Good evening and welcome.
Thank you so much for
venturing out in this rain
and being here.
It's really a wonderful evening.
I'm very happy that Iñaki
is going to speak to us.
So it's going to be
a wonderful evening.
I think everyone probably knows
that there is a tradition here
at the GSD that we have had
the very well-known Walter
Gropius lectures, lectures that
have been delivered by chairs
of the Department
of Architecture
upon the completion of their
term as chair, which is part
of this series in honor of
Walter Gropius who became
the chair of the
department in 1937.
And of course, we are delighted
that Iñaki will be giving
the chair, the talk tonight.
The Department of Architecture
and the GSD, I think,
is particularly
lucky that there've
been a few occasions
over the last few years
where we have had
the chance to have
a lot of the recent chairs of
the department here together.
And we have, at the moment,
as part of the GSD community,
no less than nine chairs
that really remain
connected with the school.
This is a very big deal.
It's a really important
thing for an institution
to have nine chairs that
are in some way or other
involved with the school.
They include Gerry McCue, who
was the chair and then the dean
of the school, Harry Cobb,
Rafael Moneo, Mack Scogin,
Jorge Silvetti, Toshiko Mori,
Scott Cohen, Iñaki Åbalos,
and of course now Michael Hays.
When we think about Spain,
where Iñaki comes from,
and we think about the
experiences that we've had here
at the GSD, and thinking about
the recent history of Spanish
architecture.
A lot of time, in
the 1980s and 1990s,
the kind of thought of
Spanish architecture
is about a particular kind of
architecture, which is really
linked to very
well-made buildings that
are very well considered.
They are very careful about
their thoughts in relation
to context.
And many of these were also
brought to our attention
under the general rubric
of critical regionalism.
But I think at some point, also
in the late '80s and '90s, we
managed to-- and we were lucky
to come across a practice
called Åbalos and Herreros.
And this is a practice that
Iñaki and his then partner,
Juan Herreros
started in the 1980s.
And I think, unlike many of
their other practices in Spain
that were very
serious, very dedicated
to particular
understanding of tectonics,
this was a practice
that was very witty.
They were really quite naughty.
They were involved in play,
in consideration of chance,
in questions of temporality,
and in many respects, quite
different than what was
going on at the time.
The discussion of
technique for example
was an important part
of the conversations
of this particular practice.
For me, both Iñaki and Juan in
some ways linked probably more
to an earlier generation
of Spanish practice--
and he'll correct me-- I'm
not an expert on Spanish
architecture.
But I think it
links to an earlier
generation of
Spanish architecture,
people like Alejandro de la
Sota, Oiza, and Miguel Fisac.
I think those are three
architects that, for me,
have the closest connection
probably to the work of Iñaki
Åbalos.
We actually were--
I was lucky that we
could collaborate together on a
publication on Alejandro de la
Sota.
We had the intention to
also make a book together
on Oiza, which we never did.
I wish we had.
And then Iñaki and I got to
see some of the work of Fisac
together, and I was lucky to
be able to write something
on Fisac.
And I think Fisac, in some
ways, is probably the closest,
in terms of what a
contemporary-- of what Iñaki,
for me, represents in terms of
a kind of contemporary version
of Fisac.
For those of you who are
not familiar with the work
of Miguel Fisac, Fisac
represents an architecture
that is full of plasticity,
of sensuality of materials,
of form, but also has an
incredibly deep understanding
of technical know-how of how
to put the building together,
how to make it.
His famous building, the
Pagoda, which is really the kind
of rotating floors
of a building,
and many other projects,
where really the construction
of the building becomes such an
important part of the creation
of a certain set of affects
or emotions connected
to the building represents some
of the kind of qualities that I
think Iñaki is very
much interested in.
What?
Is everything all right?
Good.
Just checking, if I'm
doing something wrong.
The work of Åbalos and
Herreros was always combining
an interest in architectural
design also together with
the production of ideas and
theories in terms of writing.
An important monograph
was the monograph
from 1997 Areas of Impunity,
where, for example, it
was very clear that
this was a practice that
was as much interested in the
idea of ideas related to kind
of rethinking, for example,
the concept of phasing
in architecture, finding
new ways, alternative ways,
in which the phenomenon
of incompletion
could be part of the
consideration of a master
plan in very unusual
and different ways
than, for example, what
was then current in terms
of phasing projects.
A later book,
which was then also
translated from Spanish to
English, the Tower and Office,
From Modernist Theory to
Contemporary Practice,
was a very important publication
in terms of the discussion
of the role of technique.
But anyway, sadly, Iñaki and
Juan split up in the mid 2000s.
And Iñaki was lucky to then
be able to join together with
Renata Sentkiewicz.
And they've had their
practice since then.
I was also lucky that both Iñaki
and Juan got to teach and we
spent time together in London.
And of course then
Iñaki became, in 2009,
the Kenzo Tange Professor
here at the GSD.
I think probably, Toshiko, you
were the one who invited Iñaki.
So thank you very
much to you, Toshiko.
And then of course,
more recently,
the appointment of Iñaki
at the GSD as the chair.
I think the tenure of Iñaki
here at the school has been full
of interest, excitement.
He's certainly been asking
us lots and lots of questions
about ways in which we
do things and has also
pushed that idea through
a series of conferences,
symposia.
I think obviously one of
the hallmarks of his tenure
will be the emphasis
that he has placed
on the issue of thermodynamics.
And how he really has
tried to use that in order
to transform both part of
our pedagogy and research,
but also part of
his own practice.
And I think that
that work is also
consistent with some
of the earlier writings
that he was doing before he
got really into thermodynamics,
which were books like The
Good Life, which I think
contains some of the
elements of the whole issue
of the interior, the atmosphere,
the life of the building.
And so, in a way, it's
also important to recognize
that thermodynamics always
promised and promises
more than sustainability.
That really, it's about a
kind of mode of thought.
It's about a sense, certain
attitude towards life.
And I think this kind
of magical, emotional,
and atmospheric dimension
of architecture,
together with its material
and technical aspects,
is something that's come to
be the hallmark of both Renata
and Iñaki's practice, but
also of his teaching pedagogy
and leadership
here at the school.
So I'm really grateful for
everything that he's done.
And I'm sure that
there's going to be
lots and lots of exciting
things that he's going
to put in front of us tonight.
So please welcome Iñaki Åbalos.
Thank you, Mohsen,
for this intro.
Thank you, Toshiko, for
inviting me a long time ago.
And thank you everyone here
for being tonight with me.
I don't know, it's going
to be too exciting,
but I'm going to say this is a
little bit like, I have said,
everyone, this is a
little bit boring.
But I like it.
But let's begin.
To celebrate this ritual,
I have chosen a subject
of which I believe there
is no one that can consider
himself or herself an expert.
A subject that is the central
theme of the academic activity,
and especially over the
years and its Department
of Architecture, that
of the relationship
between education, research,
and professional practice.
We always talk about this.
I will use for this a
curious and almost forgotten
type, the medieval monastery.
Following its somehow
paradoxical evolution
throughout time
until it's become
one of the typological
formulations
that they consider
of most interest
to an architect's education.
And I have used a lot this
type for studios and seminars,
et cetera.
The one commercially referred
to as mixed-use nowadays
that is, in my understanding,
just a prototype
in its childhood that
has an enormous potential
to combat the lack of quality
and transform our metropolis.
Many of the students
in this room
will soon be teachers in
other schools across the world
and will disseminate the,
yes, the same culture abroad.
