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Manuel Mensa
Amenábar 2046, Piso 30
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Index
Oswald Mathias Ungers Equals One
The House of the Ultimate Archetype
The Empire of Architectural Values
Agrupación Militancia Arquitectura
The Hollow Body of Architecture
Towards an Endless Architecture
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Matters of Fact
(…) Every art, every philosophy can be considered a cure and aid in the service of growing, struggling life: they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two types of sufferers: first, those who suffer from a superabundance of life - they want a Dionysian art as well as a tragic outlook and insight into life; then, those who suffer from an impoverishment of life and seek quiet, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and insight, or else intoxication, paroxysm, numbness, madness. (…) He who is richest in fullness of life, the Dionysian god and man, can allow himself not only the sight of what is terrible and questionable but also the terrible deed and every luxury of destruction, decomposition, negation; in his case, what is evil, non¬ sensical, and ugly almost seems acceptable because of an overflow in procreating, fertilizing forces capable of turning any desert into boun¬tiful farmland Friedrich Nietzsche, La Gaya Ciencia (1)
Architecture is not made to satisfy a service, nor to provide a solution, nor to resolve a problem, nor to implement any type of amelioration. Neither to express the individuality of an author, nor the spirit of the times or the best intentions of an epoch. Nor to convey a message, to give hope, to articulate different types of policies, or to accommodate one or another form of functioning or institution. Although architecture relies on all these ends as drives or impellers, it is important to understand them as the necessary means for its incessant and perpetually unfinished constitution. Architecture is an art of activity, an art of the empowerment of chance capable of calling upon any contingency, any requirement, in sum, any internal or external determination, its so I have willed to. (1)
That is the gamble before which architecture finds itself every time, its Dionysian suffering, as detested as it is inevitable.
An architect is nothing more than a medium, and architecture, although the first of the arts, (3) is the least aesthetizable of them: taste is discovered each time in things, not imposed onto them. It’s also the most impersonal of the arts: it does not require impulses, nor intentions, nor desires, nor traumas, nor interesting biographies to constitute wild sensibilities and create new forms of value. The materials and techniques with which architecture is made are discovered each time: art of uncertainty, of the tightrope, of the slow and meditative walk. The figure of the client is the way in which architecture projects its double, its way of building friction with reality, without apathy, without cynicism, but above all without taking refuge in ivory towers, without raising the nihilistic scream of the beautiful souls, anchored in illusions of integrity, in apparent beatitudes that are nothing more than temporary anesthesia for bad conscience.
Architecture is an art of megalomania and superiority, not in the sense of subjugating others or imposing ideals, but insofar as it is such its confidence in the sedimentation of its knowledge and in the capacity of its techniques that it has no fear of exploring the most unpopular or least honorable areas of its time: there is no better place for self-affirmation than the most sinister maw. Without depending on contemplation or meditative reflection, much less through criticism, but rather sliding everything it touches into its becoming, to then retroactively call it inevitable.
Architecture realizes each time the wildest fantasy of the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century: it realizes in life what other arts propose as a negation of the world, as a delirious dream, in sum, as utopia. Architecture is the opposite of utopia, and whence emanates its suffering, its inexorably epic character, its need for appeals to heroism. Doing architecture implies an unappealable respect for things as they are, because if things are not accepted for what they are, if chance is not affirmed, the moralism of transcendental orders (archetypes, typologies, ideal forms, canons) triumphs. However, it also requires loving destruction, (4) an enculer (5) not only of authors or traditions, but of requirements and contingencies. A form of love that entails such an extreme depersonalization that the architect himself forgets the initial objectives. He loses them one by one like coins, only to reclaim them at the end, as found forms, and love them as if they were the product of his imagination, his will and his desire. This is the plane where amor fati meets the will to power: in the architect who, loving his destiny, assumes it as his own form of self-affirmation in the world.
These are the reasons why architecture has been called a tragic profession, (6) yet such a form of tragedy, to be loved, requires not to be confused with external temptations: an idea of unbridled freedom, beyond the world, unbound to states of affairs, ideal usually situated in art (not as a form of life but as a role assigned by civil society to illusorily compensate only some for what is not given to all), neither postponed by inner noises: the exhausting demand, vitiated and resentful, of the need to criticize or to be ashamed if it is not carried out. The way out of this self-designed labyrinth is not from above, as in the myth of Daedalus, but simply from within, from the mud, the impurity, the horrid, that which damages the best eyes, to use architecture to create unexplored forms of sensibility.
Weakened minds, enslaved by the internalization of dead-end labyrinths, some inherited, others sickly designed, when confronted with the inability to build a way out, not freedom, but just a way out, and confusing what is possible with what has already been achieved, they ask themselves: with what materials is this architecture built? Ah, architects of "reality"! Black monks of twilight, kings in a world they assume incapacitated beforehand! From what materials is this defeat, this resignation made of? Do not project any more bad conscience, do not pour out your resentment! What form of criticism are you afraid of? The architectural project is not only the architectural building, but the form that comes closest to it, the virtual (fertile or sterile) that orbits each building.
Walking through a city, wandering through the countryside, or visiting the most remote site in the most exotic country, we discover, not without astonishment or violent perplexity, that the buildings that compose it are dead. It is not a beautiful death, a vanishing of the spirit that leaves behind a charged, vibrant matter, but a death in life, zombie buildings devoid of any form of their own, abandoned to putrefaction, to tedium, and devoid of any other form that could arouse interest, defeated by their epoch, unable to revert and overcome the determinations they assume as inescapable and to prolong in poetry their states of things. To observe them closely, with the tactile gaze of the architect, is the saddest of spectacles and unveils the cruelest question: what did they do, building, to make you so uninteresting? To what forms of abandonment, of dispassionate torture, of apathy, of bureaucratic automatism, have they subjected you? Such a life has no meaning, no value to exist.
A generic is the repetition of the same, over and over again, a repetition without the capacity to differentiate itself, as mummified as it is effective, a pure form, the product of millennia of sedimented contents. The repetition of the appearance of a generic repeats obsolete forms, gigantic fearful regularities that affirm themselves in their weakness. Instead, taken genetically, understanding the complex reasons for its form, adopting its intelligence without ideological mediation, making its political interests its own as a symbol, its commercial interests as a business, its social interest as a regime of bodies, only in this way does architecture have the capacity to achieve an immanent sublimity, a sublimity that neither reassures, nor appeases, nor promises its realization in an eternal hereafter.
There are two forms of sublime architecture, one transcendental and the other immanent. One determines submissive spectators before a series of skills that surpass them, thus monumental architecture or architecture of great prowess. The other does not proceed by determination, but by misaligning all senses, inducing a feeling of profound material continuity and propitiating an encounter with what is divine in matter. In this sense, it is not a matter of sinking, nor of the forging of a new relationship of domination, but of a force capable of mobilizing thought, of making us think. In the two forms of sublimity there are perhaps two forms of love: a love for what is to come, ethereal, light, pure mentality that constitutes vectors of change, transforming ideas charged with melancholy of the future, sustained by voluble forces of will, and therefore only capable of imposing their idealization. On the other hand, another form of love, loves what there is, nakedly, without regards, without twists, with the excessive violence and cruelty necessary to love things as they are.
The quasi-religious form of the transcendental sublime, limits architecture to a negative pleasure, the pleasure of feeling diminute because there is something greater, something superior to us that dominates, that has an absolute knowledge, a pleasure of what is missing, of an excess that is in place of something else as its lack, builds communities united by lament and self-pity. The immanent sublime operates by excess of meaning, such a powerful charge of meaning and vitality, not as expression in form, but as form that allows and induces heterogeneous actions and divergent activities, not given by the promise of the apparent freedom of generic architecture, gifted with laxity, like regular grids or free plan, but by excess of programmatic specificity.
Force that goes beyond our capacities, force that forces us to think beyond the prison of our subjectivity, force that turns us impersonal, not by submission, not by obedience, not by duty, but by inevitability, force that acts beyond wanting or not wanting, beyond being able or not being able, beyond any concern or epochal issue, a force capable of overcoming the psychology of the one who problematizes, a force that overcomes and shatters the vision of the spectator, the action of the user, overcoming the dichotomy between dominator and dominated, a force that is one with architecture!
It is not a question of the "best architecture", or the most virtuous architecture, for even in the best there is something that nauseates; and the best is still something that must be overcome! (7) Architecture capable of becoming imperceptible
Footnotes
1.Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gaya Science. Book Five: We Fearless Ones, Cambridge University Press, 2001
2. The dice which are thrown once are the affirmation of chance, the combination which they form on falling is the affirmation of necessity. Necessity is affirmed of chance in exactly the sense that being is affirmed of becoming and unity is affirmed of multiplicity. It will be replied, in vain, that thrown to chance, the dice do not necessarily produce the winning combination, the double six which brings back the dicethrow. This is true, but only insofar as the player did not know how to affirm chance from the outset. For, just as unity does not suppress or deny multiplicity, necessity does not suppress or abolish chance. Nietzsche identifies chance with multiplicity, with fragments, with parts, with chaos: the chaos of the dice that are shaken and then thrown. Nietzsche turns chance into an affirmation. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Continuum, 1986
3. Art begins not with flesh but with the house. That is why architecture is the first of the arts. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is philosophy? Columbia University Press, New York, 1994
4. In every modernity and every novelty, you find conformity and creativity; an insipid conformity, but also "a little new music"; something in conformity with the time, but also something untimely—separating the one from the other is the task of those who know how to love, the real destroyers and creators of our day. Good destruction requires love. Deleuze, Gilles. “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought”. Desert Islands and Other Texts. 1953-1974. Semiotext(e). 2004
5. (…) I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a sort of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception. I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous. It was really important for it to be his own child, because the author had to actually say all I had him saying. But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations, and hidden emissions that I really enjoyed. Deleuze, Gilles. Letter to a Harsh Critic in Negotiations, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990
6.Rem Koolhaas in the Interview Marathon together with Hans Ulrich Obrist in the context of 2006 O.M.A.’s Serpentine Pavilion. Also: Megalomania: Architecture is a very bizarre profession in the sense that it is a poisonous mixture of omnipotence and impotence. It is obviously true that our dreams and fantasies are megalomaniac, and we are doomed to wait passively for occasions where we can realize fragments of that megalomania. O.M.A; Koolhaas, Rem; Mau, Bruce. S, M, L, XL. The Monacelli Press, 1998.
7.Because they are all unclean in spirit, especially those who have neither rest nor respite, unless they see the world from the hinter side – these hinterworldlings! To their faces I say, even if it does not sound kind: the world resembles a human being in that it has a behind – that much is true! There is much filth in the world: that much is true! But the world itself is not therefore a filthy monster! There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smells foul: nausea itself creates wings and water-divining powers! Even in the best there is something that nauseates; and the best is still something that must be overcome! Yes my brothers, there is much wisdom in the fact that there is much filth in the world! Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Text: Manuel Mensa
Published in: Plot 69 (Buenos Aires, 2023) and in Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. Atlas de Arquitectura Genérico Sublime (Archivos de Arquitectura). Buenos Aires: Escuela de Arquitectura y Estudios Urbanos, 2022.
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Drapes
The problem consists in connecting two contiguous apartments with small adjacent patios. One of the apartments functions as an autonomous house while the other must be transformed into a bedroom, two desks and a bathroom. The building that contains them has the appearance of being constructed with load-bearing walls: narrow and high windows, separation of each of the rooms, etc. Behind this diluted style lies an extremely interesting concrete structure: beams of strange proportions: very wide and not very high, very high and very narrow; robust columns with threaded ends; and unexpected crossings between beams and columns that reveal an aesthetic unconsciousness that is a joy to make visible. The intervention includes a roof that connects both apartments by joining opposite columns and forms an extremely high hallway, wide enough to be used as a gallery open to the new patio. The five sliding windows under the roof have the same width so that they can accumulate one after the other in the centre and delimit three areas of the gallery: the access hall to the bedroom/desk at one end; the passage between one department and another in the middle; and an extension to the dining room and living room at the other end. This accumulation of panels in the centre is hidden and is indifferent to the potentially heroic structural effort of the metal beam that spans more than five meters, but also articulates an access door and a storm drain and generates an austere effect of shines, shadows, reflections and green gradients by accumulating ten glasses one behind the other. The surprise and admiration of the builders upon seeing our “invention” seemed to confirm that we were achieving a small degree of deliriousness through convention without resorting to extravagance. The bathroom rests on the wall furthest from the entrance of light, uses the modernist resource of letting light pass through a strip of upper glass and is divided into three parts. In the centre, a curved vanity whose dips are the product of absorbing the inflexions of the space. To each of the sides, a toilet and a shower, accessed through sliding plates hidden in the furniture that divides the bathroom from the rest of the spaces. The doors of the furniture relate their rhythm and proportions to the fixed panels of the gallery. The different types of floors are aligned and divide zones as a way of expressing and relating the different rhythms of the intervention. As a mirror of this, a multitude of identical light fixtures are located in the different centres of each one of those zones.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Aguero
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Tanker
Two artists contact us to “recondition” a property they are thinking of buying. As we leave the property, we tell them “The house is full of unnecessary noise. Cruelty is needed.” The reconstruction process began as a “facelift”, continued as a “revamp”, then became a “comprehensive renovation” and culminated in “a new house”. The strategy was simple, to raise from the bottom what the house already was: 3 meters wide by 18 meters long, developed vertically on three levels, with the potential of becoming a small, long, slim and tall ship. All the stylistic and unnecessary noise was demolished: mouldings, false wooden beams, niches, walls that divided the spaces according to absurd clichés, equipment not intended to be used but to represent an unrefined taste. When only the patio in the background with a greenhouse and the slabs with their unevenness remained, a square staircase was introduced in the middle of the house to connect each of the resulting enclosures. A walkable circuit connects isolated spaces that alter their specific character and humour defined by slight variations of tone, texture and proportions.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Olivia Olivari
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Photography: Manuel Mensa Arquitectos
Sequence: Catalina Sfer Salas
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Stall
An artist needs a house as small as possible. He wants to live in it, but also use it as a production space. The proposed relationship between the house and outdoors, is more typical of those who work with their hands under the sun than of those who idealize it and contemplate it. The house is divided into three bands: an extra-large central hallway that, in addition to connecting with the two side bands and allowing passage from the entrance gallery to the laundry room at the back, hosts production and leisure activities. A wide lateral band forms a sequence of rooms: kitchen, bathroom, shower, storage room, bedroom. Each room has a window to the outside and a door to the central band, except for the bedroom: a door on each side of the bed allows space to be maximized. In the narrow side band, a sequence of niches for equipment is formed, interspersed by large glasses that function as screens that, while protecting the houses, project the garden into the inside.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Matías Etchart
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Cute-chitecture
A sensual architecture but not in the hedonistic sense; sensory but not in the sense of touch, taste, smell...; atmospheric but not in the sense of air or temperature….; materially heterogeneous but not eclectic or disaggregated; useful and functional but not utilitarian or instrumentalized; programmatically specific but not hyper determined; open but not indeterminate or flexible; an architecture of sensation in which the space-time dichotomy overcomes to create a world in itself, without resolution, without reconciliation, without sublimation: a disruption of all the senses confused with each other. Tender, sensitive architecture, without falling into the violence of snobbery or normalization only possible through detachment and evasion of any tragic sense of architectural practice. Cute-chitecture: a loving architecture without fear of death.
