Pedro Levi
Bismarck
The
memory of the present
The
imperceptible becoming of space – architecture, freedom and love
It’s
the unpredictability that makes the event, but is also the unpredictability
that makes the knowledge itself. Not what can be probabilistically determined
but the unprobabilistic point that rips the veil of knowledge and shows
something that until then we were unable to predict.
Carlos Amaral Dias
Prelude 1 - Italo
Calvino, Mr. Palomar
The unquiet Mr. Palomar[1] is standing by the sea but he doesn’t
observe it, instead he fixes his eye in a wave, just one. His attempt is to
predict all its movements, its random dynamic. He seeks to find an order, a
scheme, a mental image, which could allow him to organize all that complexity. He
doesn't give up. He reduces the observation
field and lists all the slightest details and variations. If accomplished, soon
he will be able to predict all those movements and proceed to that ultimate stage:
extend this knowledge to the whole
universe. But the tide changes
suddenly and Mr. Palomar ends up to lose his patience, returning home even more
nervous and unquiet than before.
This small metaphor that Italo Calvino offers us about
the human models of world comprehension is here as simple as splendidly
exposed. In fact, man builds himself upon his desire to control the world
phenomena, to name and give them a sense, a meaning. To project, to
investigate, to plan, are the names of those apparatus that seek to control
reality. Forms, operations of the everyday life, that trace a path to a specific
human artificiality[2], where
man safely dwells before the constant menace of this endless exterior, that we
call the arbitrary, the unpredictable,
the uncertain, or just, the becoming.
The house-shelter
is not the indomitable territory-wave,
but the small observation field of
the protected and predictable things. The house is build under the sign of firmitas, of durability, of a habitus able to put us safely in the
world. But the question is the appearance
that is made to appear. Each observation field is just a temporary
station, a passage, and just like in Palomar, there is always a tide, an imminent and unpredictable
disturb. All construction is provisional, contingent, that is our human
essence, in death beyond death.
Prelude
2 : Mallarmé, Un coup de dés
What is irreducibly interesting in the Mallarmé poem Un Coupe de dés[3],
is that chance is a metaphor that
names not the poem object, but its irreparable purpose. If there is someone
that precedes Duchamp in the search of a maximum amplitude and indetermination
in the meaning of the work of art is precisely Mallarmé. The chance that the
French poet assigns is the unpredictable openness which is unlocked in the poem
own interpretation. The white space that is left between the phrases is the
space of chance, of interpretation, of the meanings that each reader (op)poses[4].
This was as well the meaning of the duchampian
word infra mince, that untraceable
detail, that minimal event able of giving a provisional meaning to the work of
art and transform it not in an aesthetical object but in a provisional content,
an agency of other meanings[5].
And this is was as well John Cage’s absolute quest, not the search for a new
language, but that of opening the music to the unspeakable world of chance, but
opening as a way of breaking the traditional codes beyond the endless deadlock of
all academic mimetologies[6].
That was also the last search of Yago Conde, this
precise indetermination of the architecture meaning[7].
But an indetermination that is not the infinite search of randomness, but
architecture own precariousness. Precariousness as provisionality against the automatization
of the self closed discourses; precariousness as experimentation, questioning,
in each moment, architecture itself and the excessively precise meanings that
we forget already to interrogate. In short: precariousness as a way to be
aware, against the excessively comfort of the habits. As writes Pep Quetglas in
his foreword to Yago Conde’s Architecture
of Indeterminacy: «Thus, two apparently distinct and complementary forms –
‘planning’ and ‘automatic’ – are nothing but names for a single, unique and
destructive enterprise: that of depriving people of their activity and their
present – to deprive us of our lives – and to convert us into mirrors and
spectators of that which does not exist, that which moves without us for and by
itself, to make us into heralds of the future, that’s to say, of nothing».
I.
The provisional space – making (himself at) home
The uncertain as the unpredictable and indetermination
as the provisional are the
meanings of the word chance that interests
us to emphasize, nonetheless they are also the meanings that arise from the
etymological origin of this word. Casus (the
Latin word for chance) meant not only an occurrence,
an opportunity, but named also the
very act of falling (cadentia), of
what unpredictably falls, happens, and therefore perishes[8].
What becomes relevant in our
digression through this word is that what we call today casa (house in Portuguese, Spanish and Italian) has precisely the
same etymological origin as the word chance
(acaso) [9]. To
the Romans the word casa didn't mean something
solid or steady, but a temporary and precarious construction, a hut, a shed. That was this word and not the word domus (the lord domains)[10] to name this distinguished and
unique place of the human dwell and privacy against the exteriority reveals
much about the precariousness of the name and action that the word casa (house) still today designates. If,
in one hand, the domus invokes at
once this triumphant action over the territory and over the nature, in other
hand, the name casa brings within
itself, and clearly, this precariousness and fragility not only of its
construction, but of the very act/event of making oneself to dwell and to
occupy a place for practicing this reside, this being-in-the world.