My propose today is to
give them a testimony
of the value of working
and teaching and practice
and the student as
a form of knowledge
by showing some of
my current interests.
Not as a demonstration of
anything but exposing myself.
As many studio instructors
do, I use option studios
as a laboratory where
I can test ideas still
in the process of
becoming, giving
the students an active role in
identifying routes of exploring
through their designs.
Normally this
experience is translated
in exhibitions,
such as the one that
was opened a few
days ago in Berlin
with the last open studio, or
into essays or articles, which
pose new questions, giving
birth to new studios,
and so on, like a circle.
This year's option
studio, subjects, forms,
and performances of the
contemporary hybrid,
is testing protocols
of design based
in exploring the lineage of
the contemporary mixed-use
in historic times, as
the medieval monastery,
as I have said, and
its sequels in others,
like socialist phalansteries
or the communist commonness.
So this talk is in many
ways its natural outcome.
And why medieval monasteries?
I mean it's not something that
I was all my life in love with.
But these last years, I
have been asked frequently
by friends and colleagues
about my life in Cambridge.
And I always had
the same response.
I live now like a monk.
Cloistered.
My time discretized
chronometically
between teaching, learning--
I had to learn a lot,
and I have learned a lot--
practicing, writing, meeting,
and most of the time emailing.
Every single day of the week.
It's a kind of background
response, I know.
As it is an experience
that everyone
has here, the instructors
and the students.
The repetition of
this response made
me interested in
how monks actually
lived in medieval times.
I mean, I had never
thought about that.
Which ones were their
motivations, routines,
and their organizations
in architectural terms?
What can I learn from them?
So only this last
years, as I said,
I began to be interested in the
Cistercian and the Carthusian
monastery typology.
Possibly because the immaculate,
I have to say this word,
immaculate type of
the Gothic cathedral
had, as for many others,
obscure in my mind
this other essential type
of the medieval times.
A type, the monastery, that
was seminal in producing much
of what we know now, frankly,
in transmitting knowledge
and paving the path of what
we know as our universities.
Let me show-- to begin with,
I mean to enter in the topic
with these engravings
and drawings represented
in the whole context
of the monastery type.
And not only of what
we are used to seeing,
which is their monumental
core, the church, the cloister,
et cetera These
drawings, represented in
all the monasteries
contexts, impressed me
because in them I understood
that their success in time
and their productive culture was
based in the land they owned.
Not in their architectural,
not exclusively
in their architectural core.
It allowed them
not only to survive
but to interact
with the villages
around and through an intense
economic exchange of goods,
promoting the local markets.
And therefore, the economy of
the villages and giving way
through bigger and
bigger exchanges
to a new territorial
organization that
opened the door to the
Renaissance territory
and the Renaissance culture.
Another engraving-- you
will see some of them.
I hope that you distinguish the
title of-- I mean if you want,
and they are more or less
chronologically ordered.
In some, they
stopped looking to me
like what we call now in
ecological terms, closed
systems.
Because I discovered
that in reality
they operated as open systems.
The special mechanism
being the creation
of a policy of circles
of decreased privacy,
pivoting around the
church and the cloister.
Followed by other
circles that begin
with the domestic
domain of the converts--
there are monks
and converts-- not
dedicated to the
contemplative life,
but dealing as a labor force
for agriculture, farming,
hydrology, fork, producing
bronze styles, glass, et cetera
That defined another
circle occupying
significant areas of
land and surrounded
by the last one,
the forests, that
limit the property and
the building wild nature
provide heat resources.
This policy of
circles of privacy
has remained since then.
The main organizational
tool or technique
of the different
mixed-use types.
In ecological terms, the
monastery is by no means
the most successful mixed-use of
all them in time and in space.
In time, because of its duration
till nowadays, in reality.
And in space, because
if it's successful
spreading throughout all
the countries of Europe.
I mean this is only
the Cluny monasteries.
The Cistercian are
much more expanded--
but I didn't find the map--
becoming a unique contribution
to the cultural and
economic evolution
of the medieval villages.
Coming back in
time-- for years, I
was dedicated to
exploring the potential
of the mixed-use type in
modernist and contemporary
architecture.
Mohsen has mentioned
some of this work.
Remainings on how blind to
their interest in [INAUDIBLE].
In one of my first
articles-- I think
it was signed with
Juan-- hybrids,
I collected a series
of complex structures
that began to construct a
geneology of the mixed-use.
This was published
in the Architectura,
the magazine of Madrid, the
collective of architects
of Madrid.
I had a catalog, a kind of
very, very improvised beginning
in the Romanesque auditorium
of Sullivan in Chicago
that all of us know and
is a precious mixed-use.
And I follow with
others still, also
arriving today, another Chicago
piece, this impressive monolith
of the John Hancock, other,
like the gallery building
in New York, that
was also interesting,
and continuing with some
important unbuilt projects
that every one of us know well--
and I don't need to mention
the authors, I think-- and this
one that is interesting, maybe
less known, the Hans
Kollhoff Atlanpole.
Impressive.
After that, in Tower
Office, the book
I published in English thanks to
the generosity of Michael Hays,
reviewing it, and when he didn't
know me at all, by the way,
and this was the main reason why
it was published by MIT press,
so thanks.
Maybe if you knew
me, other thing.
[LAUGHTER]
I studied in detail
the evolution
of the ideas of modernist
architects inspired
by the [INAUDIBLE] principles
of division of work
applied to the technical
apparatus of the skyscraper--
programming one side, structure
another, facade another, core,
MEP, et cetera.
Each part received a
separate-- received
by these architects
and a separate approach
and treatment.
The post-World War II
revolution actually
demonstrated that the reality
was very much the opposite.
The parts contribute
to the whole.
Merging systems and
problems concentrate
in this pastureland
organization or logic
of the mono-functional
skyscraper.
Making its design a new place
where all the subsystems
have to adapt, negotiate,
and collaborate to subsist.
These tables and examples
represent a moment
in this long
process that happens
in between an original
experimental prototype
and its typological
consolidation, which
is constructed by addressing
the material culture of a given
moment in time.
I will come back
to this idea later.
A significant part
of my research
has been dedicated to screen
this prototype, the mixed-use
as an embryo of forthcoming,
of a forthcoming, in my mind,
metabolic entity.
Potentially very efficient
in social, ecological,
and thermodynamic terms,
using my teaching and practice
to experiment new
design protocols that
receives the most obvious
cliches, confronting them
with categories as
monster beauty, dualisms,
or thermal engines that
I have used in many
of the talks in this room,
and that pretend to open
new paths for its evolution.
Revising now this article,
Hybrids, 25 years later,
I see that the schemes
less commercial and somehow
visionary were the ones that
capture more of my attention
as the main Paris library
and its new formulation
of the tower reversing its
interior-exterior modernist
relations.
Or the massive
vertical orchestration
of multiple typologies,
private and public,
in Kollhoff's Atlanpole.
The first using intrusion as
its main design technique,
the intrusion of a
picturesque, extended version
of the Le Corbusier promenade.
The second, [INAUDIBLE]
the silhouette
of the mixed-use as
a massive sculpture.
Just to remark, I feel
that in my mind resonate
with the title, I borrow from
Nietzsche for this lecture,
Architecture for the
Search for Knowledge,
a title that belongs to
the aphorism that appears
with the number 280 in his
book The Gay Science, published
in 1882.
