1990

Introduction

Five characters, a voyeur and a cartographer… All in search of ethical action, in a world that confuses reality and simulation and yet allows for poetic making in solitude, enabling us to understand how we are still capable of perceiving the full richness of reality, with a truly open vision…

Is it possible for architects to engage in a collective project and yet remain loyal to their creative vocation, beyond the polarity of homogenizing democracy and liberating anarchy?

Is it possible, furthermore, to define a personal thesis topic and, within the framework of shared response-ablilty, address the public reality of a specific site in Montreal?

Can we conceive of architecture as truly contextual, as an ongoing ges-ture of continual adjustment to intentions and circumstances, as something truly alive?

Is it possible to make a project that reveals the character of a site, in a way that reminds the inhabitant of the late 20th century of her mortality, and of her wondrous capacity to think things eternal?

Can we affirm through architecture our acceptance of fate, generating form and space as an act of reconciliation in a culture where action is in fact legitimated by its power to negate the human dimensions and limits of the world?

Is it possible to posit a perceptual faith on a reality a priori given with meaning, and yet act in the political context of the post-industrial city?

Can we make marks that break through the comforting cocoon of technology and seduce our fellow men, not with the giddiness of drugs, but with the recognition of that which must remain unnamed?

It is possible to start with a narrative that recounts profound mythical truths about our technological reality, and transform the characters into architectural personae to disclose a new plot, a potential vision of poetic inhabitation, truly beyond good and evil?

This is a time for architectural characters to search for a narrative… One that might be genuinely constructed upon the “gap,” upon the idea of the labyrinth which is both clarity and confusion, a revelation of purpose and its frustration; not in search of clarification or mystification. The polarities of day and night, systematic explorations and dadaistic utterances, do not allow man to dwell. Man must truly dwell upon the dawn where presence and absence, fullness and voidness coincide. At the collapse of mathematical progressive time, when one instant measured by human action can become eternal.

Dr Alberto Pérez-Gómez
October 1990

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