If, as Heidegger says, to move toward the words is to move toward the world[11], and if theory and the exercise of
writing are, most of all, a tool box,
as Foucault wrote, so the question that come to us should be, what can we make
with those names and what can they identify and offer to our daily activity? In
this case, the words remind us that even behind the appearance and stability of
the name casa, it is something
profoundly precarious and provisional, but simultaneously something that is
made upon this provisionality. The house-project, as something absolutely predefined and finished,
should be replaced as house-tactic,
as something thought and designed recognizing space and time provisional nature.
If chance has any meaning as an experience of the world is the awareness of a
specific dimension of life and dwelling that appears always unprobabilistically, asking always for attention,
answers, but mostly for invention –
the ability to listen the unpredictable and to rehearse a (re)action. Because it’s
precisely there, in this abrupt space of confrontation that occurs out of the habitus routine, where is produced the
being creative essence in the world, where he produces/finds its own space of
action and freedom. And when this happens, when this unpredictable and
indeterminate space opens up, we can
say that man makes himself a home (casa), or maybe, he makes himself at home.
What the word casus
names is precisely this, that possibility for something to happen, and this
incalculable happening that the house
allows and offers is the place of the self, of the being along-the-things; never over-the-world
(as in the domus), but always
provisionally, indeterminate, always opening us into a new and free relation
with things. The house is not just a structure
for a distracted everyday event, but the practicability
that allows the self a place in the world, not for him to hide from it, but to
communicate with the world. That this space cannot be predefined in its form,
nor predictable in its meaning, isn’t an imperfection of the house, but its
gift, the ultimate possibility that allows architecture itself, leaving always
something to (be)come, to (be)fall, and to take place in the
world, beyond the world.
2.
The space to come - agio
In the techno
imposing landscape of reality any architectural discourse on the house will
have to recognize that it’s mostly an open process, a provisional tactic for a
conquest of a place. And, that the last stronghold of the human dwell shouldn’t,
and can’t be, a submission to the bureaucratic dictates of laws, markets or images,
but always a meditation-excursion in the world individual freedom construction,
as much as the creation of a relation space towards the other. This is the
meaning of the word agio (at ease), convoked
by Giorgio Agamben, that «designates, according to its etymology, the space
adjacent (ad-jacens, adjacentia), the empty place where each
can move freely, in a semantic constellation - where spatial proximity borders
on opportune time (ad-agio, moving at
ease) and convenience borders on the correct relation»[12]. Agio is the place of the free
use of the proper[13],
is the space to come, of what is neither
determined nor destined, and only to us is left to be accomplished and achieved. Agamben call it ethos, our ethic possibility, our
second nature, but also the unique and possible place of our singularity[14]. Agio is the space of our self that is left in suspension, a space-casus and a space-casa, that remains to
make and to (be)come. Is not a
random place, but the adjacent space,
indeterminate in its margins and unpredictable in its nature, which opens up in
the limit of the being and allows him to conquer its singularity, his proper
place in the world. To have agio is
to make (himself a) house, it’s to
conquer the world intimate fragility, but it’s moreover, the place-encounter that is made in the
presence and search towards the other, in the semantic constellation and in the provisional and unique
simultaneity between two times and two spaces. It's a verb more than a name, an
action more than a fact, an open and indeterminate space
that makes itself world between man and things[15].
3.
The instant space - the memory of the present
But isn’t the agio
also this indetermination in the objects limit that Yago Conde was searching, the
white spaces between the Mallarmé’s phrases, the unsounded silence in John Cage’s music or the duchampian
infra mince? This untraceable and
unpredictable moment that makes the encounter between the work of art and the
spectator a fully individual and inter-subjective event, beyond any universal
meaning. The work of art opens up to chance, to the interpretation adventure,
and it’s the interpreter-creator that gives its ultimate meaning, possessing
it, destroying it, remaking it. And when this unique instant is to make casus and casa, happens precisely what we can call the aesthetical momentum.
Baudelaire wrote that is the immediate passage from experience to memory that makes precisely the aesthetical
momentum – what he called the memory
of the present[16].
But isn’t this momentum also that unique instant where
the experience is simultaneously
already the memory, i.e., where the present is already the absent, where what I see is simultaneously what I remember? The absolute and unpredictable
synchronization of two times, the untraceable paradox that allows something to
escape darkness and be, at last beauty – not by its form or proportion, but for
setting us face to face to this human impossibility: to remember what I still can touch
and to touch that which I know I will
remember, I want to remember. That this unexpected momentum, this slightest instant, can
occur and take place, disturbing the limits of our language and interrogating
our everyday life, opening a space – an agio
– of closeness and encounter towards the world, is this the ultimate meaning
and aim of the architectonic work. That this can occur unpredictably, indeterminately,
and even on the most untraceable and slightest detail, only reinforces our
confidence in the architecture ability and worth.
4. The imperceptible space –
unveiling the real
All artistic production requires from us attention and
wake; there is always something to un-veil,
to dis-cover. But the revelation
truly content isn’t what in itself is to be revealed, but what in its silence is
still left to be said. In other words, not what in itself is inexpugnable, but
what is left to me to be said. The same is to happen in the architecture work:
if nothing has been left to be said, and to
(be)come, so it means, that nothing was in fact said. As Agamben writes,
«the only content of revelation is what is closed in itself, what is veiled -
the light is just darkness arriving in itself»[17]. It is as it would always be necessary
some sort of interlude, a space left, but not exactly a void or a silence, rather
a threshold that one can be able to conquer and disclose, reclaiming as yours,
intimately yours. As the impending closeness of a revelation that never comes
to be said.