An aphorism I quoted,
not by coincidence,
in the three books
that I consider
more relevant in my
career-- Tower and Office,
with Juan, The Good
Life, and Essays
on Thermodynamics, Architecture,
and Beauty with Renata.
So let's take a look
to this aphorisma.
You can read while
I drink. [LAUGHTER]
Let me then read
the last phrase.
"We wish to see
ourselves translated
into stones and plants.
We want to take
walks in ourselves
when we stroll around these
buildings and gardens."
It is one of the
few images-- very
strong architectural
images-- that he used.
And it's a very specific
and very clearly directed--
direct in a message to,
I would say, all of us.
This last phrase is an amazing
architectural micro manifest,
almost impossible to
resist in its beauty.
It persuades you just
because of its beauty.
Believe me or not,
throughout these years
that I have quoted
it so much, I was
unaware of how-- I mean
to have to confess it--
how much Nietzsche was
thinking about a specific type,
the monastery.
I thought it was a kind of
generic, Gothic picturesque
dream, or something like that.
Only now that monasteries have
begun to be interesting for me,
I can see that he writes
the whole paragraph
with a specific
monastery in his mind,
But before analyzing
this text in detail,
let me invite you to have an
impression of the atmosphere
of the monasteries.
Because I'm sure
that some of you
don't have a kind of
whole picture of what
I'm talking about.
There are many spaces and rooms
strolling around the stones
and gardens through
a selection of images
from different
monasteries chosen--
I mean it is very
eclectic-- in time
and typology--
chosen to give you
a broad sense of
their differences.
So we can visit
the chapter house,
the place where
monks and abbot read
and commented the monastic
rule almost every day.
The rule that governs
their life and that
is organized in chapters.
Therefore, chapter room.
A cloister, this is a
Benedictine monastery in Spain,
a wonderful one, very, very old.
This is a Romanesque cloister,
where they wander around, alone
and in silence, or all
together in a procession.
Another view.
The squaring of
the cloister being
a representation of
the divine perfection
in its length, height,
width, and depth.
Fountain, a very symbolic
element, a very beautiful
construction,
always or many times
constructed in the
middle of the patio,
providing life and purity.
Refectory, where they
eat all together,
but in silence or reading.
The library, this
is a recent image,
where they study or copy books.
The dormitory, sleeping together
with exception of the abbot.
The church, where
they sing the psalms.
This is a Cistercian
monastery, very old
and not so rich as others
but very beautiful,
very well preserved.
And celebrated divinity, this
St, Etienne, in Benedictine.
The chorus, with the
wood furniture down.
The place reserved to the
monks to celebrate the mass.
All these places are
critical in their life.
The kitchen, the
thermodynamic center
of the monastery,
close to the refectory,
and the calefactory, warm,
and used as a sitting room,
especially for sick
and elderly monks.
Gardens, where they enjoy
their limited spare time.
They didn't have that much time.
Nietzsche's aphorisms can be
read, as we see these images,
as poetry.
And they are poetry
and they are philosophy
in its most
rhetorical state, not
subject to any of
the predicaments
of the formal logic protocols.
Aphorisms are essays
or micro-essays
that project ideas in the
most intuitive state, solely
searching for
rhetoric persuasion.
This is something
that brings them
close to the act of
designing which also consists
of projecting-- projecting
in the physical sense,
not projecting ideas,
crystallizing forms, seeking
to persuade of their
appropriateness
and importance, which is always
impossible to demonstrate.
To [INAUDIBLE] essay the
architectural project
to the essay brings
together this first
of philosophy and architecture
of space and time as the beam
and the underside of knowledge.
It is therefore not surprising
that philosophy always
uses architectural metaphors
and that architects
need philosophical ideas.
More importantly,
we can see aphorisma
as synthetic, written forms
that crystallize ideas.
Reactions, readings, discussions
that stay vague and disperse,
floating without
focus, till the moment
they find a syntactic
presentation, the aphorism,
and become articulated
as a whole.
Only after this form
exists as provocation,
a potential research
can be developed.
I am talking about the analogy
among aphorisma and projects
because in my mind,
there is a central idea.
As happens with aphorism,
projects come first.
They operate on us
as revealing tools.
There is not a neat
cause effect relationship
between research and project.
It is more true the other way.
The project comes to us
in all its complexity
in a given moment.
Normally, suddenly.
And imposes its logic to
all previous information
that only have been warming
up for this moment to happen.
It's only after the
project is in front of us
that we can identify
a research that needs
to be articulated as such.
Possibly, I'm being too radical,
and projects don't come first
alone, unless they
appear in front of us
as if they were coming first
due to their presentation
as synthesis, as facts.
But we have to admit that the
actualized, disordered ideas,
conversations, the same thing.
The difference emerges,
memories, readings, all of them
suddenly crystallize in
a completely new format.
So new that reconnects all
that was informal and chaotic
nonsense in just the
opposite-- pure order and form.
And this idea has
consequences in the way
we might conceive the respective
roles and moments of design
and research.
Coming back to Nietzsche,
he begins his aphorism
with two obvious
rhetorical devices.
A future that he visualizes
one day and probably soon,
and us, a we, that
presupposes and wishes
to involve the reader
anticipating an audience.
If we accept to become
part of his audience,
we will believe that
architecture produces knowledge
or that it should produce it.
And we will want to know what
is lacking in our big cities.
It is in those questions
that we are captured.
Nietzsche continues by
saying that the time is past
when the church possessed a
monopoly on reflection-- when
the vita contempletiva always
had to be first of all vita
religiosa.
An [INAUDIBLE]--
I'm synthesizing--
godless could not have access
to the knowledge in its
constructions.
We wish to see ourselves
translated into stones
and plants, et cetera And that
is where Nietzsche takes us,
to an affirmation that we can
all understand that then makes
of the model of the monastery
a counter model He doesn't want
to think, he cannot
think in a monastery.
The biological behind
Nietzsche's aphorism
and the architectural image
is that the architectural
is used not as a model but as
a counter model, of what we
don't want, but of what we
don't have an alternative model.
We can't talk about it
with another language
or through other forms
since they don't exist.
But at the same time, they are
desired, they are necessary.
We want the monastery,
and we don't want it.
So perhaps it's the
moment to ask ourselves,
how were these
architectures for the search
for our divine
knowledge organized?
Originally, I'm
going very quickly
through eight
centuries-- originally,
by isolating themselves
completely from the war
to live in grottos as hermits.
And evolving very slowly
to a cenobitic organization
in forms that took
centuries to consolidate.
A bit of etymology
about these words that
shows the dual character
of the monastery,
living alone, but having at
the same time a common life.
This is a real dualism.
This is a very serious dualism.
We see here some of these
moments when the monasteries
are retired to the desert.
This is in [INAUDIBLE]
sixth century.
It's impressive, no?
The solitude and the isolation,
and the materiality, too.
And the cloister
taking form later
as an essential representation
of the cenobitic life.
It's the place where
everyone gets together.
this beautiful
triangular, strange,
I would say
improvised cloister is
one of the predecessors of the
rational square cloister that
came later.
A well-known moment
of this evolution
is dated in 820, when the
Plan of St. Gall stands out,
a plan that was drawn by-- I
don't know how to pronounce--
[INAUDIBLE]
About [INAUDIBLE] Bishop
of Basel, precisely Basel,
the place where Nietzsche was
writing in The Gay Science.
This is the first
architectural plan
that is known to us in Europe.
It's really the first one
that we have knowledge of.
It was the plan for
the organization
of an ideal monastery,
removed from the war,
and self-sufficient.
