ANDROGINO

Before soul and spirit were considered synonyms, they roamed the body through the blood as phantasmata, making the brain and the body inseparable. The interstitial held these universes together: blood, the ever changing, ever moving and ungraspable, made the body both divine and human.

PostCartesian World managed to allocate the entire human condition exclusively in the head when it located the “soul” in the cerebellum and the spirit no longer was considered a third “other”. This was a major break with the past. This vision supports a completely rational understanding of what “man” is, relegating the body to a necessary item, but not indispensable, to a more expanded notion of “man”. A totality was supplanted by a group of accessories that we even consider to be replaceable and interchangeable today.

Therefore, every kind of knowledge that emerged from other than the brain or the “rational” became disregarded as false or unreal.

The World engaged then in a dualistic rhetoric framed by the binary opposition of truth and false. In this world of black or white there is no space for the ambiguous, for the undefined: it is considered to be wrong. Left or right, religious or scientific, form or function, in or out….

Absolute faith became the main trait of modernity. Whether it is in science, in religion, in politics, in Marxism, in capitalism or design… it has not managed to break away from certainty. In this context open end solutions have a difficult time to breed.

With this change the mythical and the “metareal” became dismissed as unreal. The imaginary supplanted the imaginal relegating it to the non-existing and therefore to the unimportant. Transcendental reality abandoned the realm of human interaction.  Dreams, yearnings, the intangible in general, became part of the unsoundable deep ocean of the non-existing.

In this World, anomaly became mistake. Modernity crucified the androgynous. While historically it was worshiped as a divinity, as a more complete being, closer to a state of totality. But the Modern World punished its reluctance for definition and considered it an aberration, a freak: a mistake.

In western art this understanding became evident. It abandoned the diagrammatical, the symbolic and turned to the significant, the formal, the tuned. Nowhere more evident than in music, particularly when contrasted to that in the east: one is about the formal, the other about the relation that it creates between performer and receiver.

Within this state of affairs what becomes of architecture? For a while it became simple drafting, pure form: a technique. From “disegnare” it became design, the science of design even. Today it is arguable that the metacity condition and the stress of the environment no longer support this possibility: therefore landscapeurbanism and other apparently contradicting approaches emerge. The interstitial, the undefined, the ambiguous become maybe a possible, more complete realm for architecture.

Our work explores this notion as potential. It explores architecture as negotiation rather than technique. It aims to establish relations of dialog rather than opposition. We embrace Dialogics rather than Dialectics as tool and we embrace Fields of Conscience as alternative to conceptual thinking when constructing our frameworks.

In doing so oppositions become complementary dialog. Both in the scope of our work, which is less sectarian and disregards artificial boundaries (Landscape vs. city) and in the approach to design which operates bottom up.