In the excursion-in-voyage
over Álvaro Siza’s architectonic spaces there is always something that remains
to be said, there is always an indeterminate meaning, an unpredictable gesture asking
for another meaning. Siza’s fundamental lesson isn’t in the drawing or in the
method, in what we immediately can see, but in what remains to be seen. For Siza, architecture is
mostly a critical and ironic apparatus on the exercise of the everyday life.
Each building is in itself a meditation on its condition; each building
subverts its own essence and interrogates the nature of our relation with
space, with the programs, with everyday life. In the distracted landscape of
our daily routine, Siza makes of the architectonic space an experience to (be)come, interrogating and provoking
us, subverting the most slightest detail and requiring from us all
concentration and will, but mostly, all the ease
– agio. The black trace around
the Carlos Ramos Pavilion; the stairs-path
accessing the Boa Nova Tea House; the red-colored cube walls in the
entrance of the Architecture Faculty of Porto, but also the accelerated
perspective in its main corridor, and in Berlin, the Bonjour Tristesse imperceptible eye; they all keep this precise
indetermination of architecture, that ability to provoke the imponderable, to
interrogate, of opening a space in the memory
of the present, ripping the veil of knowledge
and bringing always something new, impossible and beauty.
The
Provencal poets (whose songs first introduce the term into Romance languages in
the form aizi, aizimen) make
ease [agio] a terminus technicus
in their poetics, designating the very place of love. Or better, it designates
not so much the place of love, but rather love as the experience of
taking-place in a whatever singularity.
Giorgio Agamben, The coming community
Image
Nine memories-notes (Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye, Álvaro Siza, Faup e
Bonjour Tristesse, Mies, Pavilhão de Barcelona e Neue Nationalgalerie, Steven
Holl, Kiasma.
[1] Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar.
[2] Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres.
[4] «In coup de dés Mallarmé inaugurates a poetic form which contains a plurality of readings – something altogether distinct from ambiguity or plurality of meanings». Yago Conde, The architecture of the indeterminacy, pp.63.
[5] Mallarmé had a decisively influence in Duchamp, as it writes Octávio Paz, «The direct antecedent of Duchamp is not to be found in painting but in poetry: Mallarmé». Yago Conde, pp.64.
[6] Mimetology is a Jacques Derrida term, where he «expresses his opposition, not to mimesis per se, but to a determinate interpretation of mimesis». Yago Conde, pp.67.
[7] Yago Conde, The architecture of the indeterminacy.
[8] According to the etymological dictionaries and to San Isidoro de Sevilla (Etymologies), the origin of the word chance (acaso in Portuguese) is in the Latin casus (chance, opportunity, accident) that is etymological linked to the verb cadere, that means, to fall, to decline, to perish. The origin of the word chance has different roots in the European languages. If in Portuguese acaso is directly linked to the Latin casus as in the English and Italian. In Spanish, azar, takes the Arabic form, az zahr, that means literally the dice, evoking the traditional Arabian game. In French, hasard, has exactly the same origin. In German, the word zufall, also expresses the idea of something that falls.
[9] This essay, originally written and thought in Portuguese, follows the root of the name casa into the Latin casus, cadere, uncovering a relation between casa e acaso. In roman times, the word casa identified the roman army tents and expressed a temporary and fragile construction. The English word house is linked to another etymological origin: hiding, concealing (huis). The fact that the word casa has no place in the English language, also shows something about the different cultural relations between man and his dwelling. In the same way, the French maison also takes another root, linked, to the Latin mansionem, that is, a staying, a remaining.
[11] For Heidegger, understanding/ thinking the names behind the words is to understand/think the immemorial relation between man and world. CF. Heidegger, Das ding.
[12] Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 24.
[15] The expression feeling at home, expresses that decisive verbal form that makes the concretization of the home/house and amplifies its provisional meaning as something that takes place, happens, through the momentary production of a space to be in, an agio. A home is not a house. The building itself doesn’t make necessarily an architectonic experience.
[16] Charles Baudelaire, Critique d’art suivi de critique musicale. The memory of the present reveals, in Baudelaire, the ephemeral meaning of the present, but retains also the importance of the present experience as construction of a singular memory, an ability to be present in the present, to be aware of the world instant dérive. As it writes Baudelaire: the one that «…perd la mémoire du présent; il abdique la valeur et les privilèges fournis par la circonstance, car presque toute notre originalité vient de l’estampille que le temps imprime à nos sensations».
[17] Giorgio Agamben, The idea of prose. pp. 117.
_______________________
Pedro Levi Bismarck (Porto,
1983)
Architect graduated in Porto Faculty of
Architecture. Studied and worked in Berlin. Is developing his PhD research.
Lives in Porto
Other Articles in the same issue:
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MIGUEL LEAL
ATELIER DA BOUÇA
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