In it, we should point
out the square cloister--
I mean you can see it later on--
the square cloister attached
to the church that organizes
an interior for monastic life
outside the church.
Normally, in its
southern orientation,
taking advantage
of solar radiation
for the daily life of the monks.
Without going into the
controversy surrounding
this document,
there are a lot-- I
know the historians
have a lot of-- I
don't want to enter into that.
This is both, for
me at least, this
is both a diagram
that discretizes
the programs and an
inventory of the parts
that allow the
monastery to survive
in its relative
cenobitic isolation.
I mean also St.
Gall in particular,
was an important center of
pilgrimage and political power.
So I don't think
it was so isolated.
But anyway, as well as it
is a first approximation
to a topological or relational
scheme in which the location
and continuity of the
different programs
response to an efficient display
on a flat and abstract site.
Only governed by the
necessary is west orientation
of the church, which
is in the center.
And the cloisters,
the grace of that
as the core of the
monastery life,
receives a more precise
architectural definition
in this drawing.
The evolution of the
prototype defined by this plan
developed quickly, between
the 11th and 12th century,
outside the Benedict
orders of Cluny
and later on with the
sisters of St.Bernard.
We can have-- less than
100 years, this too,
you see the rest of the
first church in the cloister,
in the second.
And the dramatic
change of scale that
shows the success of that idea.
Throughout these centuries,
the overall form and material
system of the
monastery was perfected
through the elaboration of
a limited number of rooms
gravitating around the
cloister-- I have mentioned
them, the charter room,
the refectory, the kitchen,
the dormitories, the
latrines, the church,
et cetera--
complemented by the way
the position of each
constructive component
in each different room
becomes fixed in the cloister
and the need of using
natural resources as water
and diverting itself back to
meet the river that feeds them.
You see, that there are
two flows of water there.
The architectural
type of the Cistercian
monasteries in fact the result
of St. Bernard's command
to build near a river.
That explains the
position of the refectory,
the latrines, and
the kitchen, no?
It's diverted to receive
clean and dirty water.
What is important for
differential purposes,
so it's channeling
and organizing
two parallel waterways, one
for drinking and cleaning,
which gives origin to
the fountain, et cetera
And another one for
the water mills and
to evacuate the waste that
runs through the latrines
and the kitchen.
This evolution follows
a process of adaptation
to the life of the monks
looking for the highest
form of abstraction as an
expression of knowledge that
corresponds with the abstraction
of the spiritual life posed
by them.
So we see here, Fontenay
12th century, Thoronet,
a beautiful one that we
will see images later.
[INAUDIBLE] And then you see
how they are constructing
and repeating the model
oriented to the north
and to the south, Poblet,
in Catalonia, Spain.
This is incredible,
it's a pure abstraction,
Maulbronn in Germany.
This is a kind of amazing
construction, the Royaumont,
in France, in the 13th century.
I don't want to explain,
step-by-step-- there
are many, many more.
You can go to Wikipedia and
you will learn everything
about these rooms.
This process from a
prototype topology
receives its definitive
form in great part
through the strong decision
that supposes the exclusive use
of one material.
And this is very important.
So all the process
is perfection when
they decide to construct
in one material, stone.
In that moment, applied only
to cathedrals, fortifications,
and palaces.
And stone has-- we know it-- it
sounds stereotomic, rules that
govern the shape of
each different element
and each different
room in systemic ways.
The Cistercian monastery
is a celebration
of stereotomic
beauty in contrast
to the ornamental character
of Cluny monasteries
that were much more
about figuration.
Some of them, such as the
well-preserved monastery
of Thoronet in France,
are a real manifestation
of the power of abstraction
in architectural forms,
an abstraction that gives its
character to the Cistercian
monasteries not
any more interested
in these other fantasies,
monsters, and all the stuff
that you can see
in the cloisters
of Romanesque and
Cluny monasteries.
I remark on this this to
underline that typologies
are not just diagrams or ideas.
In the way to
become types instead
of experimental
prototypes, there
is a process of finding
their materiality
and turning it into tectonic,
stereotomic, and thermodynamic
terms, a process that
gives its consistency
and successful
replication to the type.
Typologies are not abstract
ideas, or at least I think so.
They are made of matter, are
based in a material culture,
and only succeed through a
happy encounter of form, matter,
and flow.
This consistent unity-- we have
here a table with this process.
I like this slide.
This consistent unity
of the monastery
and its infrastructure
surrounded
by ancillary constructions,
crops and forests,
a generous, self-sufficient
entity whose intrinsic
beauty comes from being, at the
same time, simple and complex.
A machine for a
living, if I may borrow
the words of Le
Corbusier, or maybe,
more precisely, a
metabolic machine, in which
a small group of monks live.
And there are a series of
precise, even mechanistic,
rules and codes.
But what was the
appeal that this-- this
was my main issue-- what was the
appeal that this invention had,
that even the knights
of the upper classes
announced it to
their [INAUDIBLE]
and also violent lives that
they like it-- war, et cetera
to their most
instinctive pleasures
they enjoy, to donate
their goods and fortune
and commit themselves
to the monastic life,
choosing isolation and poverty?
The promise of happiness
that contemplative life offer
identified at that time
with the superiority
of spiritual and religious life.
This is the answer.
And what is happiness
in cenobitic life?
To cite our own
Christine Smith, that
has been really
helpful in preparing
these-- the greatest good--
summum bonum-- is union
with God, partly
experienced in this life
and only fully realized
in eternal life.
Monastisism is the
quest for union with God
through prayer,
penance, and separation
from the world pushed
by man or woman,
later on, sharing
a communal life.
These machines for
living-- their first stance
has a topological
materialization
of the lifestyle for
new, alternative subject
in the medieval context-- the
monk, who through his life
and routines, that
you can see here,
devotes himself completely
to the discipline of the rule
of the order he professes.
With [INAUDIBLE], his daily
schedule and activities
always identical to
themselves to itself.
You can read.
They woke up really soon, every
few hours visit the church,
starting at 2:00 a.m.
to sing the sounds.
This low rhythm
of choral singing,
and we might say of their lives,
adjusted to the large resonance
chamber that the
Church is-- at odds
with the obsession
against resonance
we see nowadays in our
performance centers,
by the way.
Other activities of
the monks scheduled
are meditating and
praying, normally walking
or staying around the
cloister-- reading sacred texts,
or transcribing in the library
the preserved Greek, Roman,
Hebraic, or Arab books, which
supposes a profound dimension
of their most interests
for their medieval
and post-medieval organization
of knowledge and pedagogy.
This activity was amazing.
This scheme at the same
time protocol of life
and of architecture,
admits some variations--
we don't have only Cistercians
or Cluny-- we have Cartusians,
we have Franciscans,
et cetera, et cetera.
If Saint Benedict or Saint
Bernard had given birth
to the prototype of the
Cistercian monastery San Bruno,
in the image, in parallel
gave birth to the Cartusian
monastery, another
amazing invention,
looking for a more radical way
of vita religiosa and even more
radical-- I cannot believe it--
increasing the cenobitic life
the hermit component, by
imposing to the monks total
silence and maximum isolation.
And this comes through
dividing-- instead
of the common dormitory
having each one--
this interesting change of
the collective dormitory
for individual lodges with their
own orchard in each one of them
in the form of a patio
separated by two corridors
to make it even bigger,
their isolation.
We have some images of--
there are lot of Cartusians
now in Europe and in
Latin America, too.
