I started this essay as a statement; declarations are far from the ordinary Anglo-Saxon way of thinking. I am a transcultural Architect, trained in northern Europe, and proud of my Mediterranean origin: I was bred in Buenos Aires, a city of Dreams, and inspired by Paris, “La Ville-Lumière”; therefore I have the right to differ.

Statements are never elusive. I announced -another not politically correct expression nowadays- that this essay was a necessary extravaganza. I will explain why.

I have been involved in the Academia for twenty-five years. Argentina, Germany, France, Italy, England, lecturing, exhibiting, travelling and producing a body of work that for particular reasons is been recognized as different and positive.  By being slightly detached people cannot see you so clearly… but the only way of observing and analyzing reality is to take certain distance.  I always preferred the back seats in the cinemas. And I certainly took distance from the architecture scenery back in 1985.  In my early years, I was absorbed by the visions of Frank Lloyd Wright, August Perret, Tony Garnier, exploring the fantasies of Antonio Sant’ Elia, Erich Mendelsohn, the strict, deep beauty of the Bauhaus, the marvellous work of Hendrik Petrus Berlage, Michel de Klerk, the incredible German Expressionist and its extraordinary figures like Mendelsohn or Hans Poelzig.  I was also diving with pleasure in the exciting spaces imagined in the sixties and seventies’ adventurous years: Louis Kahn, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kenzo Tange, Clorindo Testa, Archigram and Peter Cook with his unpredictable young spirit; I was submerged in that world when the so-called “Postmodernism” assaulted by surprise bookshops and universities.  The debate became rare and inconsistent, almost exclusively focused on language issues.  It was strange, because all the beauty, complexity and intelligence reached in the first half of the 20th Century (after long decades of reorganizing ethic and design principles, including post-war Architecture) was gone: at once.  Since then, Architecture has been ruled by some sort of academic version of Hollywood.  It seems the Academia has forgotten its sources and, most important, its roots.  We should re-read Alan Colquhoun’s works: a brilliant way of relating the past with the future.

After fifteen years -as expected- the community got bored of grotesque citations of the past, colorful squares and triangles; then I thought “now we can finally restart visiting the forgotten principles of Modernism”.  But suddenly, like in a terror movie, someone in the East Coast promoted the vague idea of “Deconstruction”, perfectly fitted as a mass-product, already beautifully polished by a French thinker… it was final and perfect.  I saw the first images: they represented the end of their world, they looked mad, impotent, senseless.  Architecture was committing suicide after an heroic period.  It was not the act of jumping into the unknown, which we architects certainly do till a certain extent (we fall, we fly, we float, we fall again, we flow).  It was the act of jumping into a void full of steel, broken glass, cuts, violent and even malicious images.  Buildings cut in pieces like sausages, models destroyed by steel nails, facades peeled without sense, fragmented like bloody images of war. Unfortunately for my colleagues Libeskind, Wolf Prix, Rem Koolhaas and others I declared -and I do again- that those images and projects were mostly violent, destructive, even sadistic. The crude, careless computer renderings of the early 90′s did the rest.

Artists and painters can show their weakness, fears and violence. They have the right to do so. We do not, because we define the conceptual limits of our habitat, imagined or built. Our visions reveal how the future would be. We, architects, change the future, anticipating it.  In 1999 I wrote that “Architecture (unlike art, photography or journalism) cannot emulate our violent world with more violent, fragmented forms: we cannot fight a fire with more fire… we cannot get inspiration from chaos, random or irrelevant sources, because we will transform the world in a chaotic space, built after random parameters and irrelevant (or tragic) sources. It is already happening.

I love the body of a beautiful woman. I like the skin and the idea of skin, the balance and contact between interior and exterior. I believe in formal beauty as a bridge to get inspiration, excitement and spiritual progress; I understand functional structuralism as a rational, adaptable and flexible  approach to solve and enrich any programmatic requirement. I also believe in positive contradictions, because they give tension and drama to the state of things, stimulating our mind and joy. At some point, Architecture must refer to the Universe and to the sources of humanism: we must follow the attitude and vision of the Renaissance, that Fenix era that fed the imagination of Modernists in a positive way, because if you are a true Architect, that passion is intact. We cannot follow society, media and its interests, but understand or interpret it and re-orientate the direction.

Why this essay is a necessary extravaganza? All over the last thirty five years we got used to be impressed by loud, noisy projects, often pretentious or even dull till the point Architecture does not talk anymore.  Always trying to be spectacular.  There is also very good built Architecture around, I think of Jean Nouvel or Shigeru Ban, others are still in the background, I remember the kindness of Juha Leiviskä’s thoughts when he met, back in 2001.  However, the excess of unclassified information is transforming and blocking our sensibility: the architectural community is less precise, we cannot prioritize moral or symbolic aspects.  So I have to be even more spectacular and tell you that it is time to stop talking about innovative forms and technologies, to finally re-start discussing about Utopias, ideas and principles of Architecture.

One more time.

Pouchulu.