Summer conferences Arhitext, 21-23 July 2023, at House of Grandparents from Slămnești, comuna Brăduleț (județul Argeș), with theme „architecture within us”

0

This time around as well I can't help but notice a certain specificity, a certain spirit, at once unmistakable and mysterious, of the Arhitext topics: their false banality, their discreet, subtle demarcation and "ulterior motive", the subtle, unapparent path they open up for research and examination.

1

I understand architecture "within us" as having (at least) two meanings, organized around a difference: architecture within us and architecture of us (of the self) or as us.

1. A) The manner in which we are inhabited, haunted by architecture itself (1. inherited, given, imprinted as an environment, 2. transmitted, perhaps, as an idea, 3. dreamed, forgotten); and B) what our own "architecture" is, how we are - and whether we are - "architected", designed, built, structured.

And, again, an essential difference between the two architectures, within us and by us or as us: unlike the former, the latter cannot be designed, it is built organically, "naturally", gradually, it "grows" and "deposits", it "sediments" like the Earth itself, like the soil and the subsoil, through a subtle mechanism of projections/retainers, being more topology and stratigraphy, speleology, than architecture proper.

And suddenly, boom, the question: what if only this second, metaphorical embodiment of architecture is the – how shall I say – the valid, the proper (coming-with, together-with) one, the one that should influence the very functioning of architecture itself, as such, the meta-architecture of architecture? What if, in fact, "proper" architecture should give up its more or less ex nihilo projectionist voluntarism? Is this possible? Would this (that) still be architecture? Or does architecture presuppose precisely this voluntarism, this heroism, it is not possible without a certain foundationalism, "groundedness", "thoroughness", which presupposes, as an inevitable shadow, but to varying degrees, of course, a certain destructivism, a certain tabula rasa, a certain epoché (ἐποχή or epokhē) a certain "suspension" of the bonds inherent in voluntarist-projectivist constructivism, which is at the same time a much more philosophical, phenomenological suspension of judgment, suspicion, worry, doubt (self-doubt, naturally)?

And I think this is the question that will circulate and reverberate, more like an echo through some spaces, through my words of today. A haunted logical architecture – we shall see (or rather hear).

In other words, the question – the fundamental one (only about foundation, base and ground, and about their more or less hidden relationship with the substrate, with the soil and the subsoil, with the environment and the "context", with the place) – is the following: we inhabit architecture, architecture is the creation of places to live, but how does it itself, architecture, inhabit, the earth and the ground, for example? With indifference, and if yes, with how much indifference?. Thus, asked in a different manner, the question returns to this: what is the connection, what is the relationship between architecture proper, which furnishes the exterior and the interior, and architecture as a metaphor for interiority? Is it not the case – I repeat – that what seems derivative, secondary, "metaphorical", is – or should be – primary, "proper"?

We are clearly structured, inwardly, in specific ways, but it seems, it seems clear to me, somewhat – how shall I put it otherwise than it's been put already – "an-architecturally", by an idea of architecture that deviates, like a slanting shadow, from the purely exterior, exteriorizing, battlefront-like, "proper" idea of architecture, from the idea of architecture of architecture itself.

The architecture "within us": the counter-architectural architecture of interiority versus the architecture "proper" as the fundamental architecture of exteriority (even when it delimits interiors, but starting, as a point of reference, as a theme, as a foundation, from the exterior, from the exterior to the interior)?

Architecture projects, and projects itself from the inside outwards – betraying, perhaps, by this very projection and fundamental design, precisely the interior, the interiority, which, if exteriority means transparency and publicity, must mean shadow, penumbra. Architecture comes out into the light, it comes out from the inside towards/as the outside – and there it remains, even when it programs interiors and interiorities, since it does so im-properly, starting from the outside in, instead of from the inside in.

2

There is, of course, interior architecture (and architects), at the same time very profitable and (considered) minor, obedient, subordinate to exterior architecture. But who can afford it? But who can afford not to have it?

Again, two interior architectures, of the interior and interiority, and the relations between them. To what extent is the "design" of the interior a projection or a concealment of the "architecture" of interiority? What connections and tensions between interior and interiority, between the architecture "within" or as us, by us, and the architecture of the intimate exterior, of the immediate exterior of interiority, of the continuation of the body through architectural means in which it feels good, feels like/at home, whereby the house comes to be inhabited as home, as its own, intimate, immediate exterior, as a projection of interiority? Is it not precisely in interior architecture that the two meanings of the idea of projection and design, the psychological-psychoanalytical and the architectural, meet (perhaps even overlap)? Isn't this precisely what we are looking for in interior architecture: that its architectural design, its "arrangement" and "design" come as close as possible, as an expression, to the projection of our own interiority?