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Cenotaphs
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Máximo Sánchez Granel
Students: Bautista Zeitler, Mora Ludueña, Delfina Loro Meyer, Luis Fernando Davila Oyague, Malena Bilik, María Devecyan
Di Tella Arquitectura, 2022
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Bridges
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Máximo Sánchez Granel
Students: Santiago Cichelli, Bruno Codoni, Candela Corti, Lucila Devoto, Lucía Di Vilio, Camila Díaz, Lola Flores, Valentina Giri, Leila Kees, Luca Longinotti, Faustina Lorda, Sofía Pan, Camila Pulti, Milagros Rodríguez Muedra, Santiago Vaca, Salvador Velesquen, Camila Villa.
Di Tella Arquitectura, 2023
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Code Masochism
An architect's muses are the irrational projection he can make on his clients. Just as a portrait painter makes visible by painting the invisible forces that are at play in the face of his model, an architect spatializes the abstract forces that are at play in any commission. In that sense, his relationship with the program is not scientific, nor hermeneutic, nor interpretive, nor solicitous, it is more the art of a medium that empties itself to capture the surrounding spectra. In that sense, the building code of the City of Buenos Aires and the real estate market are the spectrums and restrictions within which this project finds, by being pressured like a diamond, not its freedom but only a small exit forward.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Nicolás Boscoboinik
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Belle
In every architecture there is the challenge of each time constructing the criteria by which what is valuable is distinguished from what is dispensable. A reform, in this sense, is an explicit simulation of what happens universally in architectural practice. Belle is a building located in an area of Buenos Aires that had its golden age foregone and aims to recover it. The criterion of a non-melancholic belle epoque becomes central to the proposal.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Nicolás Boscoboinik, Catalina Sfer Salas
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Growing Up in Public
https://creciendoenpublico.substack.com/
Introduccion
Sometimes I have such interesting conversations that they are like a celebration. Then I reenact them internally, rejoicing over and over again, thinking about alternative paths, possible outcomes, exaggerations, anger or invented joys. Sometime later, almost like a shock, I realize that something singular, be it a fragment of a book, a three-sleeve sweater, the way such a song builds toward ecstasy, or the penetrating gaze in a frame of a film, is vital so that the sensitivity and issues of the conversation continue to unfold. All these unique things and the reasons for their suggestion will be in Growing Up in Public, a newsletter of erratic frequency composed of private recommendations made public, like letters floating in the ocean.
Vanguardistas 01
Para Pé.Ká.
No se escribe con las propias neurosis. La neurosis, la psicosis no son fragmentos de vida, sino estados en los que se cae cuando el proceso está interrumpido, impedido, cerrado. La enfermedad no es proceso, sino detención del proceso, como en el «caso de Nietzsche». Igualmente, el escritor como tal no está enfermo, sino que más bien es médico, médico de sí mismo y del mundo. El mundo es el conjunto de síntomas con los que la enfermedad se confunde con el hombre. La literatura se presenta entonces como una iniciativa de salud: no forzosamente el escritor cuenta con una salud de hierro (se produciría en este caso la misma ambigüedad que con el atletismo), pero goza de una irresistible salud pequeñita producto de lo que ha visto y oído de las cosas demasiado grandes para él, demasiado fuertes para él, irrespirables, cuya sucesión le agota, y que le otorgan no obstante unos devenires que una salud de hierro y dominante haría imposibles. De lo que ha visto y oído, el escritor regresa con los ojos llorosos y los tímpanos perforados. ¿Qué salud bastaría para liberar la vida allá donde esté encarcelada por y en el hombre, por y en los organismos y los géneros? Pues la salud pequeñita de Spinoza, hasta donde llegara, dando fe hasta el final de una nueva visión a la cual se va abriendo al pasar.
Gilles Deleuze,
Literatura y Vida
Crítica y Clínica
Exceso 01
Para J.B.
En un momento J.B. dice algo sobre la moda y los artistas: “para un artista es un problema caer en la moda”. Después le digo a J.B. que 1.Hay algo lindo en la idea de moda (fashionista) que es dejarse arrastrar por las olas que pasan con la confianza de que la singularidad persistirá. Al leer ahora lo que escribí pienso “quién puede escribir así? La palabra persistirá me da vergüenza”. Pero ya sé donde está el error: en vez de haber dicho eso debería haber escrito sobre el “three arm sweater” de Issey Miyake. No puedo dejar de pensar en ese sweater desde que lo vi por primera vez y cada vez que alguien dice la palabra moda, o se refiere a la moda en algún sentido, pienso en el sweater de tres brazos de Issey Miyake. Me regocijo en el momento en el que el tercer brazo da la vuelta alrededor del cuello y pierde toda su radicalidad para distribuir el exceso de tela en un manojo de plisses. Describir su belleza, la forma que tiene de absorber todas las convenciones (el agujero para el cuello, el agujero para cada brazo, los largos..) y con un exceso mínimo, casi como si se tratara de un error de fabricación, darlas vuelta con mucha gracia.
Three Arm Sweater
Issey Miyake
1980s
Idiotez 01
Para R.Ch.
R.Ch. dice algo sobre la idiotez que ahora no recuerdo. No es al estilo de B.a.W. que detesta la estupidez humana: R.Ch. tiene una relación con la idiotez similar a la de Lars von Trier en “Los Idiotas” o del que “quiere convertir lo absurdo en la fuerza más poderosa del pensamiento, es decir crear”. R.Ch. pasa sin dudas por esa zona idiota, no le teme. Ella misma dice “trabajo con no comprender” y eso se ve con claridad en sus bailes: hay algo incomprensible, indescifrable, incodificable. Más bien, no se trata de que R.Ch. no comprende algo cuando baila, ni que no podamos comprender cuando la vemos bailar, sino que baila ante la incomprensibilidad, como una bruja bailando ante un fuego encendido por un rayo. A veces me pregunto qué se puede decir sobre la no-comprensión, como si la no-comprensión, la aceptación del propio desentendimiento o de la propia idiotez fuesen las precondiciones o el primer paso antes de seguir expresando desde esa “idiotez”. Ya no sería expresar el no-comprender: el “no-comprendo” dejaría de ser un escudo o una barrera para ser el plano sobre el que R.Ch. baila, ante lo que ella baila. Su forma de descodificarse sería tratar al código como si no fuese un código. Y cuando le digan “no se entiende”, en vez de clarificar dando explicaciones o de refugiarse en decir “trabajo sobre el no-entender”, R.Ch podría expresar más malos entendidos o volverse cada vez más confusa y oscura o mejor aún, ponerse a bailar: giros poco lubricados de cada una de sus articulaciones, la fricción del baile, la belleza de la carne deslizándose por entre los huesos con mucho trabajo.
El lenguaje idealista está hecho de significaciones hipostasiadas. Pero, cada vez que se nos interroga sobre tales significados -«¿qué es lo Bello, lo Justo, etc.?, ¿qué es el Hombre?»-, respondemos designando un cuerpo, mostrando un objeto imitable o incluso consumible, si es necesario dando un bastonazo, considerando el bastón como instrumento de toda designación posible. Al «bípedo implume» como significado del hombre según Platón, Diógenes el Cínico responde arrojándole un gallo desplumado. Y a quien pregunta «¿qué es la filosofía?», Diógenes le responde paseando un arenque en el extremo de un cordel: el pescado es el animal más oral, que plantea el problema de la mudez, de la consumibilidad, de la consonante en el elemento líquido, el problema del lenguaje. Platón se reía de los que se contentaban con poner ejemplos, como mostrar, designar, en lugar de alcanzar las Esencias: No te pregunto (decía) quién es justo, sino qué es lo justo, etc. Ahora bien, es fácil hacer que Platón baje el camino que pretendía hacernos escalar. Cada vez que se nos interrogue acerca de una significación, responderemos con una designación, una mostración puras. Y para persuadir al espectador de que no se trata de un simple «ejemplo», y que el problema de Platón está mal planteado, se imitará lo que se designa, se simulará, o bien se comerá o se romperá lo que se muestra. Lo importante es actuar rápido: encontrar rápidamente algo que designar, comer o romper, que sustituya a la significación (la Idea) que se nos invitaba a buscar. Tanto más rápido y tanto mejor si no hay, y no debe haber, semejanza entre lo que se muestra y lo que se nos preguntaba: sólo una relación en dientes de sierra, que recusa la falsa dualidad platónica esencia-ejemplo. Para este ejercicio que consiste en sustituir las significaciones por designaciones, mostraciones, consumiciones y destrucciones puras, es precisa una extraña inspiración, hay que saber «descender»: el humor, colocado por una vez al lado de, y contra la ironía socrática o la técnica de ascensión.
Decimonovena Serie
Del Humor
Lógica del Sentido
Gilles Deleuze
Dionisíaco 01
Para A.A.
Hace un tiempo que en nuestras conversaciones aparece la idea de “vida de artista”. Ninguno de los dos sabemos bien de que se trata, pero sabemos que eso es lo que queremos. Le digo a A.A. que se precisa vitalidad para tolerar la confusión y A.A. agrega que también se necesita vitalidad para instigarla. La forma en la que A.A. se procura una vida de artista es estirar el hilo de su cometa y dejarse arrastrar por los vientos que pasan, con la sabiduría de saber nombrar a ese viento su viento desde el momento en el que lo navega, mucho antes de haberlo comprendido. Estar siendo arrastrada de un lado hacia el otro sin la certeza de un destino le trae a A.A. un gran sufrimiento: muchas veces hay corrientes cruzadas y sobre todo, ráfagas inesperadas. Pero A.A. lo que tiene de liviandad lo tiene de fuerte.
[…] Todo arte, toda filosofía pueden ser considerados como medios al mismo tiempo saludables y auxiliares al servicio de la vida en crecimiento, en lucha; presuponen siempre sufrimientos, seres que sufren. Pero hay dos clases de seres que sufren: los que sufren por su abundancia de vida, que desean un arte dionisíaco y que tienen asimismo una visión y una comprensión trágicas de la vida; y aquellos que sufren por su empobrecimiento de vida, que buscan en el arte y en el conocimiento el descanso, el silencio, el mar en calma, la entrega personal o, por el contrario, la borrachera, la crispación, el estupor, el delirio. […] El ser más rico en abundancia vital, el dios y el hombre dionisíacos pueden permitirse no solo ver lo terrible y problemático, sino también cometer incluso una acción terrible y entregarse a todo lujo de destrucciones, descomposiciones y negaciones; para ellos, el mal, el absurdo y la fealdad horrible están, por así decirlo, permitidos, en virtud de un excedente de fuerzas generadoras y fecundas, capaces de convertir cualquier desierto en un país fértil.
Friedrich Nietzsche
La Gaya Ciencia
Destrucción 01
Para G.C.
Según G.C. la vida se vuelve intolerable cuando no se puede dejar de percibir el constante deterioro de todas las cosas: objetos, contratos, condiciones, vínculos, materia, etcétera. Según G.C. este deterioro constante de todas las cosas se dá con mayor énfasis en Buenos Aires. No estoy del todo seguro de esto. O sí, pero no como algo a resolver sino como algo que Buenos Aires, y otras experiencias, revelan y hacen, para ciertas sensibilidades, ineludible:
Sabado 04 de septiembre de 2021
14:04
Todo está destruido, mi vida está destruida, la casa está destruida. No veo alternativa a la destrucción, a lo destruido. Todo intento de evitar la destrucción me lleva a una destrucción más grande, más estrepitosa. Los únicos momentos de los que tengo recuerdos en los que las cosas no estuvieran destruidas son falsos. Hay más realidad en este estado de destrucción, en la dulzura de esta depresión, de esta lucidez triste, que en cualquier otra cosa. "Trabajar te va a hacer bien" se vuelve no más que una euforia forzada. Volverse un ser automático, un robot. Voy a dejarme llevar por la entropia, pase lo que pase, entropizarme. Alrededor mío, cada vez más, solo veo destrucción, veo a los destruidos, a los violentados queriendo ser felices y no pudiendo. ¿No hay más verdad en la crudeza de la destrucción? ¿Que es esta fatalidad de la conciencia? Decimos conciencia como un eufemismo de culpa, de remordimiento, de resentimiento, de melancolía. Como una forma de nombrar la tristeza de forma que no parezca tristeza. Cuando leo o escucho inteligencias deslumbrantes no puedo evitar pensar que es solo una forma de ocultar tristeza y frustración, intentos idiotas de aparentar hacia afuera, y con poco éxito hacia adentro, que se está bien, que se está feliz. No hay ficción, no hay ficciones terribles, ni realidades felices, ninguna de las dos. Son solo momentos previos a la destrucción, momentos previos a la catástrofe. No quiero más optimismo, no quiero más resignación ni conformismos, no quiero más ambición, no quiero más "fuerza de voluntad".
Diarios
Samuel Chavéz
Diferencia 01
Para MsG
En un sueño MsG dice “el problema con lo que vos haces es que es demasiado complicado”. Está claro que se refiere a que, pudiendo hacer uso de mi gracia, voy en busca de algo más, cuando ese algo más ya estaba en la gracia de antemano. Complicar, en este contexto, sería no reconocer el valor de lo que ya está ahí. Su sugerencia es “no querer que nada nunca sea diferente de cómo es”. Luego le digo a MsG que el problema con lo que él hace es que es demasiado ingenuo. Cuando me dice que no me comprende le digo con más violencia que lo que él hace es inhibir y suprimir toda posibilidad de conflicto. Aunque no lo digo estoy hablando de la mala belleza, aplacadora, adormecedora y tranquilizadora del diseño y el arte o de cualquier otra cosa. Entre una posición y la otra, entre la violencia y el placer están muchas de las preguntas que exploramos juntos.
¿Cómo producir, y pensar, fragmentos que tengan entre sí relaciones de diferencia en tanto qué tal, que tengan como relaciones entre sí a su propia diferencia, sin referencias a una totalidad original incluso perdida, ni a una totalidad resultante incluso por llegar?
La Conversación Infinita
Maurice Blanchot
Gracia 01
Para S.G.
Con S.G. no hablamos casi de ninguna otra cosa que no sea la gracia. Hablamos sobre la gracia con risas histéricas o sobre la gracia como forma de espontaneidad y de perdida de sí: formas de conectar con algo divino. No es que decimos la palabra “gracia” una y otra vez, pero funciona como el plano sobre el que nos movemos, nos alejamos y nos acercamos en función de como conseguirla: si depende de un problema de época o en cambio de una aventura caótica de la existencia. Decir divino, en el contexto de nuestras conversaciones, es ya un problema porque cada uno entiende la divinidad de formas muy diferentes. Uno piensa que se consigue por ausencia y vaciamento, el otro por proliferación y exceso de pensamiento. Sin embargo hay una zona amorosa y destructiva donde nuestras ideas de gracia y divinidad se encuentran y, por momentos muy fugaces, se vuelven indiscernibles: pensamos que para diseñar una silla como la de Donald Judd hay que estar en un estado de inocencia tal que permita desconocer por completo la historia del mueble, y al mismo tiempo concebirla y fabricarla con gran precisión y técnica. Como si alguien hubiera conectado con la obviedad de una silla “un plano horizontal que sostiene, dos planos verticales que apoyan, etcetera…” M.L. nos diría que primero hay que saber lo que hicieron los demás para poder hacer lo propio. En cambio, junto con S.G., cuando no quedamos atrapados por olas que nos arrastran o pesos que nos sumergen, creemos que como alternativa al modo erudito enciclopédico, están el idiota frenético y el compulsivo delirante.
