ARCHITECTURE AS CHAOS

Dragonfly Building

Before starting a project, it’s almost mandatory for the ‘general research’ of the site to be done. Many hours are spent producing beautiful drawings, maps, diagrams, texts in order to understand the place. Issues in society, economics, environment, politics, history, infrastructure, etc. are here addressed. This process is especially important when the project is done by someone who doesn’t know much about the site, city, or country. But in either case the final aim is to discover some interesting issue to focus for a more thorough research.

When the topic of the research is defined, more work is produced under that spectrum. For instance, a specific situation on the economics of a country is explored in maps, revealing a new problem not yet addressed. From this issue emerges the concept of the project. Therefore, a project is done from the generic superficial study covering a large number of matters of a project to the very specific issue that called the attention of the architect.

For international architects, it’s almost impossible not to go through that methodology — one needs to understand a place before interfering on it. However, our studies of a place are very likely to leak some important information neglected or unseen. In addition, the reduction to one spectrum can lead to bizarre perspectives of the problem —spatial problem— and even more bizarre solutions. Sustainability is one of the most misleading issues of architecture today. As Juan Herreros recently addressed in a lecture at Columbia University: the discussions of the topic are either too devoted or too skeptical. The projects are usually the same: when too devoted, they often ignore all the other issues; when skeptical, sustainability is ignored. This is architecture of reduction. In order to communicate one project, it’s reduced to one issue, leaving the others to the side or not even mentioning them at all.

The reduction of each one means chaos for the whole discipline. Architecture is embracing to much to its field. There are the ones who add philosophy, biology, literature, economics, etc. In the end, architects do the work of other fields but not having the same knowledge they have, believing we are able to respond to everything with design. In academia or as experiments in practice it could lead to advances in both fields. However, in practice architecture has to deal with all the issues related to space, it is complex and chaotic for architects to have all the answers. In this case, the solutions we propose have to open space for other professionals to work on. The final product is the result of a collective work, complex and chaotic.