Frédéric Levrat

NY 26 de Julho de 1992, 5:10 PM
New York, Sunday, July 26/92, real time 5:10 PM, trying to answer a fax I just received from Geneva. The TV in the other room is giving information about polls in American politics related to the previous new TV campaign they saw on their little screen. The phone rings again. Not a fax this time, but a voice from Japan, asking me if I could send him a book he forgot in my apartment.
The news are explaining how the stock market rose up sharply because of… no specific reason in fact. Only the number of poor and unemployed people is growing too and mister nice face on TV is going to solve all of our problems, what ever they are made out of. An ice cream commercial interrupts the information, switching again to a massacre in what used to be Yugoslavia. Trying desperately to finish my text for Nuno to be faxed to/in Lisbon tonight I go back to my computer to find a little note on my screen telling me that there is no more space on my memory (whose memory?)… and it is probably already 11:17 in Portugal.

In a debate usually voluntary narrowed around style, -ism, efficiency or traditions, let us dare to ask some necessary questions about the foundations and motivations of what could be considered as «the intentional constitution of our environment»: Architecture.

Architecture in the desire to respect itself has to be able to express and respond to its cultural, intellectual, social and political surroundings. But what we used to consider as the definition of our environment – our every day surroundings – has been fundamentally modified. Much of the same is true for walk we used to consider as «oneself» in respect to the interface in contact with the «outside world»: the limits of our body or our «sphere of interaction».
Technology has obviously changed our surroundings, extending our physical perception beyond our anthropomorphic boundaries. While many examples could demonstrate this statement, I would like to concentrate in the evolution of technology through the specific analysis of the notion of speed.

Since Milliner power has been related to the speed of communication, as Paul Virilio has brilliantly demonstrated and has it was already a key factor even 4.000 years ago, when Pharaoh Ramses II was represented with the symbol of his power, a whip and reins to control the speed of his horses. Since then speed of transportation has increased from animal to mechanical reaching lately the transport of information almost instantaneous, where material constraint and physical displacement are no longer necessary.

With instantaneous speed, information can be «present» and affect different parts of the world without requiring «presence». A single individual can interact with different places at the same time contradicting the anthropomorphic notion of perception. Our space of interaction with an outside world is now almost limitless.

This interaction, however, dos not implicate our entire body, but only a partial number of its senses. Only the eyes, or ears are able to perceive information. The observer as an entity, related to a specific body, in a specific place and time has been dislocated, fragmented. This recent state of fragmentation is providing us with an entirely new problematic, that I would call the «Space of Information».

Technology, very clearly provides a possibility for a specific world, or space, that exchanges and contains information (orders) and dos nor require physical space it has a great influence on our everyday life, challenging the intrinsic notion of the «Real».

As an exquisite example the Stock Market is probably one of the most influential systems ever imposed on a planetary level, that runs only from digital information to databank twenty four hours (or more) a day, in non specific location (New York, Tokyo, Frankfurt, London and everywhere in between that is supposed to determine the abstract value relative to the «real value» of materials, human production, etc. Those values exist more as a representation of themselves within the «Space of Information» than in the «Real» world.

Our environment seems to be more influenced by the «Media Reality» then by our direct physical experience of our surroundings. Within this new media environment things start to get very complex as we address the question of perception of the construction of a perceptive referential.

Perception is an active thing, and what we see is literally what we see, But to be able to distinguish forms or concepts one needs to learn how to build  «perception referential».  This educated build up of a referential system enables one to distinguish what is good from bad, nice from hideous, friendly from dangerous. Most of our knowledge of our surroundings comes from mediated information. Our referential is pre-shaped, not by what one has experienced but by what one has seen or heard, only as a fragmented perception and an already processed and produced information.

Materiality has disappeared to be replaced by the representation of itself. The image of the information has become more powerful than the «real» object, and most of our environment is being shaped by information that needs no «material space» or time, or notion of space and time as we used to know it.

How all of that relates to architecture and if it does how could it be translated by or into it, is a disturbing question. This shift of speed of transmission in information in our «electronic or Media society/environment» has modified a lot of relationships that we thought were naturally given, and it applies strongly to fields as diverse as economy, politics or science, reinventing and distributing different roles to different fields. The challenge offered to architecture and urbanism is certainly one of the most profound, questioning what we always thought were the foundations of our discipline.

In the middle of all this uncertainty, one statement still clearly stands out for some young architects, and such concerns can be read through the work presented in this book. Architecture must respond to its environment, and express the concerns of its time. It is the materialization of our thinking and of our social condition. It has always been so, and whatever it does, it can only be so. If architecture wants to still «mean» something, it must deal with those very precise extensions of our present body and create a «shelter» for the mind.