Donald Judd
Chair 2
https://judd.furniture/product/chair-2/
Fuerza 01
Para L.V.
Al salir de una fiesta L.V. dice que la gente era tan fea que le provocó nauseas. Alguién podría confundirse y pensar que en tal afirmación no hay más que un frívolo y estéril, que no esconde más que miedo a la diferencia. Quien piense así fracasaría en ver que L.V. no es jueza de un tribunal, sino que es una bruja con la capacidad de ver el “aura” de las personas. No en un sentido místico, esotérico, oculto o inaccesible. Todo lo contrario, L.V. es una médica materialista capaz de ver de un golpe cómo la salud de un espíritu se expresa en la superficie de la ropa, sus colores estridentes o apastelados, sus texturas rugosas o lisas, los movimientos de un baile, pero sobre todo, es capaz de ver la lucha de fuerzas que se da en los rostros y produce tal o cual gesto o rigidez, belleza que aumenta todas las funciones vitales o fealdad nauseabunda. No se trata de una afirmación imparcial, desinteresada y con validez universal, es el reconocimiento de un campo de batalla, un gusto político, fuerzas composibles o incomposibles, constructivas o destructivas. L.V. no está en posesión plena de este don porque su potencia es altamente destructiva y genera grandes malentendidos. Al mismo tiempo funciona como una forma de selección y evita caer en la trampa de las modas poco interesantes, los amiguismos o los vaivenes de tal o cual preocupación de época instalada. L.V. no compara rostros o movimientos contra un canon o gusto ya establecido, en eso radica su singularidad. No es que lo olvida, simplemente le es indiferente. Por eso muchas veces lo único que tiene para decir es “no me gusta ese olor”.
Friedrich Nietzsche
El Artista Trágico
Refrain 01
Para L.B.
Hablamos con L.B. sobre fotografía y sobre diferentes fotógrafos. Nos detenemos a pensar en Jeff Wall. La pregunta es obvia: ¿por qué Jeff Wall saca fotos de escenas montadas que parecen espontaneas en vez de sacar fotos espontaneas y ya? El mismo Jeff Wall insiste con la artificialidad de la fotografía, lo repite en sus entrevistas. Con L.B. pensamos que hay una razón clara en los efectos: las fotografías de Jeff Wall están en una zona en la que espontaneidad y montaje, gracia y artificio se vuelven indescirnibles una de la otra y eso nos genera un gran placer. Pero no es un placer continuo, hedonista, sino que un placer con pulsaciones, ascensos y caídas: ciertas miradas y ciertas poses en la foto delatan que se trata de una escena dirigida por alguien, pero ciertos movimientos hacen creer que se trata de un retrato fugaz y espontaneo. Ese desfasaje trasciende al placer y, en vez de detenerse, el proceso continua. Es que probablemente se trate de ambas: la inspiración que surge después de extenuantes horas de preparación y el toque de gracia. Pero hay algo que nos importa más ¿por qué hacer todo ese esfuerzo cuando muy fácilmente se podría simular la escena con CGI y obtener el mismo resultado? No es que no se pueda, pero precisaría construir sus propios enlentecimientos, sus repeticiones, sus refrains. La cámara de fotos con sus restricciones técnicas, los actores con sus comportamientos y sus caprichos, la construcción o elección del set, funcionan como refrains o demoras que vuelven al proceso más lento, más pesado, menos ágil. Ese enlentecimiento, esa fricción cargan de impureza, o más bien, funcionan como un antídoto contra la pureza y enriquecen la imágen abriendola a la posibilidad de afirmar un mundo en sí mismo.
Jeff Wall In Front of a Nightclub
2006
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Erewhon
An ordered labyrinth created by pairs of opposing stairs that start from the same centre, proliferate two by two and change direction, creating a changing but recognizable route. In turn, each line of stairs opens in two and folds into a second mirrored staircase that returns to the starting centre. The steps of the upper stairs tremble, accumulate at the ends and connect to form arches of variable height and section. Arches emerge from the lower stairs followed by columns directed towards the lower limit plane. The steps progressively extend their depth until they reach the width of the next line of stairs, becoming both a landing and the last step.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Nicolás Boscoboinik
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StaGGer
Paired stairs emanating from a center form an orderly labyrinth, creating a flitting yet recognizable path. Each artwork is reached in awe. Staircases multiply, fold and craft arcs of variable height and form, shaping spatial evolution.
StaGGGGer
Paired stairs emanating from a center form a challenging labyrinth, creating a shifting yet recognizable path. Each artwork is reached in awe. Staircases multiply, fold and craft arcs of variable height and form, shaping spatial abundance.
StaGGGGGGer
Paired stairs emanating from a center form a complex labyrinth, creating a fleeting yet recognizable path. Each artwork is reached in awe. Staircases multiply, fold and craft arcs of variable height and form, shaping spatial proliferation.
StaGGGGGGGGer
Paired stairs emanating from a center form an inmense labyrinth, creating a variegated yet recognizable path. Each artwork is reached in awe. Staircases multiply, fold and craft arcs of variable height and form, shaping spatial profusion.
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Personaeism
The personaeist architect’s practice has a close precursor in avatars, but unlike these, it transcends, while also making mundane, the astonishment towards the technological capacity to appear as other, the modelling of characters, manners, routines and spectrums in an abstract form of consistent thought and the forming of a projecting machine autonomous from its references. The personaes of the personaeist architect do not need a figure to substitute them, to uphold a fictional mask behind which there is supposed to be a hidden background. Distanced from any idea of fiction or foundation, the personaes are virtual beings, containers of a latent reality; they disfigure the idea of the figure itself through the production and multiplication of figures.
That which in the architectural culture of the nineties, not by coincidence associated with the emergence of digital culture, disassociates and polarises with a new form of the death of the author and the culture of the starchitects, is only the beginning, announced by the former and amputated a priori by the latter, of personaeism. Alternatively, by being confused by the uncritical cult of personality, or rather by its moralistic rejection where its forces crystalise beforehand into personalisms (a particular and reduced case of personaeism), the starchitect inverts their reason for being and returns to architecture as a prisoner of itself, converting its modalities into registerable signatures, its modulations into recognisable resources and, in terms of its projects, in the best of cases, into easily identifiable icons.
The bifurcation thresholds of this polarisation process, confused with the mystified figure of the journalist and thus becoming the self-referential and touristic practice of the media, which includes the architecturally productive personaes of Rem Koolhaas that foretold personaeism through first analogic and then digital collage, segregated their latent multiplicity and distributed them in identifiable but uncommunicated personas. These distributions are juxtaposed in series that mystify them without relating them and that are only capable of giving compartmentalised responses of the developer, artist, theorist, humourist, or entrepreneur type. They do not force convergences, nor do they synthesise personaes whose names would need to be invented through their formation and whose architectural consequences are unknown. Perhaps Philip Johnson should be turned to, for his multiplicity of personaes are still undocumented, unexplored and are at the service of the eclectic architect, a mask that flattens differences, neutralises the divergent forces and behind which, a multiplicity of personaes are recreated in each new project.
The personaeist architect transmits the classic values of the architect: integrity becomes passion for the interesting, honesty expands as will for consistency. In their modulation of the present’s signal, and in their capacity to differentiate noise in a series of distinguishable intensities, the personaes construct relevant unedited forms from which the material that constitutes them arises, reversing the traditional passive relationship of the epoch. Without a relevant external framework, the personaes risk falling into self-referential melancholies. Without a reversal of passivity and other similar moralistic forms, the personaes become mere representations, captured in the repetition of the same.
To activate their modalities, the personaes of a personaeist architect build an interface, almost like a game board or an operating theatre, in which the modalities are operatively activated, forming protocols for action and an etiquette that mediates from within a project’s multiplicity, hierarchically organising it and naming its singularities and new purposes. A true raison d'être for the personaes: only when the project defines itself as a singularity can it be said that these ideas are defined. Until then, they are only the erratic intentions, cultural poses or naturalised dogmas: they are half done and contain only an embryonic will of a project, extracted but not autonomous from the architecture that precedes them. Personaeism is, in the end, a constitutive trace of a meta-personae architect, who, for its organising impetus, is able to position itself artificially above itself, even if such action implies incarnating undesirable personaes. Their figures are embedded and forgotten in the projects that drive them.
Credit: From Starchitect to Constellationtect: Alejandro Zaera Polo, Álvaro Siza, Bernard Tschumi, Bjarke Ingels, Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Greg Lynn, Jacques Herzog, Jean Nouvel, Kazuyo Sejima, Norman Foster, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, Sou Fujimoto, Steven Holl, Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Winy Maas, Zaha Hadid.
Text: Manuel Mensa
Published in: Superdigital.
(Editor: Ciro Najle. CPAU, 2018)
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Walls, Holes, and Doors
Reducing all architecture to walls, holes and doors is schematic. In this definition, the floors are horizontal walls, and the stairs are the concatenation of tiny vertical walls with minuscule horizontal walls. These elemental restrictions are what allow a project’s next operation to be an expansive proliferation, where the number of elements and their combinations scale to quantities of many while their types retain their qualities. Faced with this redundancy and dominated by delusional reason, the projects concentrate forces to saturate them in a single behaviour that is characterised by simplicity, allowing the organisation of discrete elements to contrast in a controlled way with itself. The reasons why certain elements adopt forms, rhythms and positions are intertwined with the analogue purposes of other elements (the width of a room with the number of doors with the holes in the wall or the floor length with the slope of the next and its width). Through a slightly varied repetition, tending towards infinity, each project forms a type of variability, constituted by the possibility of its combinations, but without unfolding a large variety. Nevertheless, through the projects, a global and transversal character is built in which each process presents a singular variation (ramps and landings that bifurcate, modules that stack and move, rooms that shrink and enlarge).
The relations that build the elements are, first, only among themselves and mediated by their dependencies: there are no doors without holes and no holes without walls. Later toilets, sinks, showers, kitchens, washbasins, and beds are introduced, laden with only their attributes of conventional use so that they negotiate with the inertia that the elements build and are distributed in an analogic way. If the relations that the elements establish have the capacity to incorporate attributes, at first foreign but generating the appearance of having always been there, this happens because there really is nothing foreign, all is latently included from the beginning. A system that has the capacity to set in motion conventions and integrally include them can continue to do so with the certainty that it will not be captured by them. This guarantees self-imposed limitations that, although they are rudimentary, arithmetic and analogue, produce a split that allows the project to advance in tension with itself, accumulating these conventions and containing them in a concentric spiral always on the verge of escaping through tangents.
Some effects are beyond the understanding of the projects: it is the infantilising effect of the limits. The projects understand, in an alternative way, what is supposed to be understood. This alternative has two main qualities: it allows for delirium in a non-alternative way, which includes transcending it, and it shows that the material conditions necessary for this alternative to exist already exist. An example of the first quality: the projects contain images of other projects without crystallising themselves in any of them. An example of the second quality: the projects stress the social rules that produce them, specifying them through architectural elements.
Although they participate in the construction of the conditions that make possible their existence in the world, that which maintains them, the projects would need to absorb a high number of conventions which would reduce their brilliance and would allow them to hide in a mimetic appearance. The project’s actual state is more fleeting and fantasy than rooted and imperceptible. These qualities bestow it with ambitions of universality and abstraction that interrupt the lines that lead it to territories foreign to itself. In the same way that the organisation of a wall organises the inclusion of a toilet, it could continue incorporating more objects (which is where conventions are hiding): armchairs, basketball hoops, blenders, bookshelves, bottles, bricks, cabinets, ceiling lamps, chairs, cladding, coffee pots, computers, countertops, display counters, doorframes, generators, gowns, guitars, handles, latches, microscopes, nightstands, paintings, sectional boards, sewer pipes, shoes, shutters, speakers, stoves, televisions, vases, ventilators, vents, water tanks. Due to the way in which the projects build their organisation, they have the possibility to include conventions that are hidden, and at the same time very explicit, so that they build a substrate that, due to the excess that it shows, manages to conceal itself.
The projects are made up of the same as all architectural projects, but with one difference: they constitute the type of building that is used for a set purpose (a municipal transaction or a visit to a sick family member), but in which, once inside, and without forgetting what had to be done, the only thing that matters is to go up and down stairs, to open and close doors, retracing one’s steps over and over again. Feeling a slight unease but without distractions from any type of entertainment, we concentrate to discover what the building asks of us through its elements.
Published in: Stateless Architecture: Housing Multitudes (Architecture Archives, EAEU UTDT, 2018)
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World Structures
World Structures unfolds the intrinsic capabilities of medium-scale urban public buildings to create nodes that offer alternative spaces and times within the city that give them meaning. By internalizing the urban logics that determine them and sedimenting them into forms of material orders, World Structures define public meeting spaces capable of articulating a diversity of ways of life. Exemplary contemporary cases will be analyzed to extract structural systems, circulation regimes, usage distributions, envelope performances, and contextual relationships, with the goal of designing community leisure spaces. Addressing the deficit of covered and semi-covered recreational public spaces in the city and integrating heterogeneous uses at an inter-neighborhood scale, World Structures will establish their internal spatial rules to foster collective, impersonal forms of gathering in the future park located on the peripheral strip of the Municipal Golf Course of the City. Its topographical and landscape qualities, along with its size and location, have the potential to transform it, along with the appropriate building infrastructure, into a paradigm metropolitan park for the city.
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Máximo Sanchez Granel
Students: Martín Achinelli, Gerónimo Amado Cattaneo, Milagros Ines Ares, Jorge Alejandro Barja Añez, Tiago Buceta, Luciano Nicolás Cichanowski, Iván Santiago Corach, Julia Delbes, Martina Kase, Joaquín Khoury, Valentina Luján Maldonado, Facundo Nahuel Manfredi Ortiz, Julieta Miguel, Francesca Moretti, Valentina Sofía Puente, Sofía Ramos, Lola Sadovsky, Chiara Luján Scaglione, José Luis Augusto Silva Teixeira, Lucia Tahmazian Hopson, Trinidad Ticinese, Tomás Vazquez Gonzalez, Pedro Zapata
Di Tella Arquitectura, 2023
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MothershipTheatre
Thesis for an Opaque Architecture
Thesis 01
Modern Envelope
Modernism compresses everything in its envelope in order to achieve transparency. Materials and material systems represents ideal truth (limpid, pure, smooth, simple, condensed, almost invisible) becoming almost transparent itself, thus allowing transparency of the interior that encloses (the lack of an interior, the interior as spectacle).
