Disintoxication of Design

It is not just in the architectural realm that experts predict a retreat from recent "vulgarity and ambition" (Ouroussoff), designers too see the coming trends as:

Retreat to the comfort zone

Purism as Self-Therapy

Back to basics

A Return to Reason

No Jokes, No Fakes

Utility

Craftsmanship

Back to Bauhaus

The beauty of reason: Luxury is no longer sought in comfort but in formal and qualitative consistency. Only forms that are beautiful, innovative and durable can be useful as well. Bauhaus classics set the tone, quality workmanship adds authenticity. Slender, simple furniture with as few edges as possible dominates. The materials also indicate a return to the authentic: wood, leather, woven fabrics or ceramics, rounded off with the occasional plastic detail.

Design against design: with experiments, with products and furniture that are driven by artistic rather than market-oriented motives and play with our expectations, designers and their public are rebelling against the slickness of the design world

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Read more at Dezeen. In Spanish there is good article in El PAÍS.

Muere el profesor Juan Antonio Ramirez

La noticia se ha regado por los medios como la pólvora. Sucede que Juan Antonio Ramirez tenía una inmensa autoridad, que no poder. De hecho, era de los pocos que ha defendido a contracorriente que la modernidad artística tiene un largo recorrido por delante y no cejó en denunciar sus sucedáneos contemporáneos.

El mejor homenaje que le podemos hacer desde aquí es ofrecer un vínculo a su indispensable obra teórica: estos son los hombros sobre los que nos subimos muchos enanos a su alrededor.

Este es el comienzo de "Hacia otra cultura arquitectónica", publicado en LARS, mayo 2005:

No cayeron solamente dos torres de oficinas gigantescas el 11 de septiembre de 2001. Persiste en la memoria el impacto de los aviones y conservamos vivo ese sentimiento mezclado, entre el horror y la fascinación, que experimentamos ante aquel derrumbe colosal.

Ya nada volverá a ser igual, nos dijimos entonces; es imposible que el mundo no saque de esto algunas lecciones. Pensábamos en el ámbito político y económico, por supuesto, pero no sólo en ello. ¿Podía permanecer incólume tras el desastre el universo de la arquitectura?

Para leer el artículo completo pinche aquí

Pragmatismo inteligente

Acaba de salir el número de septiembre de Revista de Occidente. Después del dedicado a Isaiah Berlin llega este con una entrevista con su heredero: John Gray (ver entradas anteriores). En "Pragmatismo inteligente" Gray conversa sin reservas : a él le gusta, como a mí, la discusión franca, la dialéctica cuerpo a cuerpo, conversar.

El pensamiento de Gray ha sobrevivido la maceración acelerada de los tiempos de crisis. Sus juicios se han acabado confirmando por mor de la experiencia: no es puro y simple realismo es inteligencia arriesgada confirmada por el devenir. En este sentido uno de sus mejores libros es el último, Anatomy, en el se recopilan artículos publicados durante esas décadas en las que se le consideraba simplemente un intelectual incomodo.

Good and Affordable houses

The picture comes from one of my favourite blogs: A Daily Dose of Architecture

Accordia is the name of the dwelling complex in Cambridge, UK, that has won the 2008 Stirling Prize. A good way to understand the excellence of this design and the criteria to achieve such a work is spending some minutes watching the video of CABE. Two years ago I published the article below in which the 20 questions of Building for Life (CABE's questionnaire that is on the video) are proposed as a guide to start mending the disaster of Spain's hounsing.
Construir para la vida

Eugenia López Reus Lecture at Cornell

Cornell University has a program in Rome since 20 years ago (the same length of time LIPAU was on in Bergamo before becoming Dr.PAU). In that program Eugenia is going to give a lecture on the role of memory in architectural design. It is going to be in November.

Summer Holidays

Sunset at Segovia's Roman Acueduct

The Blog is going to be inactive for few weeks: summer holiday has arrived. I prefer to think that I am not going to post anything on vacation. Anyway, that just means that I will have some new experiences to feed this sort of intellectual diary that has become part of my life already.

Have a good summer

Miguel

Algorithms and Form Creation

Delanda’s lecture at Columbia clarifies the philosophical roots of algorithms in form creation. To begin with, you have to accept that there are two forms of considering the world: Rationalism (what Delanda calls European Idealism) and Empirism (what Delanda calls Materialism).

The thing is that that duality was the one Kant had to overcome and what allowed the birth of modern art more than a century later. Actually, the whole postmodern philosophy flourishes from the nostalgia of those days when pure reason ruled the world and Idea and Matter were one. In modern times (our time) that harmonious synthesis only occurs in art: no truth or desire can do so with complete legitimacy.

Manuel Delanda’s arguments are exposed in a rather attractive way, and are quite useful in order to relate form creation (generation?) to current philosophical debate.

Poetry and Politics in the Architecture of John Hejduk

Social Center Trisca

Towers in Gaigás

John Hejduk believed in the poetics of architecture. However, when his buildings are more architectonic is when they are simply buildings and not built statements. An example of this difference are the two buildings in Spain by him (thanks again, Clara): one is a built poem; the other a beautiful and useful building. Both are authentic jewels and both are in Santiago de Compostela. It is good, anyway, to read, watch and listen to his poetry first hand, and to contemplate his paintings-designs too.

Above all, Hejduk was a passionate professor of architecture:

" I believe in the social contract therefore I teach. I believe that the University is one of the last places that protects and preserves freedom, therefore teaching is also a socio/political act, among other things. I believe in books and the written word, therefore I fabricate works with the hope that they will be recorded in books. I am pragmatic and believe in keeping records. I believe to record is to bear witness. The book I wrote, Victims is to bear witness and to remember. I believe in the density of the sparse. I believe in place and the spirit of place."

John Hejduk

Reflexivity and transformative action (Margaret Archer)

Clear speech on various interpretations of reflexivity, but artistic. Archer defines reflexivity as:

mental capacity of normal people to consider themselves in relation to the social context, and the social context in relation to themselves.

Her patient review of other sociologist's definitions is worth spending 45' listening to her coherent and beautiful structured discourse. Wikipedia gives a rather comprehensive view of reflexivity in the social sciences.