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