Architecture   and   Humanities

With time, the formal possibilities that have permitted structure to be used as an element in the design process have become unequivocally tangible. The power and dynamism of structure allow an architect to explore the more formal metaphors that faithfully depict the vigorous mode of today's life. It has been stated at some point that architecture is a simple portrait of the technological revolution. Although this affirmation is true in part, it is obvious that the development of architecture nourishes itself from many other factors that move her to search for new horizons and generally these are not intangible in nature, rather they represent more spiritually-oriented symbolic and myth-like ideas.

The home is not a machine to be used, rather it is a human being's first universe. It is the one where he/she will satisfy the concerns of his body, soul and mind. Home is the place in charge of supplying one's first important encounter with space; home is where we begin to explore, know, understand and experiment with our own existence. Home is the place where we accumulate those occurrences that will brand the course of that which will come next.

To design architecturally is to discover one's own Will of Being. The purpose of covering this subject is based on a well known saying, at least for me that says: "Everything that has been wanted, has been possible; that which has not been possible was not in the path of artistic will". ⁽¹⁾ Spirit and Science intervene in the origin of will. Spirit through feelings - divinity -, and Science through worldly - material - elements. Both words, conjugated in a man's feeling and doing, direct an action and an action is exercising a Power, understanding power as energy that moves things, energy that emerges as a "Will".

One of taoist's main lines of thought is 'the universe as an interrelated and harmonoius system', and 'feelings are doors through which the liberated spirit flies'. Japanese spacial relations bear strong experimental senses. Space is not conditioned by its forms and measurments, rather the five senses deployed in time and space perceive it. Contrary to what one may think, the apparently negative aspects such as obscurity, the non being and emptiness to name a few, preform an important role in the taoist art. Emptiness is the maternal seat of form; emptiness is where space's usefullness resides in.

Mysticism, a word that takes us back to the unspeakable, entertains our senses penetrating each and every pore of our skin. This contact with the word's atmosphere is unavoidable; its mysterious halo has shrouded us.
We start the flight accompanied by our own loneliness so as to place us in front of that which is eternal so as to find resonance in the ground of our own destiny. Thus, by way of language, we will leave this world only to return with a strengthened soul and spirit communing with men's values and establishing links between our profession as architects and the mystic thought.
Lets detach from the self for a few instants and open our awareness to this vision hinting at a symbolism that does not move us away from the world, rather settles us more into it.

Architecture that transforms spaces continues to supply the community with the possibility of traveling to the ephemeral world via the imagination. It achieves a theoretical construction of what is anticipated, as utopia does, oriented to the individuality of that which still isn't in order to run it into something possible.
When architecture turns into art and provides art for its own comfort, we come to understand that that utopia that was a part of this ephemeral world turns into reality and that is where each organized space turns into a stage design.

The architectural project field, understood as a process of creativity, is approached at by looking into the architects' tasks as a designer who tries to recover the main job: ordering the space of that place where the human being will build.
We can close in the large human creation field by understanding the cultural principles of the target human group, allowing us to see how his/her expression need is motivated by creative will and how it is materialized by integrating form and content making visible that which is hidden.
Thus, a series of leads appear pointing out the few aspects to be explored: existence, ideas, needs, intentions, expression, spiritual essence, materialization and content.

Architectural desigs for nomadic type constructions show that solutions go beyond the mere need of satisfying the needs of men. Man's implied nomadic conditon is, before anything else, a stance in life where the architectural answer must take into account the realities of the communities to be addressed.