Ideal Paradigm: A glass house
Thesis 02
Deep Section
An architecture of mass arrive at transparency through a process of rarefaction
developing a renewed model for multiple, even contradictory, faces and readings through the building section is a way to diverge from the modernist paradigm.
Thesis 03
Gothic Mies van der Rohe
The virtue of the Miesian design model is its assumption that a rich and varied architecture could be developed using only two geometrical and tectonic models: a gothic frame and a classical grid.
Thesis 04
Scales
A change in scale would have both quantitative and qualitative consequences.
Thesis 05
Miesian Neutral Datums
Ceiling is given to structure. Floor is plate or plinth.
In Miesian clearspan floor and ceiling are two hovering, apparently uninterrupted, neutral datums whose articulation is deliberately suppressed in favor of the expression infinite extent.
Part of Jesse Reiser's Lab 009 at the School of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Torcuato Di Tella University.
Director: Ciro Najle
Professor: Manuel Mensa
Students: Michel Hunziker, Celeste Mourad, Mariano Galindez, Cloe Sierchuk, Micaela Zadravec
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Never Even
Proyect: Manuel Mensa
Published in Symmetry: The One and the Many (David Salomon, Archivos de Arquitectura, 2018. EAEU UTDT)
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Stateless Architecture
Housing for Multitudes
According to Charles Jencks in his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1972), at the exact moment that the Pruitt Igoe housing complex collapses, modern architecture dies: a project that was pursuing, following the first precepts of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), to put architectural rationality at the service of well-being. Jencks considers that the physical existence of certain buildings demonstrates that modern ideals and their ethical project are not practicable, and therefore theory and the modern building collapse. What escapes this view is that the force that collapses the modern building does not arise from the failure of architecture but from that of a State that fails to articulate the project that architecture proposed. There are buildings that presume a state of things in which the construction and organization of a common life is a necessary condition so that the violence exerted by their operation does not transform it into ruin.
The course investigates and uses the tools and conceptual findings that modern architecture obtained from the history of architecture, making them explicit by materializing them in buildings. All possible normativity arises from experience and architectural materials function as norms that regulate and restrict the movement of bodies. Architecture separates one thing from another, offering physical blocks to the flows that try to cross them. These restrictions comprise, as a whole, territorial ordering systems that, deployed at borders, legislate, and contain the overlapping of the jurisdictions that they materialize. The architectural elements constitute norms that, in their combinatorics, establish regimes that regulate the possibilities of movements, interactions, positions and displacements of the bodies: a wall is what does not allow to be crossed, blocking the horizontal displacement, a hole is a portion of absent wall that regulates the crossings according to its dimensions, a door is a binary device that open is a hole and closed is a wall.
Studio: Project taught at the School of Architecture and Urban Studies of the Torcuato Di Tella University (2016). Fragments of the publication Arquitectura sin Estado: Albergues para Multitudes (Archivos de Arquitectura, EAEU UTDT, 2018)
Director: Ciro Najle
Edition and texts: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero
Students: Macarena Sánchez and Camila Sueyro, Martina Cingolani Rey and Manuel Maquirrain, Santiago Cornejo and Manuela Toto, Sol Sánchez Cimarelli and Sol Zamalloa, Camila Ambroggi and Felipe Ginevra, María Eugenia Cosentino and Agustina Mesa, Clara Sosa D'Este and Catalina Stok , María Eugenia Massa and Agustina Monopoli, Delfina Herrera and Magdalena Jenik.
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Crowds in Motion
Steps and Revolving Doors
Abrimos una puerta y, cuando todos terminaron de pasar, la cerramos. Después subimos un escalón, abrimos otra puerta, la cerramos, usamos la ducha, abrimos otra puerta, la cerramos, subimos otro escalón y prendimos el horno para cocinar algo. No podíamos distinguir qué eran los sonidos que venían de las puertitas que teníamos a un costado. Las abrimos y las cerramos varias veces para escuchar cómo el sonido cambiaba. Si estaban abiertas se escuchaban gritos; si las cerrábamos se escuchaban los mismos gritos pero un poco más apagados. Cuando la comida estuvo lista seguimos subiendo. En el escalón siguiente lavamos todo lo que habíamos usado para cocinar, y en el próximo algunos se lavaron las manos y otros cerraron dos puertas para hacer sus necesidades en un inodoro. La puerta siguiente estaba trabada, y del otro lado se escuchaban el ruido de una ducha, cantos y golpes en las paredes. Les cantamos una canción y se callaron. Pasamos por un vano y llegamos a otro escalón más grande en el que muchos de nosotros estaban usando las puertas giratorias para propulsarse, saltar en un escalón, rebotar contra la cama y entrar directo a la siguiente puerta giratoria. En el aire abrían la boca y les tirábamos restos de comida. Aunque era casi imposible, si embocábamos nos agradecían, y si no lo hacíamos, se enojaban y nos decían palabras hirientes. Después de un rato nos unimos a ellos y subimos, yendo de cama en cama, varios pisos. Cada vez íbamos más rápido, y en el camino inventamos una canción que acompañaba el sonido de las puertas giratorias y los resortes de las camas. En cada piso se nos sumaban muchos hasta que llegamos a unas camas donde había varios durmiendo. Frenamos y pedimos disculpas. Desde donde estábamos podíamos ver, a través de un hueco, a otros enfrente que también estaban durmiendo. Les gritamos pero no se despertaron. Después abrimos una puerta y nos sentamos en un escalón con los pies hacia el hueco. Sentimos cómo entraban el aire y la luz. Hacia abajo vimos muchas puertas, y enfrente había otros que estaban sentados mirando hacia donde estábamos nosotros. Los saludamos pero no nos respondieron, así que les tiramos pedazos de comida. Ellos hicieron lo mismo. Al principio nos reímos todos, pero cuando nos entró comida en los ojos comenzamos a amenazarnos mutuamente. Les dijimos que íbamos a ir hasta donde estaban así podíamos pelearnos. Empezamos a correr con mucha furia, saltamos de un escalón al siguiente, esquivamos a los que saltaban de cama en cama, abrimos puertas, las cerramos con mucha fuerza, despertamos a los que estaban durmiendo, pasamos por puertas giratorias, doblamos a la izquierda, subimos más escalones, entramos a otras puertas giratorias, nos tropezamos con una cama, volvimos para atrás, giramos en dirección contraria, y nos dimos cuenta de que ya no estábamos más enojados. Subimos hasta la parte más alta y vimos allá, muy lejos, a los que se habían enojado con nosotros. Nos saludaron sonriendo, y nosotros hicimos lo mismo.
Ramps and Landings
Intentamos pasar de una habitación a la siguiente, pero alguien había dejado una de las camas en una posición que trababa el paso. Bajamos por una de las rampas para intentar rodear el bloqueo. Entramos a una habitación, pasamos por encima de una cama, la rotamos, doblamos a la izquierda, rotamos otra cama, pero nos confundimos y terminamos adentro de una habitación donde había un inodoro y una ducha. Nos quedamos un rato adentro, sentados, mirando por los vanos y saludando a los que pasaban. Salimos todos por vanos diferentes, subimos una rampa y corrimos por los techos para ver quién de nosotros llegaba más rápido hasta la parte más alta. Cuando miramos para el costado vimos que muchos de nosotros hacían lo mismo, así que nos mezclamos para armar una carrera más grande. A la mitad de la carrera volvimos a entrar a una habitación y, cuando salimos, como la rampa bajaba, nosotros bajamos. Aunque después quisimos seguir subiendo, doblamos a la izquierda y entramos a otra habitación. Quisimos movernos lo más rápido posible, pero después de pasar por el segundo vano, se cruzaban tantas carreras que nos quedamos trabados adentro de una habitación. Hicimos fuerza en todas las direcciones y, mientras tanto, los que aprovechaban para hacer sus necesidades o para ducharse, no veían que a nosotros nos estaban dando comida. Los que estaban en la cama la hicieron girar en todas las direcciones posibles hasta que destrabaron el paso hacia una de las habitaciones de al lado, pero solo lograron que entrasen muchos más. Empezamos a empujarnos. Algunos insultaban y otros escupían hasta que nos dimos cuenta de que podíamos alinear de a una todas las camas y destrabar el paso. Fuimos de una cama a la siguiente, cantando agarrados de las manos y, cuando nos cruzábamos con otros, los sumábamos aunque no quisieran. Como nadie se soltaba las manos, las carreras se bifurcaban, conectándose, desconectándose y armando una cadena que recorría todas las habitaciones. Lo celebrábamos con varios gritos. Entrabamos y salíamos de las habitaciones, sumando a todos a la cadena, doblando a la izquierda y a la derecha y subiendo hasta que llegamos a la parte más baja de la parte alta. Unos subían corriendo hacia un lado, otros hacia el otro, hasta que llegamos a la cima de la parte alta y festejamos levantando las manos. Todo siguió llenándose hasta que los del medio empujaron a los que estábamos en los extremos y, agarrados de las manos, bajamos colgados armando una cadena vertical. Cuando llegamos a la parte más baja, volvimos corriendo hasta la parte más alta para sostener a los que estaban bajando colgados. Después nuevamente subían y nosotros bajábamos, y así sucesivamente. El momento en el que pasábamos colgados en el aire de una punta a la otra, agarrados al de arriba y agarrados por el de abajo, era el que más miedo daba, pero también el más lindo, porque podíamos ver el sol a través de los vanos.
Corridors and Curved Walls
Los pasillos centrales estaban tan llenos que no podíamos ver dónde terminaban. A la izquierda estaban las primeras escaleras pero nadie bajaba por ahí. Corrimos hasta donde se cruzaban cuatro pasillos, nos chocamos, nos amontonamos y nos empujamos hacia las escaleras hasta que liberamos espacio. Había que tener cuidado de no caerse por los huecos desde donde subía olor a comida. Cuando miramos, pudimos ver que muchos de nosotros estaban cocinando. Los saludamos y nos devolvieron el saludo. Estaban muy lejos, así que no sabíamos si el saludo era para nosotros. Les pedimos comida pero no nos escucharon. Como los pasillos se seguían llenando, caminamos hacia las escaleras de las puntas pero nos trabamos, porque chocamos los que subíamos con los que bajaban. Nos quedamos un rato amontonados mirando hacia afuera el atardecer. Hacia ambos lados había escaleras que terminaban unos pisos por encima nuestro, y muchos las aprovechaban para sentarse y mirar a los que pasaban. Donde se cruzaban los cuatro pasillos también vimos cocinas y, como estaban cerca, abrimos la boca y pedimos que nos tiren comida. Vimos cómo la comida cayó por el hueco, mientras que alguien de una cocina de abajo intentó agarrarla pero no pudo. No escuchamos el ruido que hizo la comida cuando golpeó contra la parte más baja. Los pasillos en los que estábamos también se llenaron, así que bajamos por una escalera mucho más angosta que las anteriores. No nos sentíamos apretados. Fuimos a otro pasillo que era aún más chico que los otros, pero cuando llegamos ya estaba lleno. Fuimos hasta el centro, pedimos comida en una de las cocinas y, como el hueco era tan pequeño, nos sentimos tentados a saltar, pero no lo hicimos, aunque nos alentaron para que lo hiciéramos. Nos tiraron comida y la agarramos. Lo que se caía no sabíamos adónde iba a parar. Compartimos la comida entre todos los del pasillo y, para festejar, aplaudimos y cantamos una canción. Después saltamos e intentamos agarrar de los pies a los que miraban desde las escaleras de más arriba para que se nos unan. Algunos cantaban con nosotros y otros pedían que paremos, aunque no les hicimos caso. Llegaban muchos desde otros pasillos y en seguida se nos sumaban. Si los de las escaleras de más arriba se tiraban encima nuestro los aplaudíamos. Cuando nos cansamos subimos por una escalera muy angosta por la que pasábamos solo de costado. Llegamos a una habitación que conectaba con otras cuatro. Usamos los inodoros para hacer nuestras necesidades y, cuando nos duchamos, todo se llenó de vapor. Cuando salimos descansamos un rato en las camas y vimos el sol atravesar el vapor. Después encendimos la cocina mientras esperábamos que lleguen los del pasillo a pedir comida. Cuando llegaron les tiramos pedazos y, como no lo habían pedido, se enojaron con nosotros, aunque no demasiado. Nos disculpamos y los invitamos con señas a que vengan adonde estábamos.
Double Doors and Steps
Corrimos en círculos mientras llamábamos a los que estaban en las otras habitaciones. Saltamos de escalón en escalón con las piernas juntas, pasamos frente a una puerta y llegamos a una pared. Doblamos a la derecha y corrimos hasta un extremo de la habitación. Después bajamos saltando hasta el otro extremo, doblamos a la derecha y volvimos a empezar. Si una de las puertas se abría cuando estábamos pasando y nos golpeábamos con alguien que entraba le pedíamos disculpas y pasábamos a la habitación de al lado. Si no, lo sumábamos a la ronda aunque no quisiera. Los que entraban por alguna de las cuatro puertas se metían a la fuerza y después no querían salir. Intentamos echarlos. Éramos tantos adentro de la habitación que ya no podíamos movernos. Empujamos en todas las direcciones pero después nos quedamos quietos un rato muy largo. Alguien quiso empezar una canción pero estábamos muy apretados, así que nos quedamos en silencio. La habitación estaba tan llena que algunos fuimos empujados hacia las escaleras del centro y, sin quererlo, pasamos a la habitación de arriba. Como estaba vacía descansamos un rato, mientras mirábamos hacia la habitación de abajo. Aunque nadie nos saludaba no nos ofendimos. En una puertita encontramos una cocina y preparamos comida. Los que olieron la comida desde abajo entraron a nuestra habitación, pero en vez de comer comenzaron a saltar de escalón en escalón armando una nueva ronda. Les pedimos que paren. Estábamos cansados y queríamos subir la escalera para ir a la próxima habitación de arriba, pero no nos dejaban, así que tuvimos que saltar con ellos con la comida en las manos, hasta que llegamos a la puerta y pasamos a la habitación de al lado, que sí estaba vacía. Enseguida se llenó con una ronda, así que pasamos a la siguiente habitación donde estaba pasando más o menos lo mismo. Fuimos a la habitación de al lado donde había mucho vapor que salía de las duchas prendidas, pero como nadie las estaba usando las usamos nosotros, nos sentamos abajo del agua y cantamos una canción. Después usamos los inodoros, nos lavamos las manos y pasamos a la habitación de al lado. Nos dividimos en cuatro, salimos por las puertas y formamos una ronda que unía todas las habitaciones. Saltamos los escalones, abrimos una puerta, pasamos a la habitación siguiente, gritamos lo que estábamos haciendo, y los de las otras rondas se nos sumaron. A medida que pasábamos de habitación en habitación la ronda crecía cada vez más y se movía en círculos espiralados, hasta que nos encontramos en la habitación del centro. Nos saludamos. Pasamos al siguiente nivel y fuimos en dirección contraria a la que veníamos. Llegamos al perímetro y lo recorrimos, mientras mirábamos el atardecer. Algunos se quejaron porque les molestaba la lluvia. Cambiamos de dirección y llegamos al centro. Cambiamos otra vez la dirección y volvimos al perímetro. Así sucesivamente hasta que llegamos a la parte más alta, donde nos dividimos por habitaciones y bajamos lo más rápido que pudimos por las escaleras de los huecos hasta la parte más baja, y volvimos a empezar.
