Mariscal is one of those artists that after his death everybody is going to say he was a genius. To have a taste of his talent visit the wonderful exhibition at the Barcelona's Pedrera, Caixa Catalunya. It is going to be opened until January.
Oriol Bohigas, the chief architect of the urban transformation of Barcelona'92, disagreed on the idea of “fabricating” the beaches of Barcelona at the end of 1980’s.
The thing is that the sand of the beaches of Barcelona are naturally taking away by the sea some kilometres down the coast and deposited at the river Ebro’s Delta. To maintain the beaches as they are right now (well, as a matter of fact they have lost a lot of the sand already) the Municipality has spent this year 400 million €, 750.000 m3 of sand and lots of work. There is an article at El Pais, a video and a link to the Municipality that has information (in Spanish and English).
The effort is good business, anyway: the beaches of Barcelona are the most visited in Spain with 14.000.000 tourists. Just as Simón Bolivar once said, in a total different context, “If nature opposes us, let's fight against it and make it obey us”. By the way, Bolivar (his statue) is staring at the sea in the Barceloneta Beach.
Lección de Anatomía, Rembrandt, 1632
In the birth town of Giorgio Armani, there is going to take place the Open City International Summer School of the Politecnico di Milano.There are innumerable recommendations for surviving current crisis. I propose naïve realism.
Think for a moment that there were 2 billion people in the world in 1940; that we are now 6 and will be 8 billions inhabitants in the world in 2050. Sum to it that our planet can not possibly feed that amount of “animal spirits” (Keynes). John Gray insists (see “Homo Rapiens and Mass Extintion”, 2002, in his last book Gray’s Anatomy, Allen Lane, 2009) that the “plague of peole” is not going to reach the “Era of Solitude” (Wilson), when humankind would be alone because all the rest of animals have been killed, nor the eradication of humankind (Lovelock): The future is going to be a combination of genocide, war, epidemic, natural destruction and the sort of generalized social collapsed that has taken place in post-Comunist Russia.
Just as we do everyday, that we live knowing that we are going to die, we have to choose what kind of life we want to lead in a world that is condemmeded to change radically and violently in the next future. I call it naïve realism, adapting slightly Keynes' “naïve optimism”. Gray puts it this way: "From a human point of view, this may be a discomfiting prospect; but at least it dispels the nightmare of an age of solitude".
What architects and artists should do in such a situation?. Well, maybe to preserve the aesthetic as a value, as some of them have always done: the harmony of the aesthetic experience is the only way humans experiment their subjective unity authentically. There is nothing more we can do, but we should not do either anything less.
An image from Avatar, the film, taken from the Eco Buddhism BlogDistributed and collaborative learning, with its emphasis on mindfulness, attunement to others, nonjudgmental interactions, acknowledgment of each person's unique contributions, and recognition of the importance of deep participation, can't help but foster critical thinking skills and greater empathic engagement. In that sense, collaborative learning transforms the classroom into a laboratory for empathic expression, which, in turn, enriches the educational process.
A page from the manuscript “La speculazione edilizia” (‘Building Speculation’; 1957)
Se suele reservar el término "fundamentalismo" para la religión, pero es que la economía hoy se ha vuelto religión. En un artículo reciente sobre las nuevas tendencias del mercado laboral, uno de los blogeros más populares de España, Enrique Dans, declaraba en El País que: "el mercado de trabajo no tiene por qué ser democrático"En este contexto se entiende por democrático lo igualitario o simplemente lo justo. Sólo caben dos posibilidades: o bien esta postura se enmarca en la fe ilimitada en la justicia inmanente del mercado o, en el peor de los casos, en la spenceriana máxima de la supervivencia de los más aptos (que en el mencionado artículo son los que tienen dinero para pagarle a las agencias de colocación para que promuevan su CV). En cualquier caso todo, absolutamente todo lo que sucede dentro de una democracia es democrático pues está sujeto al estado de derecho, hasta los delitos, ya que incluso ellos están contemplados en el ordenamiento jurídico. Otra cosa es que la libertad, que la democracia garantiza y regula, haya permitido excesos que necesitan corregirse a la luz de deflaco global reciente.
"La centralidad financiera viene necesariamente acompañada de la depreciación del valor del trabajo. Del valor central por antonomasia. Del valor que ha cohesionado y estructurado nuestras sociedades."Y se pone realmente serio cuando advierte:
"Se trata de un asalto que asedia, no sólo a las personas, sino también a todas las instituciones que las representan, y, en primer lugar, a los partidos y los sindicatos. Instituciones que, los más benévolos, en el mejor de los casos califican de retardatarias, de obstáculos del pasado que entorpecen el rápido disfrute del placer inmediato, primario, único: el lucro."
The Treachery of Images, 1928, Rene Magritte
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