And all them surrounding a
central garden space where
the fountain is
normally situated,
I think the cemetary too--
to sum up, their new subject,
the rule and the type, in
their ecological context
work as a mechanism in pursuit
of an idea of happiness.
Strange for us, but a very
intense idea of happiness.
The new subject, the rule, and
the type, are the same thing,
and the three of them are
necessary as an organizational,
economical, tectonic,
and ecological level.
These are other images
of-- engraven images
of the Cartusian monasteries.
Also Le Corbusier was in love
with the this type as you know.
[INAUDIBLE] et cetera.
I mean a lot of references.
And composing architecture and
the knowledge that contributed
paradoxically to the outcome
of a new world but at odds
with that of the monastery, no?
The world of the Renaissance.
All of these had almost
disappeared in these times.
Henry the Eighth
dissolved [INAUDIBLE]
in England in the late
1530s, beginning a process
that expanded to the
Lutheran countries
around the 16th
century, followed
by the Catholic countries
after the French Revolution.
We can say that-- but
they again were restored
and now they are alive--
there are a lot of them.
We can say that this model
had died of its own success,
not only for having given
birth to a new secularized
and instructed class, but
for having in time renounced
their own principles of
poverty and isolation,
in some cases going
back to the city
where they chased the power
of the church, and the prince,
and the king, making them
appear as the very same thing.
But also generating
other, assumed
to us, typological version--
the monastery palace.
El Escorial is standing now
as its first example built,
widespread to other monarchies
throughout the 16th and 17th
century.
This plan composes
a complex program
rigidly subject to
the rules of symmetry
with completely
different activities,
with a palace connected
to the church in the top.
In the axis, and the
monastery cloister
and the rest of the monastery
to the right, and the coat rooms
and other multiple activities
as a school to the left side.
I will not go into the
socio-political implications
of this typology, I
will just mention,
I will say the
indisputable interest
of this new format of
the monastery palace
as a typological invention, I
think-- this beautiful image
is a German monastery.
It's a monstrous hybrid and a
third version of the mixed-use
that also a typology
that will give way
to surprising new formulations
in the first decades
of the 19th century, when
palaces and monasteries
became references of
the revolutionary ideas
of the social condenser
and the campus university
that the French and the
American revolutions propel.
Let's compare now
these two circles
of the monastery in this
revolutionary period,
comparing the contributions of
Thomas Jefferson and Charles
Fourier.
Between 1819 and 1826,
Thomas Jefferson,
whose architectural skills
are without a doubt-- designed
and built the University of
Virginia-- mostly all of you
know-- started the boat to a
secularized and contemplative
life in search of knowledge of
which we all know its success
and reproduction throughout
the US and the world,
for example, here, in Harvard.
Jefferson proposed a well-known
distribution of pavilions
around a central lawn
hidden by a building that
contains the most symbolical
collective activities
and leaving its
other extreme open
towards the natural
landscape-- unfortunately
enclosed nowadays by new
buildings, which is a pity.
It it's impossible not to
relate this typological scheme
to the variation that we
have seen, the monastery
type illuminated
by the Cartusians,
in which each monk had
its own house and culture,
and in which all the
composition becomes
[INAUDIBLE] around a central
courtyard or garden headed
by the church and
farther, surrounded
by a city of minor patios.
I'm not aware of whether
Jefferson-- I was asking
and no one was able to respond
me-- whether Jefferson ever
alluded to this typological
similitude between the two
models, or if he had visited in
France any Cartusian monastery.
What I'm interested in, is
in its formal and functional
analogies-- formally while
the typological scheme is
maintained, its
Gothic language, this
appears in favor
of the palladian,
secularized language then
meaning enlightenment,
a new civil culture.
Functionally,
Jefferson reproduces
the isolation of the monks
in this model with pavilions
dedicated to each
specific discipline,
and a professor living the upper
floor, teaching this matter
in the lower rooms, where the
students, as the new converts,
were located in the perimeter--
close, but separated
of the inner ring.
It's not a secret that
American universities
have inherited the model
of the medieval monastery.
Even today, in multiple aspects
related to our rule life,
from the language of academic
hierarchies, provost, dean,
chair, lecturer-- all those
come from there-- all the way
to the regalia that we wear
during the commencement,
or the tight class schedule
that organizes [INAUDIBLE]
metrically our day today.
So no one of these
routines that I
have been talking
about as strengths
are foreign to us and to our
daily lives, both of professors
as monks, and the students
as converts, dedicated
to a secularized knowledge.
In his excellent book,
Biologic Evolution in France,
published in 1939
by Emile Durkheim,
he concludes-- it
is a notorious fact
that among all the
medieval institutions,
universities remain
today being the closest
to their original formulation.
I just mention this to
frame the close relationship
of this lecture with all of us,
somehow subjects and objects
at the same time of it.
So the European
idea of phalanstery
is firmly rooted in the ideas
of utopian socialism reacting
towards the impact that the
modes of industrial production
had on the quality of
life of the working class,
and also against the
bourgeois style of life,
completely indifferent
to a situation
that demanded changes.
Charles Fourier, as many
other social critics,
saw this situation
as an opportunity
to propose a
radically new subject,
as well as a new prototype, the
phalanstery, whose name clearly
alludes to its lineage-- fusion
of phalanx, troop, or army,
phalanxes, and monastery.
We are, by the way in 1822,
contemporary to Jefferson's
scheme and six decades before
The Gay Science was published.
The phalanstery
means an alternative
to the modes of production
promoting differentiation
of the whole structure
as a comparative.
It's a new idea, and
to the family unit
permitted but not
needed or promoted.
For Fourier, just as for
the Benedictine monks,
happiness was at the
core of his proposal.
This time, it was an earthly
happiness, and a happiness
for all, both collective
and individual,
based in a better
organization of labor forces
and their time freed.
But for cultivating
culture, but also
passions and instinctive life.
Their frustration considered
the chaos of all problems.
It's a kind of
pre-psychological idea.
This vision-- for the first
time in this lineage--
includes women in
equality to men.
The invention of
the term feminism
is actually
attributed to Fourier.
And fold a libertarian
and anarchist theory
serving as inspiration
for different attempts
to materialize the
phalanstery, all the way
to the hippies
communities of the '60s.
The phalanstery
means an alternative
to the most [INAUDIBLE],
promoting the organization
of the whole structure
as a comparative,
and to the family unit,
permitted but not needed
or promoted.
For Fourier, just as
for the Benedict monks,
happiness was at the core
of this idea-- sorry--
but we should not
fool ourselves.
The phalanstery
materialized a way of life
just as a ruled and
metrically organized
as the most structured
of the medieval rules
and orders, of which it actually
copies many of its guidelines,
including some way,
surprisingly, the organization
in two social classes, just
like the medieval monks
and the converts
did, divided for
their different social status.
You can see that
the organization
is really obsessive.
Fourier proposes a community
of around 1,600 inhabitants.
A lot of people, no?
The symmetry of the
overall composition
actually hides a highly
organized [INAUDIBLE],
with kids occupying
lateral wings,
educated in Libertarian ideas.
The kitchen and the
refectory socialize,
and the center of
the composition
again dedicated to
art and knowledge,
as in Thomas Jefferson's scheme.
And the agricultural
industrial programs
are outside in front of the
phalanstery in a composition
that could be seen as
a new St. Gall plan,
although the phalanstery
to a large extent,
follows the aforementioned
tendency that
associate monastic and palatial
life in huge structures.
Now the keen substitute
by individuals
that aspire to a
social happiness that
melds work and passions.