Stairs and Slabs
Nos dividimos y bajamos por cuatro escaleras diferentes, mientras todos mirábamos hacia el centro de la habitación. Bajamos otras cuatro escaleras y, cuando llegamos a la siguiente habitación, nos saludamos y subimos por la escalera opuesta a la que veníamos. Todos hacían lo mismo y, después de subir otra escalera, nos volvíamos a cruzar, pero esta vez sin saludarnos. Algunos se enojaban. Subimos unas escaleras y comprobamos que no llovía. Bajamos otras escaleras. La habitación de al lado estaba vacía, así que nos sentamos en el medio a esperar. Los que venían desde las cuatro escaleras nos esquivaban pero, como se chocaban entre sí, se enojaban y se peleaban entre ellos. Nosotros no nos disculpamos, y nos dijeron cosas que nos hicieron sentir muy mal. Los que se tropezaron y se cayeron al piso se quedaron con nosotros y, cuando la habitación se llenó, nos unimos a los que pasaban, hasta que llegamos a una habitación con inodoro. Como nadie lo estaba usando nos sentamos e hicimos nuestras necesidades. Enfrente había una ducha con el agua corriendo, así que aprovechamos para bañarnos y cantar una canción. Después cerramos la ducha para no desperdiciar agua, pero alguien abrió la canilla del lavabo. Desde la habitación de abajo se escuchaban gritos y ruidos. Subimos y bajamos otra escalera para ver de qué se trataba, pero llegamos a una habitación con una cama sin sábanas. Nos subimos encima y empezamos a saltar. Lo hacíamos rítmicamente, y cada uno gritaba el número de saltos que hacía. Los que llegaban desde las escaleras se nos sumaban y saltaban con nosotros. Los ritmos se desfasaban logrando que siempre hubiera alguien en el aire y alguien acostado en la cama. Lo que estábamos haciendo atrajo a muchos más, y los que no tenían lugar para entrar en la cama nos miraban desde arriba amontonados en las cuatro escaleras de los costados. Cuando se armaban formas que les parecían lindas aplaudían y gritaban, pero cuando no les gustaban nos pedían a los gritos que los dejáramos entrar a la cama. Había empujones entre unos y otros hasta que los que estaban en la cama pasaron a la escalera. Chiflamos para quejarnos de que no nos gustaba lo que estaba pasando, pero todo se confundió con los gritos, así que nos fuimos. Después de subir la mitad de otra escalera vimos hacia arriba que en una habitación algunos estaban cocinando, después señalaban a los que miraban, los hacían subir en andas y les daban de comer. Los que terminaban de cocinar se tiraban rodando sobre nosotros, y los que terminaban de comer, después de lavar los platos, preparaban otra comida y elegían a alguien para que subiera. Lo repetimos muchas veces hasta que no tuvimos más hambre. Bajamos dos escaleras y vimos hacia abajo que en una habitación muchos bailaban. Cuando pasamos por el medio intentamos movernos para sincronizar con el baile. No lo logramos. Después subimos unas escaleras y había muchos mirando hacia arriba a otros que estaban gritando. Les gritamos desde abajo pero nos pidieron que hagamos silencio hasta que fuera nuestro turno, así que nos sentamos a esperar.
Columns and Corridors
Abrimos todas las puertas al mismo tiempo y nos metimos en las camas a dormir. Los que no encontraron lugar se quedaron parados a un costado o se fueron al pasillo. Cuando nos despertamos vimos a través de los vanos que nos saludaban desde el pasillo. Devolvimos algunos saludos y empezamos una cuenta regresiva en voz alta desde nueve hasta uno. Los de los pasillos acompañaban con aplausos. Salimos de las camas. En el momento en el que abrimos las puertas para pasar a la habitación siguiente, vimos cómo se abrían las puertas anteriores y los que entraban se metían en las camas en las que habíamos estado. No nos saludamos. Cerramos las puertas y nos dividimos en grupos de tres y por turnos, unos cocinaban, otros comían y otros lavaban. Después unos comían, otros lavaban y otros cocinaban, así sucesivamente. Por los vanos pudimos ver que en otra habitación algunos se estaban duchando. Les tiramos pedazos de comida y abrimos las puertas siguientes. Nos miraron mal. Atrás nuestro, los que entraban nos gritaban quejas, pero cerramos las puertas y cada uno se sentó en un inodoro. Como había lugares libres gritamos a los del pasillo que vengan. Cuando se abrieron las puertas vimos que los que venían atrás nuestro nos hacían señas. Se las devolvimos y se rieron. Nos lavamos las manos con cuidado de no salpicar, pero alguien empezó una guerra de agua y jabón y, aunque tuvimos mucho cuidado de no inundar el piso, los que seguían sentados en los inodoros pidieron que paremos. Les pedimos disculpas y, aunque no estaba muy sucio, limpiamos como pudimos lo que habíamos hecho. Dejamos abiertas las canillas para distraer a los que estaban entrando por las puertas y, como había muy pocas puertas para pasar a la habitación siguiente, nos amontonamos haciendo fuerza. No podíamos pasar, así que los que venían atrás nuestro se sentaron en los inodoros y nos pidieron que nos fuéramos porque era su turno. Hicimos más fuerza hasta que todos pasaron y nos metimos a las duchas. Nos sentamos y nos quedamos abajo del agua mientras hacíamos sonidos con la boca y empezábamos canciones. El vapor del agua hizo que los del pasillo no nos pudieran ver, así que perdimos la vergüenza y cantamos cosas lindas sobre ellos. Cerramos las duchas, abrimos la puerta muy despacio, y entramos a una habitación muy larga y angosta. Nos fuimos acumulando hasta que no hubo más espacio y, aunque queríamos pasar a la siguiente habitación, por el vapor no podíamos ver dónde estaba la puerta. Nos quedamos quietos mientras los del pasillo nos hacían masajes para tranquilizarnos. Cuando se abrió la puerta anterior y llegaron los que venían atrás nuestro los recibimos con un aplauso pero ellos se quedaron en silencio, con cara de enojados, y nos reprocharon que tardamos mucho en abrirles. Los del pasillo también aplaudieron, así que los invitamos a pasar. Cuando se abrió la puerta que estaba al final de la habitación, entraron muchos más que venían de otras duchas y juntos, cantamos hasta que se disipó el vapor.
High Walls and Stairs
Nos movimos muy despacio para no despertar a los que estaban durmiendo. Nos agachamos para pasar por debajo de una escalera mientras subíamos por otra que conectaba con una escalera cuadrada. Mientras gritábamos las diferentes formas de cómo hacer para bajar, nos movíamos y saltábamos de escalón en escalón, usando una sola pierna, hasta que llegamos a una habitación. Miramos para arriba y vimos que la escalera estaba llena. Todos bajaban agarrados de las manos, algunos jugaban a saltar al vacío sin soltarse, otros jugaban a quedarse quietos en un escalón hasta que se formaba un amontonamiento, y otros subían la escalera mientras armaban nudos. Los que se tropezaban se acostaban boca arriba hasta que alguien los ayudara a levantase y, si nadie los ayudaba, rodaban hacia abajo. Los que llegaban a la habitación nos empujaban contra uno de los cuatros vanos de las esquinas, hacia pasillos muy angostos en los que teníamos una pared en la espalda y otra en la frente. Cuando el movimiento se detenía nos quedábamos quietos, mientras escuchábamos las respiraciones y con los ojos cerrados intentábamos tocar los muros con la boca. En la habitación siguiente había inodoros y duchas, así que aprovechamos para bañarnos y hacer nuestras necesidades. El movimiento volvió a empezar y en otra habitación nos encontramos con los que venían en dirección contraria. Nos chocamos y en el amontonamiento surgieron formas de pirámides y cubos, pero también de cilindros y hexágonos, hasta que armamos una doble hélice y nos quedamos quietos un rato bastante largo. Los que estaban más alto sacaban de la habitación de al lado las sábanas de las camas y las movían de un lado hacia el otro. Los que mirábamos desde abajo veíamos cómo el cielo se transparentaba en las sábanas. Cubrimos el techo de la habitación cuando empezó a llover y el agua que se acumulaba formó un chorro que caía encima nuestro. Levantamos las manos y celebramos con un grito muy fuerte. Desde algún lugar nos devolvieron el grito. Seguimos avanzando. Siempre a una habitación grande le seguía una más chica y viceversa. En las habitaciones más grandes esperábamos hasta que se llenaran, para que el empuje nos llevara a otro pasillo. A medida que avanzábamos sentíamos un sonido cada vez más fuerte. Nos soltamos las manos y corrimos hasta que llegamos a una habitación muy grande, sin techo y llena de cocinas. Formamos una ronda que recorría las cocinas, preparaba comida, lavaba los platos, y abría y cerraba heladeras. Por los cuatro vanos de la habitación gigante llegaban muchos que se unían a la ronda o continuaban, formando una cruz con los otros que entraban mientras intentaban agarrar algo de comida. Los que lo conseguían le daban un pedazo al que tenían adelante y otro al que tenían atrás. Después de un rato la habitación se llenó, y tanto la ronda como la cruz se unieron formando una onda que se movía hacia un lado, hacia el otro, y después subía, haciendo que no pudiéramos tocar el piso con los pies.
Beams and Columns
Les hicimos señas y les gritamos a los que estaban en la parte más alta, pero no nos escucharon. Subimos las primeras escaleras, nos desviamos y chocamos contra un muro. Miramos hacia los costados y vimos que muchos de nosotros subían y bajaban por otras escaleras. Nos trepamos a las columnas y caminamos por las vigas haciendo equilibrio. Saltamos alternadamente las vigas hasta que se armaron ritmos desfasados. Los de abajo intentaron tirarnos, pero no pudieron. Desde arriba pudimos ver que en una habitación algunos dormían. Hicimos ruidos muy fuertes y los despertamos. Se pararon sobre las camas y armaron sogas con las sábanas para tratar de atraparnos, pero no pudieron. Nos disculpamos pero no respondieron. Seguimos caminando por las vigas hasta que nos bajamos porque vimos que algunos corrían en círculos alrededor de unas cocinas y estaban preparando comida. Corrimos con ellos y nos ofrecieron unos pedazos. Aunque el olor de la comida era feo, para que no se enojen aceptamos, pero después la tiramos por el hueco que estaba en el medio. Nos amenazaron y peleamos mientras corríamos en círculos. Nos alejábamos y nos acercábamos del hueco lastimándonos, hasta que los que estaban atrás nuestro avanzaban, gritaban y nos empujaban. Teníamos que hacer fuerza para no bajar las escaleras, y en las siguientes algunos de nosotros nos pusimos a cada uno de los costados y unimos las manos armando una barrera que subía y bajaba. A los que lográbamos pasar nos aplaudían y felicitaban, y a los que no les ponían caras agresivas y los obligaban a meterse más hacia adentro. Pedimos que se disculpen, pero no lo hicieron. Caminamos hacia adentro y lo único que había de luz llegaba por los huecos, que también traían olor a comida y gritos de los que llegaban hasta la parte más alta. Había tan poca luz que cuando entramos a una habitación con camas nos acostamos a dormir. Cuando nos despertamos ya no había más luz. Intentamos salir de la habitación pero terminamos adentro de otra habitación con un inodoro y una ducha. Los usamos para bañarnos y hacer nuestras necesidades. Dejamos prendida la ducha. Salimos y como estaba tan lleno armamos una escalera humana y trepamos por los huecos. En cada piso algunos bajaban, preparaban algo para comer y lo repartían entre todos. Seguimos subiendo y nos dimos cuenta de que sí había luz, solo que muy poca porque atardecía. Llegamos a la parte más alta y vimos que el sol entre las vigas y las columnas hacía sombras muy lindas y confusas. Pudimos ver a los que estaban en la parte más baja de un lado y en la parte más baja del otro. Les gritamos que se agarraran de las manos y corrimos hacia abajo en las dos direcciones, mientras ellos subían. Cuando nos chocamos en el medio nos metimos hacia adentro y volvimos a subir a la parte más alta por otras escaleras.
Treads and Raises
Empujamos todos juntos para abrir una puerta y, como estaba trabada desde afuera, nos acostamos a esperar. Por uno de los vanos de la habitación en la que estábamos podíamos ver muy lejos que en otra habitación muchos estaban peleando. No llegábamos a escuchar qué es lo que se decían. Les gritamos que paren, pero como no nos escucharon miramos el atardecer, que se veía a través de la parte de abajo de las habitaciones. Nos distrajimos pero tuvimos cuidado de no caernos por el hueco. Cuando la puerta se destrabó y pasamos a la siguiente habitación nos chocamos con los que ya estaban ahí. Miramos hacia arriba y vimos que en otras habitaciones muchos intentaban abrir o cerrar puertas. Algunos podían y otros no. Nos gritamos cosas hirientes porque sabíamos que para cuando lleguen a donde estábamos ya íbamos a estar en otra habitación. Ellos hacían lo mismo. Fuimos hacia la izquierda y a medida que abríamos las puertas entrabamos a habitaciones más pequeñas. Como no había espacio para todos nos dispersamos subiendo hacia las habitaciones de los costados. Para subir nos teníamos que ayudar haciendo escaleras humanas, porque algunas habitaciones estaban más altas que otras. A veces lo que se armaba no tenía ninguna organización, así que chiflábamos para impedir lo feo y saltábamos excitados, hasta que las formas resultantes eran tan lindas que nos olvidábamos hacia dónde estábamos yendo y nos sentábamos a mirar y a cantar canciones que describían la forma de lo que hacíamos. En las habitaciones de más arriba pasaba lo mismo, y se formaban cascadas de escaleras humanas que se conectaban en espirales y dobles hélices, pero nunca en pirámides ni en hexágonos. Los que estaban yendo en dirección contraria a la nuestra, al abrir las puertas desarmaban las formas. No nos daba melancolía ni tristeza. Se disculpaban y eso nos enojaba, pero se unían a nosotros y armábamos cascadas que eran cada vez más grandes y crecían hasta casi tocar la habitación de arriba. Pero después se volvían a desarmar por los que entraban por las puertas, que después se nos unían para armar una forma aún más grande. Después de un rato algunos seguimos yendo hacia donde nos dirigíamos, y llegamos a una habitación con inodoros y duchas. Cerramos todas las puertas, prendimos todas las duchas, llenamos todo de vapor, e hicimos nuestras necesidades. Los que se cansaron de las cascadas querían entrar, pero no los dejamos, aunque había lugares libres. Golpearon las puertas y nosotros les cantamos una canción. Se quejaron y pasamos a la habitación siguiente. Nos dispersamos cada uno en una cocina y preparamos comida. El que terminaba le tiraba un pedazo de comida al de la habitación de abajo, hasta que llegaba al último. A medida que pasábamos de habitación en habitación éramos cada vez menos, hasta que solo quedó uno que, al abrir la puerta más chiquita, encontró del otro lado, en una habitación muy grande, a muchos empujando para abrir una puerta.