The work of Nuno Mateus to be well understood, has to be inscribed in a larger structure of investigation, founded about three years ago in Japan and operating since then in a multiplicity – and undetermined- space through «instantaneous» exchanges of information between New York, Berlin, Kobe and Lisbon. «ARX» as it is named is a diminutive of «ARCHITEXTURE». It involves some young architects and theorists who do not only see some possibilities of reinterpretations of space and the social environment in the collapsing of space, time and cultures, but also tries to investigate these new possibilities by «embodying» them through the process of their work.

ARX is an existence that does not exist in our «physical world». It is rather a network of information authorizing some intensive exchanges through different cultures. It provides an access for some interaction located far away from our anthropomorphic capabilities. This short circuiting of space allows some experimentation in the overlapping of different cultures, languages and places creating misreadings and fragmentary perceptions and questioning the potential of an «information space» directly applied to the physical world.

The multiplicity of spaces and the multiplicity of actors in a decision process are immanent to our society possibilities, specially when the main aim is to produce a singular space. The notion of the «Great Master» orchestrating the whole decision making process becomes an obsolete concept. Nevertheless this notion of the «Great Master» is probably going to stay – even as anachronism – for its convenience as en easily recognizable and therefore marketable product.

As an active member of this thinking process, Nuno Mateus has been developing a work of his own, trying to address and provide a space combining the material dimension of our existence with a more intellectual «presence» related to an «information space».

The work presented in this book conveys his approach to architecture as the constitution of an information reality of its own-including informations that are not necessarily related to any specific time or space – using an intellectual reading of the site and program.

As much as we recognize the importance of expressing the existence of that «information» or intellectual presence, we know its incompatibility with the purely physical quality of a built space. Drawing a thinking process is the first step, bringing it into a two dimensional representation, that can than easily be transformed into a three dimensional diagram or construction.

I should make one more detour into the general theory to introduce my conclusion to this argument:
As we have seen, architects have always built shelters to protect human being from its potential dangers and since the first day the most proeminent one has always been Nature – through rain, cold or wild animals – and therefore it has been the main motivation for the production of architecture. However, since a few decades (mostly since Hiroshima), we find in the work of many philosophers and scientists that Nature is no longer our main enemy, but that the «product of human thinking» is now far more threatening – through pollution, massive destruction arsenal or genetic manipulations.
Nuno Mateus research is about the transformation and inscription of an intellectual thinking into a three dimensional existence. This three dimensional presence becomes then a potential material structure, of bricks, concrete, steel or stone that is intellectually inherent to the «loci». Even though it is a part of the project, it lays still outside the function or resolution of the architectural project. It is more like a new nature, a Second Nature that is now actively constituting our environment.

Like a new natural constrain the program and the design try then to adapt themselves and fit this presence in. The work of the architect has gained a new layer of complexity where, as a decider of forms, he has first to bring into materialization and to translate into a physical dimension the presence of a powerful and immaterial «information dimension». That role as a revelator of a new presence could be related to what used to be in practice under the name of an «interpretative reading of the site». There the architect was able to reveal a new role for an existing cliff or path.

The real design (as it used to be considered) comes then only after, fitting the program into those two now coinciding physical natures. The excellent work of «Mapping Mitra» demonstrates well how that second nature overlaps the natural ground, and the beauty of the project starts to hatch in the multiple inscriptions and traces of those multiple natures.
Architecture is for the decider the transformation of an information reality into a material reality but for the user it is a transformation of the material reality into a potential intellectual and poetic personal experience. It is the possible melting of the physical and information worlds into one coherent whole where each wall, beam or column starts to provide a multiple interpretation, that will always contain a multiplicity of meanings.

In our society, where space of information and the physical space are drifting more and more apart such an architecture would propose the user a reappropriation of the space and its meaning through his own experimentation of his environment.

Reversing the process we are confronted with a true whole that is related to thinking, extra-anthropomorphic notions and heterogeneous spaces combined in a material presence. We experience a simultaneity in the space of the material and the invisible, bluring and questioning the notion of a dialects of perception. It provides a new possibility for each individual to interact and interpret independently his surroundings. The body is part of that exploration, through its motion, taking apart he static notion of the image or its univocal information, trying continuously to reconstruct a process, a logic never reachable or properly translated, always unfolding differently.

The information has been built and has disappeared, leaving traces that the body encounters and each body has to affirm its own perception, redefining its understanding of space as well as of itself. The space, with its inherent strength and multiple presence asks for an interaction, a reappropriation of its spaces that will always carry a supplemental meaning, never having a single or a fixed meaning.

In that necessary confrontation, the observer should find back his own specific notion of perception, playing with his mind, imagining something that his body always discovers differently, inscribing the space of information into a space for the body and the mind to find ones true dignity in a non mediated that is singular to each individual.