Strange combination.
There is also the utopia for
a full controlled environment.
A utopia that is the expression
of the contemporary development
of hot house,
greenhouses, and stoves.
So at the beginning
of the 19th century,
we see two different paths in
the evolution of the monastery
typology, the mixed-use.
Its replication as a model for
the revolutionary universities
emphasizes the knowledge
component, and the isolation
of the cenobitic life, while
the European social condenser
focuses in the organization
of alternative communities
in search of a
productive ecological
and psychological success,
individual and collective.
This second trend finds
its materialization
in the [INAUDIBLE], with the
construction of the [INAUDIBLE]
but one century after that-- I
mean after ideas for Fourier.
It's a grandiose, with a,
now, structure measuring
one kilometer long, dedicated
to massive social housing,
organized around a series
of courtyards divided
with maternity clinics, health
insurance offices, laundries,
kindergartens, up to about
25 different amenities.
The composed and
exuberant demonstration
of the power of
the working class
occasionally used more as
a fortress than as a palace
when the Nazis were
occupying the city.
But the social condition gave
its more interesting examples
after the Russian
Revolution, no doubt--
radical ideas of labor communes
and an egalitarian society
governed by neither the family
unit nor by the divine order,
produced some built examples,
like the Narkomfin building
of Ginzburg and Milinis.
Well-known.
Or the Textile Institute
of Ivan Nikolaev,
in which the factory becomes
the equivalent of the church
in monastic typologies.
It's another incredible type.
Not surprisingly, the rule of
the communist social condenser,
de comuna, becomes
again an essential part
of its typological definition.
Similarly to the rules
of monastic life,
and this is a kind of
mantra in this lecture,
life in the community is
chronometic-- in this case,
driven by the fetishism
of industrial production
and by the adoption
of tailorized ideas.
In its time, the decomposition
into minimum units
that arrived to two or
three minutes, which
is schizophrenic, I would say.
The new comuna subject with his/
her family given to the state
and realized individually
through his/ her dedication
to a mechanized work will find
a collective happiness in this
world, but in a promised
future that depends on his/ her
efficient work in the present
and on the state planning.
This idea-- whatever
we think about it--
found it own St. Gall
plan in the magnificent--
it's a magnificent project--
for the communal house designed
by Mikhail Barshch and
Vladimir Vladimirov in 1929.
Its two linear buildings,
curiously composed
in a cross shape, divided 200
meters by 200 meters block
in four open patios.
The crossing of this
extremely thin volumes,
result of the yearning
for light and ventilation
divides the program in a
north-south residential part
composed by individual cells
of nine square meters each.
A collective refectory
as well as other services
in the ground floor.
And this thin spine
cross while the other
is west, linear
structure that provides
schools for the kids
in the left side,
west orientation, and programs
dedicated to the leisure time
and re-education of the
worker in the other.
The fetishes of
the assembly line
is not only present in the
extreme thinness of the slabs.
It reaches its paroxysm
in the refectory--
you see the image in the center,
in which a mechanized system
for the distribution of plates,
similar to the travelator used
in Japanese restaurants today,
reinforces-- you see the arrow,
the movement-- reinforces
its linear organization.
I have to say that the beauty
of this stylized project
and its faith in the
rule-type material culture
protocol adapted to the idea of
a communist happiness-- adapted
to the idea of a
communist happiness--
shows us almost a
caricature of modern times.
[INAUDIBLE] here.
Symptomatic of the volatile
condition of our time,
and in particular the political
agendas of the 20th century,
with experiments that
would have interested
little, or very
little, to a Nietzsche,
whose belief in the construction
of a new individual,
the Superman, was far removed
from a socialized understanding
of education and much closer to
an individualistic conception
centered in the
interior struggles
of a contemplative life.
We can connect here with the
table I propose inter-office
once again-- pay
attention exclusively
to the other mode
of social condenser,
the capitalist mixed-use,
a product, in many ways,
of the Cold War-- rule
by benefits, consumerism,
and technological exhibition.
And organized in vertical
strata to minimize land
values repercussion.
Its verticality, substantial
with a type, the [INAUDIBLE]
new design technique, based
in organizing the section,
instead of the plan as an
adjustment of the gradients
of privacy between
the flows of people
in the street and the
demand of maximum isolation
in the residential units
located in the top.
To define the subject and
the rules of this version,
we have to follow the flows
of international capital
investment and the flows
of real estate data,
painting with precision the
portrait of its post-modernist
character, not the
Superman anymore,
but the super-affluent,
or the super-rich,
secluded in his/
her golden tower,
in gigantic cells fortified
against any kind of otherness,
as JD Ballard explained in
his novel, High Rise, of 1975,
now transformed in a curious
and interesting film.
An idea that has its own St.
Gall in the New York City
Waldorf Astoria,
finished in 1931,
as its more interesting outcome.
A refined, residential hotel
as the capitalist alternative
version of the comuna.
But this is not the whole truth.
Today, and by the hand
of well-known architects,
or [INAUDIBLE] and
some other, there
are approaches that experiment
with interesting results
the potential inherent
to this type [INAUDIBLE]
architectural formulation
of its social urban,
and mythological implications.
We have some examples
here that I have used also
as monsters that explain the
interest of these new types.
This beautiful building
finished a very few weeks ago.
In all cases, we see the
organizational reference
is transferred to the section.
In our own office,
[INAUDIBLE] has contributed
to this research
and is dealing now
with work that has [INAUDIBLE]
urban and material complexes,
presented very recently in
this room in the context
of the Heliomorphism conference,
so I'm not repeating myself,
I'm just showing, this is a
university campus, by the way,
in Paris, another
university campus in Weihai.
As a professor at
the GSD, I have
proposed to students
protocols that
speculate with the
vertical mixed-use,
applying the design
techniques that introduce
basic thermodynamic
principles splitting in two
the design process.
A first phase where the
organization of the projects
focuses exclusively
in conceiving them
as thermal engines,
using program
as a combination of
heat sources and sinks.
And working with
equation for matter
flow to manage
climate, material,
and social cultural
specificities.
This moment this is
what we call monsters
that are essentially
aphoristic, to use
the language of this
lecture-- provocations
that help to forget
cliches and open
the door to a second phase
with a focused transfer
to the students that need to
identify individual researchers
to confront critically
the inconsistencies,
redundancies, and excess
of the first phase.
Some different examples.
This part of the exhibition
in Berlin, as this one too,
beautiful, floating,
golden globe.
So, to close-- I'm
closing, be quiet.
Where are we in this tale
about the long lineage
of the medieval monasteries
conducted by Nietzsche
as our Master of Ceremonies?
What do we know?
Honestly, it's very
difficult to say,
and first of all,
it's very difficult
to use the rhetorical we to
respond to this question.
Although this is not a
historical or political
lecture, I am-- I
think it's obvious-- I
am interested in the
ideological differences
and the methodological
similarities
of the mixed-use
lineage a long time.
This is the rule and
all these obsessions.
They fix it in the
description of the subject
and the definition of
the millimetrically
of the life of each one.
They all appear as counter
models of their predecessors,
the monastery, phalanstery,
the campus, the communal,
that capitalism mixed-use,
all reverse the main purposes
of the previous but
contain similar outcomes
or methods that reveal a trend.
I would say that
Nietzsche was right.
We can learn from them
if we understand them
as counter models.
I see beauty in the search
for knowledge of all of them.
I see that.