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Steps and Revolving Doors
Ramps and Landings
Corridors and Curved Walls
Double Doors and Steps
Stairs and Slabs
Columns and Corridors
High Walls and Stairs
Beams and Columns
Treads and Raises
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Steps and Revolving Doors
Ramps and Landings
Corridors and Curved Walls
Double Doors and Steps
Stairs and Slabs
Columns and Corridors
High Walls and Stairs
Beams and Columns
Treads and Raises
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Singular 00
Director: Ciro Najle
Editorial Team: Anna Font, Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Carolina Telo
Archivos de Arquitectura 2018, Escuela de Arquitectura y Estudios Urbanos, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella
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Avant-Gardes or Nothing
Text 1
Text 2
Prospective Manifestos
In today's architectural culture, where any affirmative position quickly crystallizes in the representation of dogmas that arerepeated, perpetuating similarities, and diluting the vitality that drives them, to decline in instrumentalization as a service or take refuge in empty appearances, Avant-gardes or Nothing pretends to reverse the current resignation, from its basic logics, with the simple operation of affirming that the spirit of the artistic avant-gardes of the beginning of the 20th century has yet to be overcome. No longer with the melancholic repetition of its images or actions by means of mechanical pantomimes, nor by evading their truncated wills, but instead, by recognizing in the current architectural trends the truncated process initiated by the avant-gardes. Through various analyses of their manifestos, their vehement spirits are modeled and their affirmative candoris adopted to make their childish worldviews their own, in order to distinguish their most significant nuances and gradients, using their force to push them beyond their ideological presumptions. This process, which involves closely linking the texts with the form of architecture they propose, aims to shake the stage of contemporary architecture by creating new isms, not as unappealable foundations, but as engines capable of setting in motion architectures capable of overcoming the same reasons that drive them forward.
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Luciano Brina, Florencia Fernández, Lucía Carli
Di Tella Arquitectura
2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
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Oswald Mathias Ungers Equals One
The autonomy of architecture claimed by O.M.U. is based on its promises of transcendence (of form over function, of buildings over time) where concepts have no temporal or territorial determination and are, therefore, as eternal as they are inert.
O.M.U. abstracts and reduces architecture to a minimum located in geometric orders that produce a unity achieved by force of containment and repression. Each of his projects presses multiple solutions (structural, aesthetic, proportional, geometric, finishing, chromatic) into cohesive frameworks. For O.M.U., these frameworks are archetypes and essences found, abstracted from the History of Architecture. This conden-sation is subject to a nostalgic operation, insofar as it concentrates on linear ideas of the permanent, but it is at the same time what allows him to contain the History of Architecture, internalized, in his projects, inhibit-ed, although, by the possibility of surpassing them (assuming the permutation of what remains by what be-comes).
In O.M.U. the constitutive basis, single but multiple, of the general project that the course proposes is al-ready partially contained in the individual projects in the form of each of the interacting ideas within them. In order to open up the projects, it will be necessary to distill these ideas in the form of subsystems, to find variations that lead to exaggeration, driven by the construction of new meanings that finally reveal new global characterizations.
““New Abstraction in architecture will revive basic concepts of space which have occurred in all historical periods: the four-column space, the concept of walls, the courtyard block, the gate, the cruciform building, the square, the circle, the cylinder, the pyramid, and the perfect cube -regular geometric and volumetric forms which as universal orders of abstraction represent a quality of permanence. It is not the differentiation of color and form, of material and style, that will be of importance and significance, not the abundance of shapes, volumes, and spaces, but the restriction and the economy of means. The new Abstraction should be the representation of the essential.”
“Beauty is agreement and harmony of the parts in relation to a whole, to which they are linked according to a certain number, delimitation and placement...”
“The Villa Adriana can be seen as the end of the age of creation, but it is also the beginning of the age of classicism, highlighting the richness of cultures consecrated by the veneration of generations. It is the first evidence of an architecture of memory, collecting sets of pieces of history, which have left traces.”
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Gustavo Bianchi
Students: Agustín Bustamante Jara, Azul Garcia Martinez, Belen Torres, Bernardita Bonaccorso, Celina Ghigliazza, David Jarrin, Donatella Araujo Lefosse, Federico Tomaselli, Francisca Gil Sosa, Ignacio Andersson, Juan Cruz Granda, Juan Manuel Fernandes, Julián Dieguez, Lucia Etchebarne, Lucía Reyero, Milagros Biaggi, Nicolás Boscoboinik, Nicole Damm, Paula Cracco, Pilar Scotto, Sol Fugardo, Tomás Ribotta.
Di Tella Arquitectura, 2017
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The House of the Ultimate Archetype
Text
A one-kilometer east-west linear housing building is organized as a repetitive sequence of twenty interlocking square cloisters and towers. Each cloister is fragmented in nine small cloisters by a grid of linear buildings. The housing units hosted in the inner reticular matrix are organized around small patios, each room having access to two opposing open spaces. The four sides of the large cloisters are constituted by enfilades of eight rooms. The enfilades of the exterior sides configure the north and south façades of the long complex and are divided in two dwelling units with three rooms each. Rooms are connected through central hypostyle corridors that organize the units in three parallel bays. The intersection of the two hypostyle corridors at the corners gives way to a triangular node: a communal hallway articulates the external-façade enfilades with the internal-perpendicular ones. The internal enfilades articulate the relationship between cloister and tower. Twenty towers arise from the enfilade level and are organized along the one-kilometer long axis of symmetry. The alternation between the towers and the cloisters configures a multi-centric structure at two extreme scales: the domestic scale of the small cloisters, which structures the interior of dwellings, and the territorial scale of the colonnade of towers, which monumentalizes the building as a single rhythmical operation.
Professors: Anna Font, Manuel Mensa
Students: Camila Arretche, Michela Conti, Mariano Galíndez, Michel Hunziker, Celeste Mourad, Melissa Pomsztein
Di Tella Arquitectura, 2018
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Utopia Machine Gun
Text
Techniques
Utopia Machine Gun sets out to explore the capacity of images of architectural utopias to restore the propositional forces to contemporary architecture. Frequently discarded as the byproduct of unrealizable dreams, architectural utopias are interesting not only because of what appears to be impossible but in the very materials from which these alleged impossibilities are made of. The representational techniques of utopian images becomes the source and the means through which empty rhetoric and superficial appearance are cleared away, to let shine the gracefully complex architectural organizations. Through a series of analyses, an attempt is made to increase utopia’s technical imagination by entangling them with their concepts and creating from them a series of artificial personaes capable of controlling and implementing the projects that emerge from these relationships.
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero
Di Tella Arquitectura
2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021
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Vicious Functionalisms
Text
Espacios de ocio vicioso
Gaming centers, billiards, arcades, sports betting halls, poker rooms, slot machines, bingos and game fairs are commercial establishments where gambling-related vices have the space they need to unfold. Their interiors pursue the objective of maximizing the amount of time spent inside them so that the ludic activity, linked in surprisingly creative ways to chance, progressively transforms into a self-destructive infinite loop with no difference between its beginning and its end.
All machines with their sizes, their operating protocols, their technical requirements and their auxiliary services are contained by larger machines that work to dissolve the seams between the pre-trance state and the trance state. These machines, the true machines at play, are architectural machines. In that way the gaming machines summon and suggestively invite entry so that the architectural machines that contain them link their capture by artificially recreating a world of comfort and infinite time.
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Luciano Brina
Students: Micaela Alegre Sarthou, Martina Baredes, Wenceslao Campomar, Felipe de Achaval, Alvaro Augusto del Monte, Joaquín Dowdall, Ana Paula Fiorio, Paloma García Yad, Ian Matias Giribaldi, Candela María Granito, Sofía Kesting Durand, Federico Lacal, Florencia Lostri, María Candelaria Moroni, Sofía Pedro, Marco Pierdominici, Pedro Ariel Rovasio Aguirre, Valentina Saieg, Guido Raúl Sánchez Cimarelli, Oriana Sovieri, Sol Agustina Torres, María Victoria Verellen, Francisco Alejandro Verni.
Di Tella Arquitectura, 2017
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The Empire of Architectural Values
The act of individuation consists not in suppressing the problem, but in integrating the elements of the disparateness into a state of coupling which ensures its internal resonance.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.246
The values that architecture promotes are contained, not in its public discourses, nor in its specialized critiques, nor in its theories or manifestos, but in the various forms of order that coexist simultaneously in a state of dispute within its material organization. The Empire of Architectural Values operates through the unleashing, using current techniques capable of transcending representational coverings, of latent architectural values contained in architectural projects, whose historical status lies within a range spanning from the canonized to the discarded.
Aligned with the lineage of those architects who have been inspired, as if guided by a terrible revelation, to project architecture as a form of order traversing its established domains, it seeks to surpass its mechanistic versions, like the machines for living, where its schematism fails due to the limitation of its thinking; or its more symbolist lineages, such as continuous monuments, where its totemic archaism fails to capture chaotic complexities; or its current historicist versions, where history is returned to as an apparatus of representation and image repetition; or its current technocratic versions, where technology is deified as a means that over-technifies and over-determines form until it is emptied of content. The Empire of Architectural Values seeks, before advancing over new disciplinary fields and domains, to increase architecture's power over itself by introducing its interior otherness.
Beginning with projects by Oswald Mathias Ungers, and continuing with the development of current techniques capable of creatively dealing with use in architecture, the development of the research line continues with the integration of both through work on projects by Philip Johnson.
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Valeria Ospital
Students: Benjamín Ballester, María Barbiso, Malena Bilik, Lourdes Castro, Sofía Catalano, Fabrizio Augusto Cimbaro, Luis Fernando Dávila Oyague, Elisa Etchevehere, María José Ferrari Frigo, María del Pilar Ferreira, Marcos Nicolás Gimeno, Mateo Juncos, Faustina Lorda, Betiana Karla Luna, María del Pilar Nuzzolese, Mora Petti Pagadizabal, Emilia Piccione, Luz Belén Raigada, Mauro Iván Schenone, Juan Cruz Toyos Podzus, Ana Victoria Tula, Alex Wang
Di Tella Arquitectura, 2019
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Refined Masses
Professors: Manuel Mensa, Jerónimo Baillat
Students: Francisco Jorge Agardy, María Florencia Albornoz, Camila Leoni Amoroso, Valentina Sol Balancini, Paula Banchik, Bruno Darío Chiabotto, Vicente Crivello Ballester, María Lucila Devoto, Máximo Felgueras, Pedro Andrés Huberman, Valentina Makuc, Estefania Noguera, Martina Prozapas, Miranda Laia Rodríguez, María Belén Romano, Salvador Velesquen
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Spending the Night Together
Text
Interviews
Experimenting with oneself, embarking on chaotic adventures, undertaking transcendental research, going in search of the unknown, betting each time turning chance into a matter of affirmation, seeing without one's eyes, cruelly destroying clichés, seem to be the actions that undertake by those who venture into the chaos of vital experimentation. Spending the Night Together is a series of twelve consecutive interviews between dusk of one day and dawn of the next. Ten people talk with Manuel Mensa and Lux Valladolid about their relationship with darkness, night, and chaos, but above all about how they make their practice a way of investigating and going towards the unknown. The conversations took place between 6pm and 8am and lasted approximately sixty minutes each.
Interviews: Lux Valladolid, Manuel Mensa Technician: Nacho Avilés Music: Lucas Barbuzzi Art Direction: Magdalena Molinari, Miguel Marino Piso 29 Octubre 2023
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Text
Interviews
Magdalena Molinari
Isha Kim
Renée Charmichael
Mene Savasta
Malena Sout Arenas
Gabi Leoni
Julián Brangold
Santiago Giusto
Diego Alberti
Mecha Mio
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States of Architecture
Text
Images
Six Allegories
0.
Hay una gigantesca explosión y su estallido afecta únicamente a la arquitectura. En una forma espectacular toda la arquitectura, construida o no, se eleva, vuela por el cielo y con mucha violencia los fragmentos de su cuerpo comienzan una torpe danza. Las imágenes congeladas de las diferentes agrupaciones que se forman son destellos de belleza. Despues de algunos segundos, la danza termina y la arquitectura es absorbida por las nubes. Al atardecer nadie recuerda lo que pasó. A partir de este olvido las partes del cuerpo de la arquitectura empiezan a crecer de nuevo. En la repetición de lo repetido, pequeños motivos proliferan y se organizan en geometrias cuya construcción es posible tanto material como conceptualmente.
1.
A series of rooms with doors at their ends placed one after the other describe a spiral. The wild nature constitutes a second spiral that appears in the distance between the outer walls of the rooms. The transit of objects through this space is driven by the alternation between blockages and accesses. One can observe that nature is framed less by decision than by indifference. Its condition of confinement allows it to be wild, not as something presupposed but as something established. To access it, it is necessary to cross a series of thresholds. Architecture grants freedom by imposing restrictions: to connect two points, a straight line is not needed.
2.
Beneath all architecture lies earth. Its moisture and rocks are the visible traces of a planet that pushes out of itself, using architecture as a vehicle to escape its atmosphere. This invisible force is what sustains us despite ourselves. Here, the true generic does not exist: in the holes, there are totalities. This archaeological state is the search for an unrevealable origin where nature exists because architecture functions as a limit to its constant infinite expansion. Architecture is sacrifice: an artifact whose boundaries fight fire with fire.
3.
A grid of columns occupies a flooded territory. Their height is analogous to that of the trees located in a forest and they sustain the idea of a virgin place: they are the verticality of the ground. Architecture is a virus that spreads through contact, and once it detaches, it can swiftly conquer a territory. Before architecture, there is nothing; after architecture, there are marks of a gigantic recording apparatus that inscribes portions of land into people's minds.
4.
Technology descended several degrees, and its functionality was lost forever. Now movement is a contradiction: the flexible is dry and rigid. A flock of revolving doors that once belonged to a gigantic corporate building is homogeneously distributed across the territory. Infinitely close to each other, in this state, architecture makes no sense. Use is a practice that is constructed in the act, and the only constant is the change of direction. It is what can be done with the potential of architecture.
5.
Long strips of parallel perforated walls organize different types of crops in an architectural state of intense production. An order that both restricts and cuts the land towards the horizon and an infinite offer of thresholds. Architecture can only separate what is already separated, where segmentation implies the recognition of a connection. Like the principle of organization, in all its idleness, architecture arranges things around architecture. Dwelling is a primitive act that lacks awareness of the built environment.
6.
Like the ripple of a stone falling into a lake, architecture makes the earth tremble and cuts deep into its hardest core. In an endless repetition, there is no architectural element that can provide an end. The edges are in a constant state of diffusion. Architecture imposes limits on nature, and architects impose limits on architecture.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Matías Etchart
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Agrupación Militancia Arquitectura
Manuel Mensa, 2013
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The Hollow Body of Architecture
Drawings: Manuel Mensa
Published in: Circular #01
Publisher: Milena Caserola
Editorial Team: Carolina Telo, Martín Flugelman, Pedro Magnasco, Dino Buzzi, Agustín Podestá, Dolores Cremonini, Santiago Giusto, Mercedes Peralta, Manuel Mensa, Florencia Spina.
