
The electronic
environment finally extended our very nerves outside our corporate spaces.
By carrying the whole world on the skin, our being, always somewhere else,
is filled with emptiness. Different kinds of movement were invented to bring
it back.
The paradigm of the contemporary man is an individualistic non-historical-TV-viewer-narcissus
who daily hyperinvests into his unbearable lightness of emptiness. This syncretic,
contradictory, actively indifferent character is hedonistically oriented towards
the momentary, no longer bothered by the difficulty of work but by the difficulties
of leisure.
In our permissive liberal societies, through the media and gadgets of the
third machine age, we daily create worlds of virtual reality, which are an
undisputed fact and represent a reality-realer-than-the-real. Interpretation
equals fact in this global hypersupermarket where preprocessed and prepackaged
liquid goods approach everyone like sirens that seduce, satisfy and immediately
disappear. Here, everything is consumed, without an interphase, at the very
moment of its creation.
Today there exist at least three natures: natural, technological and phenomenological,
but consumers hardly refer to more than one. Along with developing ecology
of artificial environment, architecture should finally introduce itself as
a medium of transmittance of the phenomenological reality.
The consumerist religion of life a la carte has to change to living life.
A life that is fulfilled by living itself. The civilization of visual flamboyance
should give place to a more sensible (audio-tactile) culture, where movement,
speed and measuring will become irrelevant. They should be replaced by real
communication, true compassion and non declarative ecological consciousness.
Omnipresent patterns of uncertainty will resemble the anticipatory, non routine
environment of aquatic scaping and semantic fields. The viscosity of fluid
open systems will permit holistic organizations of plexing and pliant subsystems
where natural multiplicity, diversity and variety substitute movement.
Referring to contemporary medicine which deals with undiscovered possibilities
of the human body and mind, architects should enter the hidden chambers of
the microcosm of everyday life. Whatever they come up with it still has to
have a body, but its soul has to change from the transcendental sphere to
reality. Both the virtual and the ritual part of environmental events in synthesis
should substitute the common in-between-heaven-and-earth-physical-structure-buried-with-equipment.
Technology is still the answer, but what is the question? As for the ritual
part, it is further development of new building materials like foam metals
or liquid glass, but mainly a new relationship with the traditional ones.
The role of the virtual part will be rendering perceptible the qualities of
unperceivable - hearing the images of darkness and touching the sounds of
silence...
Architecture should introduce a new unity of schizophrenically secularized
contemporary perception. Selfsimilar natural scaping with no scale, no typology
and no style should therefore substitute monumental building. The ritual part
will be dedicated to the atavistic tactile corporal while the virtual part
should feed the inventive fluid spiritual.
P&R Millennium Lament 1999