They are about innovation,
type and prototype,
new ways of life, I
would say technologies
of the self, material culture,
technology, knowledge,
and they produce drawings,
lots of beautiful drawings.
But I do not see their beauty
as something I or we can
feel comfortable with.
It is there that I
conclude my lecture
without neat
conclusions, leaving them
as a choice up to each of you,
like a French film of the '60s
or '70s-- and it's like, open.
With a deep
gratefulness for having
let me serve as the chair of
the Department of Architecture
for these past two years
and for still being tied
to a school that is
faithful to the university
principles of dedication
towards knowledge
and respectful towards
the individuality
and diversity of each one of
us-- teachers and students,
monks and converts,
thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
I mean you are all so
positive and so wonderful.
I don't know whether it's
just good to end with a clap,
or I think we
should probably have
a moment for some questions.
I think there are so many
moments of provocation
that I think it would be great
if there are some questions
that you would like to ask.
Maybe I can just start
with a simple query-- no,
no it would be very simple.
No, I promise.
No, I think at the
beginning, it would be-- it's
very interesting the
inter-relationship
between Nietzsche
and the aphorism
and the kind of the
statement of Nietzsche,
and then the history
of the monasteries.
And while you are going through
that, like three-quarters
of the talk, there is a
very clear relationship
between spatial practice,
the spaces, and the life,
and the life of the monks.
And even when you get to
the point of the university,
the parallel between university
life, the life of study,
and so on, is very consistent.
As we start coming more
towards contemporary practice,
with the idea of the
monster-- at least to me,
the concept of life
is more ambiguous.
Because it's not as clear as
the practice of the monks,
and so I am very
interested in what happens.
What is now the relationship
between the spatial
and the life that is, for
example, suggested, insinuated,
by the monster?
Is there a moment
at which there is
some kind of a
disjunction that happens,
that kind of
coherence, that sort
of consistency of monastic
life is disappearing?
Are you proposing a
new kind of good life?
What is the relationship
between architecture and life
in this latter part
in the last kind
of 10 minutes of the lecture?
It's not simple.
I knew it was not
going to be simple.
This is the first response.
I agree with you that apparently
this idea of dissolves itself,
I don't think it's
dissolve-- by the way,
I think that its unformulated.
I think that we live as monks--
not we students, everyone.
I mean, we are under many powers
that control our life in ways
that we don't perceive so well.
I mean there is a lot of
philosophical and critical
social critiques on the
way we live nowadays.
So I think that not
being formulated
doesn't mean that
it doesn't exist.
I think it exists in
a more perverse way.
This is the first
response I have.
For me, the second
comment-- that they can--
I cannot invent or generalize,
or I don't even pretend to do
that, this isn't
possible nowadays.
But I think that it's
interesting to pay attention
to this.
I mean these people are
really-- as the Greeks,
by the way-- I mean, this
comes from the Greeks,
this comes from Aristotle
[INAUDIBLE] people--
so it existed previously.
This idea, there's a moment in
philosophy, and in the practice
of life, and there were two
ways to work with yourself--
know yourself was one thing.
That was the logo, the
motto that the church took
and created the monasteries.
And the other one is
take care of yourself,
which is the wonderful example
Foucault, in Technologies
of the Self,
insists that this is
a tradition that we have
lost through the religious
tradition.
And that, in a way, he was
much more interested in.
And how this other thing
is happening nowadays,
and how much it is repressed
by many of the systems
that control our everyday life.
So I think that
in-- my interest,
the studio is subjects,
it begins with subjects.
My interest is to rescue,
in a way, the discussion
on the subject of
who we are, which
are the people that
we want to really give
a kind of interesting
quality of life.
What is quality of life for us?
I would love to
have a crystal ball
and be the prophet
of this new society.
I'm not.
I mean, for sure.
But I think that
posing the question
and making it again an
architectural question
is relevant.
And this is why I have bored
you with all this talk.
No, so the idea that it's not
that something that we live
like this.
We can construct our lives.
It's obvious.
It comes from many traditions,
and only through this constant,
we can construct an interesting
architecture, an architecture
that can produce knowledge. no
one knows what is knowledge,
by the way, but everyone
understand what it means.
I don't know if
I have responded.
Can I?
Jorge, just wait one second
so that you can get the mic.
Thanks.
No, Mohsen asked a question and
I was going to ask another one,
and I think they converge.
First of all, let
me say that-- thank
you very much for
this splendid lecture,
and if you consider
this lecture boring,
I'm glad you didn't give
an entertaining lecture.
Because we'll be a
really exhausted.
It was quite spectacular
in the way you
tie so many things together.
But following up on what
was just discussed-- I
was just wondering.
And I think it converges
with Mohsen in a certain way.
At what point-- that
very, very important point
you made at the beginning of the
connection of this mode of life
and this relationship to
space, to architecture--
that it was so tied to the
productive landscape around
is lost, and whether
that may be as one
of the explanations of
what's Mohsen asking.
Because it is obviously
somehow-- just
by looking at the slides and
what some of the footnotes
were, it seems to me
that in the 19th century
that begins to be lost.
Provided with industrialization
and with the growth
of population, I
guess, when you begin
to have larger communities.
And, obviously, the skyscraper
makes it almost very, very
different-- suddenly, the
relationship to the land,
it becomes something else.
Yeah.
I want to just comment
something on this,
is that I think that the land
is interesting in economic and
ecologic terms, which are
always the same or at least
etymologically.
And I see it-- when I saw these
engravings, and I thought,
my God, these guys knew.
They knew how to survive.
It was a very well-organized.
I immediately thought
about all these [INAUDIBLE]
or green utopias, of the
green skyscraper, blah,
blah-- that we have seen
in these last decades.
Now they are fading away.
But 10 years ago,
they were rising.
And you know that things go like
this in architectural terms.
And I had always had a
kind of interest in that,
I have an archive with a
lot of them-- all very ugly,
by the way.
But I think that they were
pointing to a good idea.
But they were unable to organize
them in vertical structures.
Because of the land.
You can have some cultivation,
some products but that kind
of a self-sufficient entity
cannot mean needs surface.
And there are many
calculations, and if you
google about green
skyscrapers, there
are many calculations that saw
the impossibility of having
a self-sufficient city
without accounting, because
of the density, the
need of expansion.
Even with hydroponics
and everything like this,
there is an impossibility of
becoming green, really green,
or ecologically
green, if you don't
have that kind of expansion.
But I think that the
idea of the-- let's say
the mix of natural and
artificial architectural
and landscape or
just farming features
is still something that
will need to be developed.
And will obtain some
interesting developments
in the near future.
I think that the more the
confidence grows about it--
I mean the lack of resources,
et cetera-- the more
the inventiveness will
bring solutions to this.
And I think that is kind
of an interesting point.
The monster began being an
interesting idea for me,
yes putting together these two
ideas, a kind of elements that
relate with the
discipline of landscape
and the elements that
relate with the discipline
of architecture, both of
them fighting and trying
to create a unity, but all
of them organized vertically.
This is something that
some people-- I remember
[INAUDIBLE] that made
a beautiful, a number
of beautiful
gadgets, I would say,
that was one of the
best things that they
have produced, probably.
Because it was
really provocative.
There are some
moments that you could
see that there was a potential
integration of this problem
in the vertical construction.
But this is still too
far away, I think.
Any other?
John.
John?
Maybe here in the front row.