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Architecture Postponed
Text
Images
A competition to design the New Architecture Pavilion is held. The competition brief says “No distractions will allow the visitors to behold Architecture” A jury of ninety five prestigious architects is conformed. Entries from all over the world are received. The jury makes a decision. There is only one winner, no second or third prizes. “One winner” shouts the jury of ninety-five prestigious architects. Once the winning project is unveiled, the winning architect says: “A great white shiny box contains all the contemporary architecture”. There is one door.
The New Architecture Pavilion holds a competition to decide which contemporary architecture will be contained inside. A jury of ninety-five prestigious architects is conformed. “One winner” they say. Once the winning project is unveiled, the winning architect says: “A great white shiny box contains a great white shiny box that contains all the contemporary architecture”. There are two doors. A new competition to decide which is the contemporary architecture to be contained is held. A jury of ninety-five prestigious architects is conformed. “One winner” they shout. The winning architect says: “A great white shiny box contains a great white shiny box that contains a great white shiny box that contains all the contemporary architecture”. There are three doors.
A new competition is held. One winner is all there is. The winning architect says “A great white shiny box contains a great white shiny box that contains a great white shiny box that contains a great white shiny box that contains all the contemporary architecture”. There are four doors. This was repeated a total of thirteen times. There are thirteen doors.
Text and Drawings:: Manuel Mensa
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Tu Amorosa
Text
Serla
"Beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language."
Marcel Proust
The first time I heard about Ferdydurke, someone told me that it had been written by a Pole who, while living in Buenos Aires, translated it into Spanish with a group of admirers. Allegedly the experience of reading such a translation was like reading someone who does not know how to speak Spanish well enough: has little vocabulary, conjugates verbs poorly. Gombrowicz's book is much more than that, but then also much less... The following text arises from the disillusionment resulting from imagining literally and exaggeratedly, it is dictated, that is, performed and constructed, and then written, as if spoken by someone who, in the strictest sense, does not know the language in which he narrates. Its content follows all the detours that arise from following the previous word as if it had been imposed, or rather, as if they were planted there at random like the wind that brings grains.
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Towards an Endless Architecture
1.
What are the qualities, the capacities, the potentials within architecture that are socially transformative?
2.
As long as architecture finds its ends subjugated to external determinations, the deployment of its own politics will be inhibited.
3.
Architecture, as a theoretical nucleus that can think about how the world is "spatialized," is confined to exercising the mere praxis of survival.
4.
The construction of a building is a temporary update of a previously made spatial decision. It is a crystallization of an earlier moment.
5.
Architecture liberated from its empirical character becomes a knowledge that can think about the world.
6.
In endless architecture, there are no commissions.
7.
In the same architecture, there is architecture with a certain political idea and architecture with another political idea superimposed, in contradiction, in dialogue, and in friction.
8.
Dwelling is a primitive and instinctive act that only requires protection from the climate.
9.
Endless architecture has a purpose in itself.
10.
Endless architecture incorporates the buildable by reflecting on the built.
11.
An architecture that proposes to be apolitical is surrendered to a politics that, besides being foreign, it does not understand.
12.
As if it were a topological issue, the real decisions are related to how many holes a wall has; the rest is entertainment.
13.
Just as painting emancipated itself by ceasing to be "useful" in terms of progress when replaced in its technical dimension by photography, the same is now happening with architecture. Its utility has already been deployed, and now only the tortuous path of emancipation remains.
Text: Manuel Mensa
Published in: Circular #02
Publisher: Milena Caserola
Editorial Team: Carolina Telo, Martín Flugelman, Pedro Magnasco, Dino Buzzi, Agustín Podestá, Dolores Cremonini, Santiago Giusto, Mercedes Peralta, Manuel Mensa, Florencia Spina.
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A Memorial for the Revolution
Text
Images
No Man´s Land
A close look at the drawing of the proposal's floor plan allows us to see a double black dotted line reminiscent of those used on cartographic maps to indicate a political boundary between two countries. When that border is crossed in the territory, regardless of its physical manifestation: fence, wall or a weak mark in the grass, whoever does so rejects one piece of legislation by obligating himself to the government (and protection) of another. In this same sense, crossing the threshold of one of the openings in the walls of the architectural memorial to the revolution implies entering a gap in which, using only architectural elements (openings, walls, stairs, rooms) an interstitial space is created between two limits.
We could affirm that the only public space is the one that is located between two borders and that perhaps that is the paradox of all limits. The architectural memorial to the revolution suggests the confrontation of the idea of the public and the private: those who have entered this "no man's land" will be seen only by those who are already inside. There is a latent bunker-voyeuristic possibility that allows to observe without being seen those who are outside the wall. And perhaps the most important aspect is that since the arrangement of the architectural elements makes surveillance and control practically impossible, we can argue that, architecturally speaking, the interior of this memorial for the revolution is excluded from any type of regulation or regime. beyond one's own.
The architectural memorial for the revolution is a proposal for the city of Paris in France. It is located across the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, a site that comprehends and condenses the bourgeois paradigm of the French Revolution. Considering that this is the last and triumphant revolution whose program and effects are hegemonic, we must assume that our idea of the public sphere has its origin and concept there.
The memorial for the revolution consists of two opposing walls 2.80 meters apart. Each wall is 65 meters wide, 25 meters high and has seven rectangular openings located at street level. Each opening is 1.00 meters wide and 2.10 meters high. After the openings there is a room 2.80 meters wide and 1.40 meters long. Each of the rooms has, in turn, rectangular openings of 1.00 meters by 2.10 meters and a staircase of ten steps connects with another room 3.00 meters wide by 1.20 meters long located on the opposite wall that in turn connects with another 10-step staircase that leads to another room that is directly above the first room.
This series of rooms and stairs is repeated until reaching 25 meters in height. Above the access openings there are small rectangular openings that visually connect the rooms with the exterior of the side of the wall through which they were accessed. The stairs on one side of the wall are 3.00 meters apart from the stairs on the opposite wall. The rooms on the access level of one wall are separated from the rooms on the other wall by an earthen trench 7.00 meters high and 65 meters long. A restriction imposed solely by architectural delimitations determines that exit and access must be made using the same opening and observation made through the small rectangular openings in the rooms allows observation only to that same side.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Matías Etchart
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In the Wall
In the center of a room, we locate a wall that on each of its faces has two openings the size of a door. The distance between the faces is exaggerated to make the interior of the wall spatial, which has a mountain of earth on its floor.
On the side faces there are mirrors that reflect and repeat the image of the wall infinitely. A series of metal profiles support the wall so that it does not give way to the pressure of the earth.
Inside the profiles there are seeds of various floral plants. Attendees are invited to take them, put them in a gardening glass, fill it with soil and hope that, when they take it home, a plant will germinate and grow.
Like light, which allows us to see what is illuminated by hiding itself, walls become present by invisibly delimiting the spaces we inhabit. A wall separates one side from another side and in this separation our relationship with nature comes into play. In this sense, when delimiting spaces we take into account nature.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Matías Etchart
Matienschön,
Buenos Aires, Argentina,
2015
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Parque de Las Ciencias
An Ocean of Columns
The property is covered with wild vegetation. There are different types of nature regions, each with characteristic attributes corresponding to each of the geographical regions of the Argentine Republic. As happens in the collective imagination of citizens, they are mixed and distributed.
Above this nature, a grid of columns emerges from some geological layer. The module coincides in both directions with the module of the Technology Pole building. The 325 columns of the grid have a cylindrical lighting device in their upper section that allows the park to be illuminated at night, turning the Science Park together with the Technology Pole into a visible, identifiable and present landmark in the city. The height of the columns is equal to the aforementioned module, so one could suspect a cube Seen from Juan B. Justo Avenue: the science park spans the embankment and roads with minimal elements of the train.
The columns operate, in a certain way, as science operates: establishing, before anything else, reference points. They are also structural elements, delimiters of uses, friction between the natural and the artificial or simply the lighting of the entire park.
With minimal elements and sustained by the thought that sometimes less is enough, architecture floats on the mantle of nature. The grid spatially structures and delimits the dimensions and location of each of these islands. A network of roads connects them. Thus, the Science Park is a blanket of wild nature on which architecture floats in the form of islands holding on to a grid of columns.
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Laberinto
What can architecture say about architecture? What potentials exist within it that allow it to think about itself?
It is true that the figure of the labyrinth hides the hope of disorientation and, unlike an extended Cartesian grid, orientation is determined by discovery through domination and finding.
Opposing the metropolitan panopticon, the appearance of a labyrinth enables the possibility of resistance, to be able to exert some kind of opposing force.
If modernity understood the labyrinth as an anti-architectural sign, we understand that the orientation that arises from the appropriation of a labyrinth happens after the discovery of order. That is, the order is not clearly indicated. It is suggested so that it can be experienced. Today we know that all labyrinths have doors, just as Daedalus, the Greek architect, it will only be by flying that we can exit the labyrinth we ourselves have built.
The pavilion is constituted as a skeleton waiting for its activation. It will be the bodies, the flesh, and, avoiding the postponement that a vacant white box implies, it will also be the architecture that intends to sustain itself that will return the movement.
Team: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Matías Etchart
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Invisible Geometries
Text
Images
Elevated forty centimeters from the floor level, we place a device that is not prepared to go anywhere. Bounded by two walls and four doors that allow access to its interior, where there are four built-in wooden chairs and an AM/FM radio that allows tuning into local stations.
Both the doors and the rear and front walls of the device have openings closed by glass. Invisible geometries are concepts that govern all the spaces we inhabit, regulating our spatial relationships. They respond to reasons to which, although unknown, we submit.
Recognizing with the conceptual tools of architecture what the invisible geometric structure that governs a spatial situation is, as a political way of seeing the world (or: to see the world in a political way).
Team: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Matías Etchart
Equipo: Manuel Mensa, Lucas Torres Agüero, Matías Etchart
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Today the World
A:
Today the world is economy. Architecture must use its disciplinary tools to facilitate the efficient management of resources used in building construction.
B:
Today the world lacks ethics. Architecture must recover the projects of the modern movement of yesterday and use today's technological tools to invent a world.
C:
Today the world is a horrible and dangerous place. Architecture resists by producing beauty and safety for its users.
D:
Today the world is governed by extreme pragmatism. Creating spaces that move away from function, that fulfill it but surpass it and impose a certain distance, is a form of resistance.
E:
Today the world is immersed in intense fragmentation where everything seems abandoned to the infinity of meaninglessness. Focusing on the interior of the architectural discipline to unite and give meaning is a form of resistance.
F:
Today the world only understands money. The insatiable accumulation of capital that a super-capitalist system entails confuses good architecture with luxury architecture. Architecture must find economic construction methods while maintaining high aesthetic quality to resist the measures imposed by money.
G:
Today the world lacks beauty. The historical avant-gardes dissolved this concept, focusing on the manifestation of the separation between meaning and signifier. Architecture can resist by dedicating itself to the beauty of material organizations.
H:
The world today insists on hyper-deterministic encasements that do nothing but crush and subdue any possible attempt at subjectivity. Architecture is a way of seeing the world, and the architect resists by manifesting their uniqueness.
I:
Today, saying "world" means saying "market." Architecture can resist these calculations by introducing its own variables into foreign equations.
J:
The world has no archive, and without an archive, memory is impossible. Architecture resists by operating as a gigantic recording apparatus that enables justice and truth.
K:
Today the world is unthinkable as a totality. Architecture implements small modifications that have large-scale repercussions.
L:
Today the world flows incessantly, and architecture must stop resisting and modernize. Achieving the efficiency of other industries, like the automotive industry, is the next step.
M:
Today the world no longer exists. Architecture must find ways to recreate itself and not languish.
N:
Today: the world. Architecture provides a professional service, and resistance is related to war, not peace. In the future, there are only corporate organizations.
O:
Today the world understands that everything is politics. Architecture as a technical discipline finds its politics determined by the conditions of its commissions and must serve intelligent processes to resist.
P:
Today the world is the same as yesterday. Architecture as a tool of consensus is condemned to maintain the hegemony of dominant powers. Any confrontation provoked by architecture abandons the discipline without the possibility of return.
Q:
Today the world? Architecture is a service like medicine, and theory is a business driven by many people who chose the wrong profession.
R:
Today the world is something we as architects cannot think about. Architecture is a discipline focused on architectural problems, namely: doors, windows, walls, columns, perimeters, structure, program, function, access, heights, etc.
S:
Today there are many worlds. Architecture can negotiate with heterogeneous actors, resources, and knowledge to provide a framework for assembling new social organizations.
T:
Today the world is transformed by multiple forces that act incessantly and simultaneously. Architecture can sketch representations of the world within the limits that the technical and conceptual tools of the discipline offer, having to inhibit and erase from its discourse the temptation to pronounce any kind of programmatic action.
U:
Today the world has deepened its complexity. Architecture must use new technological tools to interpret, reference, analyze, index, and systematize the dispersion of these new events and deploy their latent information.
V:
Today the world is globalized. Architects must think of architecture with ubiquitous capabilities that provide global solutions to local problems.
W:
Today the world's population lives in cities. All architecture must deal with this condition.
Text: Manuel Mensa
Published in Circular #02
Publisher: Milena Caserola
Editorial Team: Carolina Telo, Martín Flugelman, Pedro Magnasco, Dino Buzzi, Agustín Podestá, Dolores Cremonini, Santiago Giusto, Mercedes Peralta, Manuel Mensa, Florencia Spina.
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Logic Of Sensation
Gilles Deleuze
Textos
Diagramas
01:The Round Area, The Ring
An isolated Figure is a nonillustrative and non narrative Icon.
A round area -O- delimits the place where the Figure -F- is.
Painting escapes the figurative through isolation. It has neither a model to represent nor a story to narrate.
Figuration implies narration and illustration.
The relationship of an image to another image supposes narration. The relation of an object to an image supposes illustration. The relation of the Figure to its isolating place defines a "fact".
O is a place and an enclosed operative field.
It can be extended, centered or dispersed and replaced or duplicated by a round area, a bar, a parallepiped, a chair or a bed. It renders mobility to the Figure within the place.
A relation between distinct Figures is a matter of fact.
02:Note on Figuration in Past Painting
In El Greco's The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, a horizontal divides the painting in two parts. In the lower half there is figuration.
In the upper half, there are liberated Figures.
Figures refer to an existing code of the church that liberates them.
They are doubled over, liberated, freed, lifted up. They only have celestial sensations. They belong to fantasy. In Giotto's Stigmatization of St. Francis, figuration traces lines towards a Figure in the sky.
In Tintoretto's Creation of the Animals, Figures run a race that separates them from f.
03:Athleticism
03.01 From the Material Structure to the Figure
The contour, as a "place," is the place of an exchange.
There is a first movement that goes from the MS (Material Structure) to the Figure.
The field curls around O (ring) and it envelops and imprisons the Figure.
The Figure accompanies the movement of all the structure's forces.
This confinement excludes every spectator.