3

Structuring and, in fact, settlement: the relationship between habitude and inhabitation. Things settle in space, as space, become, generate space only in time, temporally (and obviously temporarily). They settle, i.e. are deposited: the opposite of architectural design.

As Giorgio Agamben suggests in an extraordinary and very recent book from 2021, La follia di Hölderlin. Cronaca di una vita abitante (1806-1843), translated into French in 2022 as La folie Hölderlin. Chronique d'une vie habitante (1806-1843), into English as Hölderlin’s Madness. Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806–1843, and in Romanian: Nebunia {lui} Hölderlin. Cronica unei vieţi locuitoare (1806-1843), madness would be that of living not only on the earth, but of inhabiting Earth, in all the political and ecological senses of this mode of inhabitation, which implies, indissolubly linked, both the (Kantian, pre-Hegelian), hidden idea of cosmopolitanism, of inhabiting the spherical, and therefore inevitably finite, surface of the Earth, and the less "habitual" idea that the house itself, the place itself inhabits the Earth, rather than take its place. The "madness" in the case of Hölderlin's "poetic" inhabitation, the madness to which we might assign, prophetically a-theologically, his name, consists precisely in this double, total, integral inhabitation of the Earth both by its inhabitants and by their homes and dwellings, with their habitats, habits and habita. To live, to in-habit, getting used to the Earth, superficial saviour, only at, and on the surface.

Now, Agamben links this "inhabitant" or "habitative" mode of inhabitation with paratactic writing, without logical-semantic connectors, instead with pure placement and juxtaposition – which turns out, we should think, to be much closer to the very a-logical, non-verbal idea of architecture (although there has been a fashion for "verbalizing", "logicizing", "discursivizing", "textualizing" architecture). Hölderlin would thus write habitatively, i.e. architecturally, a-logically and a-textually.

Defying the opposition, the logical-architectural duality, typical of architectural logic or the dominant, traditional, fundamental logicist conception of architecture, between exterior and interior, we have to live and inhabit purely "superficially", democracy, and perhaps the only way in which it can be reconciled with ecology, being precisely this "superficial" and paratactic inhabitation, purely juxtapositional, a-syntactic, non-discursive, habitual superficial-paratactic inhabitation without relations or without the privileging of relations that are inevitably political and, in fact, indistinctly logical and political, in/by which the political is "logicized" and the logical turns out to be purely political.

There is nothing but surface – that of Earth – and we live only superficially, according to the routines and habits of the land and of Earth. The outside/inside distinction is derivative and phantasmatic, fantasized. 

4

Structuring, then, by habit and deposition, the laying down of habitudes.

5

But also the linking of architecture to the interior, and of interiority, to what is already called "the disappearance of things", which does not make us less consumerist, but instead marks the displacement of "commodity fetishism" (Marx) exclusively towards signs-movement as signs of life: dematerialization.   

6

Co-habitation with things, the house as a place of repair, manufacturing and the human craftsmanship that is any house. Co-habitation structures the relationality with others and with things. Repeatability, routine, duration, habituation, structuring, architecting.

The "architecture within us" is an architecture without plan, without design, without purpose, unfinished. Which compulsively sets out to do all this, but goes beyond that, allowing itself to be defeated. The architectural compulsion, to architectonicity, to historical-logical discursivity, is permanently counterbalanced by the 'growth' and sedimentation of things and places: architectonics counterbalanced and permanently tending to be reduced to tectonics.

Perhaps the truth of architecture – i.e. of the exterior – is the so-called architecture of the interior. We have to organize the interior not as the opposite and complementary of the exterior, but instead as an exterior: a common body or environment. 

Possible reversal, then: interior architecture, apparently minor and derivative, should inspire architecture, pure and simple.

And, with everything, inhabitants and dwellings, interiors and exteriors, only on the cosmopolitan-ecological surface of the Earth.

Surface beings, front/back (two faces, two surfaces, one inward, the other outward, back-to-back faces), routinized, habituated, but according to othere routines, habits and habita of inhabitation and co-habitation (habituation, de-inhabitation, rather than separation from each other).

And so on and so forth.

7

The architecture within us is like the tectonic-sedimentary architecture of the Earth itself.

And the Earth is, to this day, the alchemical Athanor: see it transforming the dead, the fossils, into fuels, into vital energy! And see it actually turn and project, nihilistically transubstantiate death through this false sublimation!