Iñaki, I wonder if-- there was
a moment in your genealogy,
where you-- there seemed to be
almost a split in the genealogy
that you maybe unintentionally
glossed over and I wonder
if you could expand on it, where
there were the daily rituals
and the daily routines of
the monastery went from being
primarily organized through
communal spaces to one in which
all of those communal
activities were deeply atomized.
And you emphasized even so
far as a prohibition of speech
and a vow of silence, right?
And it seems to me, picking up
on Jorge's point, and Mohsen's
point, that I wonder if
that break-- if there isn't
something in that connection?
Because obviously the
most pronounced critique
of the cell, of the
concept of the cell,
in our contemporary discourse
is from Sloterdijk, right?
Where he refers to it as a
sort of form of co-isolation,
and the modern condominium as
a kind of expression of that.
And I wonder if there
isn't something in that--
if there isn't something to be
learned in the mixed-use model
from that division that
doesn't lead us back into sort
of nostalgic models of
communal living, maybe
from the early 20th century.
But maybe you could
expand on that and that
that moment of
almost privatization.
In very practical terms, I
don't have a clear solution.
But I see that the composition
of small groups of people
divided into groups, not
by class, as in this case,
but by other for example,
expertise or age,
can really give
way to communities
that are more interesting
than just those ones that
are based in the social class.
There are many attempts I
think in Europe are growing--
I don't know, in the
States, of communities that
are put together people,
very young people, that
are normally, let's say
leftists, or green guys,
that are interested in
having their farms et cetera
In the city and houses
for the elderly that
create a kind of interest
in accommodation and sharing
things.
The young ones have
children that others
care when they go out.
There is a kind of
interesting possibility
of creating new societies
that are not that conventional
and that produce-- they
can produce knowledge.
They can produce more
intensity of life.
And I'm interested in
these kind of combinations
of very two different things and
see how they operate together.
I don't have any other response.
The whole idea of--
I like the idea
of establishing attention
among needing and wanting
to share something and needing
and wanting to be isolated.
I think this is
radically modern.
This is why the monasteries
survive, either way,
without going to
other typologies.
But this is why I
see interest in this,
even in the Communist
comuna that in a way
frightens you a lot, but at the
same time has a lot of sense.
I mean you are not alone.
There are all the things
are-- I mean you can really
belong to something,
but at the same time,
retain your individuality.
I don't know.
Iñaki, thank you.
This was a wonderful,
wonderful lecture.
From your lecture
there's two things
that-- maybe also associated
with this question about land--
one is a new understanding
about pleasure.
Pleasure, as associated
with being close to God,
being close to a certain
internalization, when
we know that after
the 19th century,
particularly if we think
about the pleasure grounds
that became part of the
civic network of the city.
So on one hand, the
garden, the interior garden
becomes the park, becomes
the civic infrastructure.
So there is a externalization
of this interior world
that becomes accessible to all.
So I'm wondering if there's--
how can we imagine pleasure
being redefined or re-inserted
on this conversation?
And second one is-- if the
monster also becomes a way
to engage the city, to engage
the civic realm, in which
you're not talking just
about agriculture production
but actually about landscape
as a civic network?
I think that Giorgio Agamben
is treating this topic now.
There's an amazing book that
is called Altissima Poverta--
Highest Poverty,
which I recommend
everyone that is crazy
with monasteries could,
should read this.
I didn't want to enter
into the Franciscans,
but I think that
in the Franciscans,
and in the idea of
extreme poverty, they--
it was not a kind of
poetic, hippie thing.
It was based in the legal
frame that still maintain
control of the monasteries.
And they wanted to become as
animals without any kind--
any kind of-- they had nothing.
They were animals.
So being like this, you were
not a [INAUDIBLE] person.
You are just a life entity that
is like an animal or vegetal
or whatever.
And this was the technique--
I mean it's very crazy.
But I think that
they really defined
idea of a religious pleasure.
They were really the ones that
made an improvement in religion
in the 15th and 16th century.
And what-- we now have a pope
that is Franciscan, by the way,
and this apart-- I think
that it's always-- obviously
you have all the sensual
pleasures that all of us
love, and me the first.
But there is-- I think
that this is obvious.
But I think that
the idea that talk
has is this other way to
think about pleasure, to be
able to contrast this
kind of, let's say,
immediate place of understanding
with one that is more
elaborated and that produces
the satisfaction-- the care
of yourself, again, that
the Greeks were pushing
and Foucault insists that is
something that we have missed.
I think that this is--
I am not a philosopher.
I'm not anything.
I'm just someone that is-- I am
an aficionado of many things.
And I think that this is
the path where-- this can be
a kind of personal confession.
But I think this
is the moment when
you feel that you are doing
what you wanted to do,
and you studied to do, and it
produces an immense pleasure.
And it doesn't happen
every day, by the way.
Happens very few
moments, but I think
the intensity is
much more important
than other intensities.
This is something that in
a way response, partially,
and the other thing is the
monster-- the monster is
everything and nothing.
Is The monster is always
combining things, landscape.
It's obvious.
And in fact, I
think, for example,
the Atlanpole, which is
a beautiful thing, this,
what, super muscular--
not the Hans Kollhoff
organism with all these things.
In a way, its beauty, he said--
I remember in those years,
Hans Kollhoff was
an amazing guy.
He was super smart and was
producing beautiful things.
I don't know what has happened
with him in the last years.
But he was saying that the
whole idea of the Atlanpole
was to retire from
the city, to go
to the other side of the river.
I think it was located
in Nantes, in France,
the project and to create
a kind of otherness,
a replica of the city
that was other city.
And that was really
enjoying the landscape
and forming part
of the landscape.
This is an example.
Any last questions from the
students or anybody up there?
Yes?
He's not a student, but
he can ask a question.
Please, go ahead.
Can you wait for the mic?
Could you comment on
postmodern capitalism
from the point of
view of monsters,
like the CCTV tower, or
the World Trade Center,
or some of the
globalization styles, which
are sort of the ultimate
consolidation of power, which
used to be a function
of the church
but now as a
function of capital.
Well.
You have a person
now that could speak
very well about this topic.
[LAUGHTER]
I mean all my interest
in the mixed-use
comes from the
commercial mixed-use.
So I'm not ambiguous about that.
I think that we live
in a society that
is driven by money,
and that it produces
very consistent things, very
consistent, and very disastrous
things.
And so we have to
negotiate with it.
And I learn a lot from
commercial buildings.
Tower and Office is basically
about commercial buildings.
I mean commercial offices,
et cetera, et cetera
And the pragmatism that
you see in those buildings
is something that
you in no way have
to interiorize if you want
to survive in this world.
I mean as an architect, so there
is a kind of lesson in that,
or a technique in that
that I appreciate.
Then there are the extremes.
And extreme
capitalism is-- what?
Is where we are going, which
is dangerous, everyone knows.
But at the same time it
produces always a reaction.
And we are seeing the
reaction, we like it or not,
we are seeing the
reaction, the consequences
of maximizing the differences,
social differences--
this is obvious, in terms
of wars and terrorism
and other things.
And so I think that these
extreme manifestations
of capitalism are-- how can I
say-- apocalyptic in the sense
that the announce not the best
things that we should expect.
So I prefer just to
work with the practices
of the different societies
that are in the market--
to work with in terms of a
field of study, case studies.
But I'm not interested in these
demonstrations of super powers.
I don't think they are
interesting for an architect.
This is my-- they are
interesting socially
and in other terms,
culturally, and critically.
But for me, I'm not interested.
Iñaki, thank you very much
for a wonderful lecture.
[APPLAUSE]
And for everything you've done.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