There are as well attendants that serve as a constant or point of reference in relation to which the movement is assessed. In this exchange the O (ring) becomes an apparatus for the Figure's gymnastics on the fields of color.
03.02 From the Figure to the Material Structure
The Figure is a body, or rather a Figure-body.
It escapes from itself in a spasm.
Then it passes through a vanishing point or through a hole in the contour. It goes back to the Material Structure.
It tends to dissipate into the fields of color.
The body can elongate itself out in a vanishing point of a mirror or parallepiped. It can also contract itself by going through a hole of a ring or of an umbrella.
04: Body, Meat and Spirit, Becoming-Animal
Meat is the zone of indiscernibility between man and animal.
The body is the material of the Figure.
The head is the culmination of the body. It is a spirit animal in bodily form.
The face is a structured, spatial organization that conceals the head. It is a man spirit.
Flesh is the bodily material of the Figure. Bone is the material structure of the body.
Meat is the state of the body in which flesh and bone confront each other locally rather than being composed structurally.
The mouth has a power of nonlocalization that turns all meat into a head without a face. It is no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes, and from which the flesh descends.
Both man and animal have animal traits. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time.
05: Recapitulative Note: Bacon ́s Periods and Aspects
The body tends to escape from itself in order to become imperceptible.
It can do it through the head-meat or in a movement from the Figure to the Material Structure.
In one case, the entire body escapes through the mouth in a scream.
Man becomes animal.
Beyond the scream there is the smile.
Becoming animal is one stage in a more profound becoming imperceptible, where the smile is the last thing left.
In the other one, the Figure extends in a dyastolic movement. There is already a systole within it.
The Material Structure makes a systolic movement towards the Figure. There is already a diastole within it. The O (ring) assures communication in the two directions. It is a membrane.
The Figure dissipates into the Material Structure as light and color.
06: Painting and Sensation
The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation.
Each Figure is a coagulated sensation.
The nature of sensation is to envelop a difference of level and plurality of domains.
Each Figure is itself a shifting sequence.
Rhythm places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. Neutralization of primary figuration allows the material synthetic unity of a sensation.
It can be done through rubbing, scrubbing or the pressence of crouching Figures or a curtain. A vital power that exceeds every domain traverses them all.
The violence of sensation is not visible in the Figure.
It has direct action on the nervous system.
07: Hysteria
The body without organs lies beyond the organism and at the limit of the lived body. It is defined by the temporary and provisional presence of determinate organs.
It is traversed by a wave that traces levels or thresholds in the body.
When the wave encounters external forces at a particular level, a sensation appears. The provisional organ will be determined by this encounter.
The direct action of the forces in the nervous system constitutes a hysterical reality of the body.
When sensation is linked to the body in this way, it ceases to be representative and becomes real.
It is immediately conveyed in the flesh through the nervous wave or vital emotion.
It is not qualitative and qualified, but has only an intensive reality, which determines allotropic variations.
The temporary and provisional presence of determinate organs is a way of introducing time into the painting. The color system itself is a system of direct action on the nervous system. This is called chronochromatism. With painting, hysteria becomes art. It makes presence immediately visible.
Painting liberates lines and colors from their representative function, but at the same time it also liberates the eye from its character as a fixed and qualified organ.
Bacon ́s series constitute the hysterical reality of the body. The "picture" of hysteria animate Bacon's bodies: spastics and paralytics, the phenomena of precipitation and anticipation, sleepwalkers and the phenomena of autoscopia show the wave traversing bodies and the transitory organ being felt.
08: Capturing Forces
Painting must render invisible forces visible.
It is a matter of capturing forces.
The primary function of the Figures is to make invisible forces visible.
Deformation subordinates movement to force and the abstract to the Figure. It is always bodily and static. Forces are exerted in the brushed, wiped, swiped or covered over areas and turn them into zones of indiscernibility.
In a wrestle, the visible movements of the Figure are subordinated to the invisible forces excerted upon them. Invisible forces become visible when they wrap around the contour, dissipate, scream or through
allotropic variations.
Invisible forces in Bacon are those of solation, deformation, dissipation and coupling. Visible forces are powers of the future.
09: Couples and Tryptichs
Relations between simultaneous Figures are matters of fact.
Coupling of Figures makes a matter of fact.
The confrontation of two sensations makes resonance.
Sensation appears as the vibration that flows through the body without organs.
A single Figure can be coupled with its animal or two separate Figures can be coupled like a diagram. Separated figures as part of tryptichs make a matter of fact as well.
The tryptich is the redistribution of the three basic rhythms: an active rythm, with an increasing variation or amplification; a passive rythm, with a decreasing variation or elimination and an attendant rythm.
Rythm itself becomes the Figure. It takes on an extraordinary amplitude.
Matters of fact are nonillustrative and nonnarrative.
10: Note: What is a Tryptich?
There are many explicit attendants in the triptychs.
The visible attendant gives way to the rhythmic attendant when the function is passed on to it.
The attendant-function circulates throughout the painting.
The horizontal defines the attendant rhythm that is retrogradable in itself.
The visible attendant turns into an active rhythm or a passive rhythm.
The two rythms are retrogradable and distributed.
The fall is the active rythm. The opposable character will assume the role of the passive rhythm Sensation is experienced through the fall. The fall exists to affirm the difference in level of vertical variation as such.
The attendant-function can refer to a superficial figurational (in the first sense)attendant and see or to a more profound figural (in the second sense) attendant , that does not see.
11: The Painting Before Painting...
A probable visual whole is disorganized into the improbable visual Figure in the pictorial act. There is a first, prepictorial figuration in the probable visual whole.
It cannot be completely eliminated; something of it is always conserved.
There is a second figuration, the one that the painter obtains.
These two figurations do not have the same nature.
The painter will use free manual traits to make the visual image of the Figure emerge through a deformation in place. It is manipulated chance.
The pure presence of the Figure is indeed the reconstitution of a representation, the recreation of a figuration or of a first resemblance or convention.
There is an entire order of equal and unequal probabilities and figurative givens or clichés on the canvas.
12: The Diagram
There are three modern paths of painting: abstraction, abstract expressionism and the one of the diagram, that is Bacon ́s path.
Abstraction replaced the diagram with a code.
In abstract expressionism the abyss or chaos is deployed to the maximum, so the diagram merges with the totality of the painting.
Abstraction reduces chaos to the minimum. It raises itself above the figurative givens.
In abstract expressionism, optical geometry disappears in favor of a manual line.
In abstraction, the abstract forms are part of a new and purely optical space that has no need of the tactile connections.
The diagram is the operative set of reinjected lines and zones, line-strokes and color-patches into a Figure. It is a chaos and a germ of order or rhythm.
For Bacon the diagram must remain limited in space and time.
Not all the figurative givens have to disappear. A new figuration should emerge from the catastrophe.
The diagram has to make a precise sensation and a rigorous contour. It gives them power of vibration and nonlocalization.
13: Analogy
Abstract painting proceeds by code and program.
Abstract expresionism proceeds by analogy and resemblance.
In aesthetic analogy there is neither primary resemblance nor prior code, but analogical language.
By extending the diagram to the entire painting, analogy takes the diagram for the analogical flux itself.
The diagram acts as a modulator. It breaks all the figurative coordinates and defines possibilities of fact.
Aesthetic analogy is both nonfigurative and noncodified.
Analogical flux passes through the diagram and starts a triple liberation of the planes, colors and bodies.
Lines and colors are then able to constitute the Figure or the Fact, that is, to produce the new resemblance inside the visual whole, where the diagram must operate and be realized.
A digital code covers certain forms of similitude or analogy: analogy by isomorphism, an internalised one or an intrinsic one. When analogy is independent of every code, one can still distinguish two forms of it: resemblance as a product or a a producer. Resemblance is the producer when the relations between the elements of one thing pass directly into the elements of another thing, which then becomes the image of the first. This is a figurative analogy.
Resemblance is the product when it appears abruptly as the result of relations that are completely different from those it is supposed to reproduce by liberating lines for the armature and colors for modulation. In this last type of analogy, a sensible resemblance is produced, but instead of being produced symbolically, through the detour of the code, it is produced "sensually," through sensation. This last one is an aesthetic analogy as well.
14: Every Painter Recapitulates the History of Painting in His or Her Own Way
Color itself is capable of two very different kinds of relations: relations of value and relations of tonality.
Relations of value escape from the danger of storytelling in a pure code.
Relations of tonality move closer to the pure state of a pictorial fact which has nothing left to narrate. They are the analogical language of painting.
Within sight, haptic space is defined by the relative opposition of warm and cool.
Within sight, optic space is defined by the opposition of light and dark.
Warm and cool attest eccentric or concentric movement of expansion or contraction.
Bright and dark attest an aspiration to movement.
In the relations of tonality, there is neither an inside nor an ouside, but a continuous creation of space. Modulation belongs to this temporal, variable and continuous mold.
Volume is reached through the arrangement of colors.
15: Bacon ́s Path
The manual diagram must be reinjected into the visual whole, where it introduces a properly haptic world and gives the eye a haptic function.
It sweeps out the pure optical and the optical-tactile world and forces the eye to confront manual power.
It produces an irruption like a scrambled or cleaned zone and forms an absolute zone of indiscernibility.
If there is still an eye, it is the "eye" of a hurricane. It has an unbridled manual power.
This appears as chance, accident, automatism, or the involuntary.
It is color that forms this haptic world with relations of warm and cool, expansion and contraction.
The diagram acts as a modulator of color. Time and space result from color.
Time does it as flows where time passes and as shores of eternity of time.
The first one, in the chromatic variation of the broken tones that compose the flesh; and the second one in the monochromy of the field.
Space does it as bright and broken colors. The tone of the field seizes upon color as a passage with little variations of saturation. The body ́s volume is rendered by one or more broken tones, by mixing complementary colors in critical proportion..
In Bacon, the broken tones produce the body of the Figure, and the bright or pure tones, the armature of the fields.
This treatment of color has its own dangers and its possible catastrophe, without which there would be no painting.
The first danger, is that the ground would remain indifferent and inert, with an abstract and coagulated brightness.
Another danger is that the broken tones of the Figure would be allowed to blend together and become scrambled,losing their clarity and lapsing into a monotonous gray.
16: Note on Color
Bacon ́s three elements of painting: Figure, Material Structure and contour converge and communicate in color. The relations between colors explain the unity of the whole, the distribution of each element, and the way each of them acts upon the others.
Colorism consists of regimes of colors and the relations between these regimes.
Color attains different regimes in the Figure and in the Material Structure for Bacon.
It is color that creates the line and the contour. The contour is a colored pressure that ensures the Figure's balance.
It makes one regime of color pass into another.
In the regime of the Figure, we find ourselves before flows of color, in the form of broken tones. The broken tones constitute the flesh of the Figures. The flow traces millimetrical variations in the body as the content of time.
In the MS, the monochromatic shores were raised to a kind of eternity as the form of time. Pure dominant bright color constitute the fields.
Each dominant color and each broken tone are assured proximity by the contour.
They indicate the immediate exercise of a force on the corresponding zone of the body or head, immediately rendering a force visible.
With the diagram as the point of application of forces, the flow enters into relations of proximity.
This proximity can certainly be spatial, but it can also be topological and act at a distance.
The internal variation of intensity or saturation of the field was defined in terms of proximity to this or that zone.
17: The Eye and the Hand
The ideal optical space grasp its forms through an optical code. Figuration is a consequence of the tactile-optical space.
The manual diagram disrupts this space and its consequences in a catastrophe or an accident. A form of a completely different nature emerges from it, called the Figure.
The diagram imposes a zone of objective indiscernibility or indeterminability between two forms.
One of the forms was no longer, and the other, not yet.
It destroys the figuration of the first and neutralizes that of the second.
In the diagram, figurative lines will be scrambled by extending them and hatching them.
Everything can be done inside the same form.
New relations emerge out of the broken tones of coloring gray.
These produce a more profound resemblance.
Being manual, it must be continuously reinjected into the visual whole, in which it deploys consequences that go beyond it.
ln a colorist formula, the diagram-accident imposes nonformal color-patches and traits that function only as traits of animality. The diagram introduces formless forces, making us pass from one form to another.
There is indeed a change of form, but the change of form is a deformation.
Substitution of the form by completely different relations create an aesthetic analogue of the form.
The pictorial fact that has come from the hand, is the formation of a third eye, a haptic vision of the eye.
It is as if the duality of the tactile and the optical were surpassed visually in this haptic function born of the diagram.
Project: Manuel Mensa, Catalina Sfer Salas
Textos
Diagramas
01:The Round Area, The Ring
02:Note on Figuration in Past Painting
03:Athleticism
03.01 From the Material Structure to the Figure
03: Athleticism
03.02 From the Figure to the Material Structure
04: Body, Meat and Spirit, Becoming-Animal
05: Recapitulative Note: Bacon ́s Periods and Aspects
06: Painting and Sensation
07: Hysteria
08: Capturing Forces
09: Couples and Tryptichs
10: Note: What is a Tryptich?
11: The Painting Before Painting...
12: The Diagram
13: Analogy
14: Every Painter Recapitulates the History of Painting in His or Her Own Way
15: Bacon ́s Path
Chapter 16: Note on Color
Chapter 17: The Eye and the Hand
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Office
Manuel Mensa is an architect from the University of Buenos Aires, leads Manuel Mensa Arquitectos, and is a Full Professor of Project at the School of Architecture and Urban Studies at Torcuato Di Tella University. He conducts project clinics for artists and recently launched the publication "Creciendo en Público," an erratically scheduled newsletter. He has been the director of the Center for Contemporary Architecture Studies at Torcuato Di Tella University and has also served as the coordinator of the History and Theory area, undergraduate thesis tutor, and professor of project workshops, minor fields, and history and theory seminars both at the undergraduate and graduate levels at the same institution.
He has been the director of META Arquitectos, winning the first prize at the Matienschon Contemporary Art Gallery in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a first mention in the National Preliminary Projects Competition for the New Pavilion of the Museum of Architecture of the Central Society of Architects.
He has given lectures and has been an invited critic at IIT, Chicago, the University of Tokyo, Japan, EAEU, and FADU-UBA, Argentina. He has served as the director of Circular, a publication on contemporary architectural theory, and has been part of the editorial committee of the zine Singular of the EAEU. He is the co-editor of "Arquitectura sin Estado: Albergar una Multitud" (Archivos de Arquitectura, 2018). His work and research projects have been published and exhibited in various media, including "Paraformal: Ecologías Urbanas" at the Spanish Cultural Center in Buenos Aires (2010), "Prácticas Públicas" at the International Architecture Biennale of Argentina (2014), "Archizines" at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2015), "Symmetry: The one and the Many" (Archivos de Arquitectura, 2018), "Superdigitalismo" (Notas CPAU, 2019), "Singularidades: Teoría Práctica de lo Irreductible" (Archivos de Arquitectura, 2022) and "Atlas de Arquitectura Genérico Sublime" (Archivos de Arquitectura, 2022).
Team: Manuel Mensa, Pedro Huberman
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Website
Project, curation y execution: Manuel Mensa, Catalina Sfer Salas, Nicolás Boscoboinik