned. A gift, as every gift, of course could disguise a condemnation. The gift, always impossible, both, medicine and poison: pharmakon.
José Vela Castillo

(de)gustaciones gratuitas

Finalmente ya está editado, en breve llegará alas librerías all over the world (bueno, algo menos...).

infantil+primaria el peñascal

maría de la o del santo mora
josé vela castillo
arquitectos

algunas imágenes, casi acabado

aa/ie imba april 21 2010

AA joao bravo imba workshop, with ta ie josé vela
april 21 2010

video de la ponencia 3iau

En la parte final del video se puede ver la ponencia que presenté al congreso 3iau de investigacion en arquitectura el junio de 2010. jose vela castillo

zoontotechnics

uno de los congresos mas interesantes que se van a celebrar este año es el zoontotechnics: animality/tecnicity, en la Universidad de Cardiff, en mayo.
http://info.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/newsandevents/events/conferences/zoontotechnics.html
Tenemos ponencias aceptadas.
Dejo el abstract de la mia.

La pudeur et la demeure : architecture and the animal
josé vela castillo

Of course the question of architecture is, also, the question of the animal. And of course, it needs some explanation. Or, more precisely, demands it.
Maybe I'm not sure I could offer this explanation in full, but I hope this paper will unfold some different traces and reveal some disguised tracks of what this partially neglected relationship between architecture and animality could offer to rethink (what Derrida calls) l'animal que donc je suis. And in so doing, extend the whole problem to a much broader (political) context in which technology, animality and virtual reality will transform the whole (build) environment into a world peopled mainly by ghosts.
La pudeur et la demeure, then.
On one hand a short citation from Levinas will surprise us when we realize that the word demeure relates not only to residence, inhabitance but to cavern, grute and the nest or den of (what the man calls) animals, and also to a certain delay or retard, to a certain awaiting and awareness of what will come (l'avenir).
On the other, la pudeur, the pudicity or pudency, the decorousness that Derrida feels when a cat stares at him in the bathroom, being naked (and naked itself), sets in motion another intriguing and related set of envois. For instance the myth narrated by Plato in the Protagoras, the known story of the disastrous error committed by Epimeteus, but not only in relation with his fatal oblivion and the necessity of the techne that could supplement what the man have not, but also with the necessary two pre-conditions that the man will need to live in common (and build a city) : aidos and dyké, pudency (or honesty) and justice.
Now, is it not the question of la demeure, the question of techne (the question of the dressing and the question of building, but also the Heideggerian question) and the question of la pudeur (the question of the beginning of the polis) the questions of architecture?

José Vela

ii congreso interseccion!!

la semana que viene, lunes y martes, y luego el 9 de abril celebramos el grupo INTERSECCION el ii congreso de filosofia y arquitectura. si os interesa, estais todos invitados, es gratuito.

y mola. mazo.

www.interseccion.es


jose vela