1996

Introduction

Even if some might argue that it has been (wo) man’s destiny to stop constructing a poetic world by imagining the invisible and adumbrating the future from the light of fire and a sense of place, her ability to tell stories remains intact. True knowledge, the wisdom that truly matters for us mortals, is the telling of stories, in words or traces, woven in stone or constructed with paper.

Indeed, the cult of cumulative information and machinism has led us to forget the wonder of telling stories. It has long created the delusion that knowledge may be what you find in data banks for encyclopedias, or simply somewhere else, in a place other than one’s own externalized plots. The utterly individual projects presented in this publication, itself a work that attempts to use computer technologies creatively rather than simply re-present its contents, seek the coincidence between the personal and the universal. Often exacerbating the personal, these many-layered stories loop the traces from our architectural tradition into intimate recollection and pressing cultural questions. The result is a bewildering and consistent defiance of the presuppositions of binary logic.

A brief inventory of eugenesic projects (consult your Oxford English Dictionary, letter E, pp. 317-324, or better still, pp. 902-903 of the Compact Edition. Let your gaze wander, following the motions of your magnifying glass).

A euchologion in the form of a prayer machine that recognizes the inherent power of instrumentality, the power of the hunter, transcending through its very operations the impossibility of prayer.

Boxes of keys that open unknown future possibilities, eucharistic reliquaries of profane memories that make the invisible appear yet are never simply “there,” always constructed.

The universal labyrinth, the ultimate ideal “plan” transformed into the ultimate concrete reality, burnt into our selves, becoming a eucratic sign of the flesh.

Furniture for euphoric, often absent passerbys, in the hope of revealing the garden that is already there and yet invisible in the contemporary city of traffic flows.

A chest of eugenetic female cavities that contains spiritual organs capable of nurturing and giving birth.
A construction for collective participation, a euphonic text that remains sadly mute, demonstrating the difficulty of ritual and the unshakable reality of brotherly love.

Euharmonic prosthetics for seduction of an impossible love, absence coinciding with presence, eunnuchizing forces transformed into eulogy, despair turned into hope.

Unbuildable gardens that you can hold in your hands, euplastic transmutations of the four elements always different, always the same.

The wasteland of the city transformed into metaphysical place by the gaze of desire, eureka! on condition that it remains a marginal site.

Criticism and poetry fused into eurythmic plots that nevertheless express hope in the human potential to construe a better world: a eudemonic city of the imagination, yet a politically responsible one, beyond reactionary particulars and universals, beyond strong values of difference or homogenization, of gender and race, of nature and technology.

These works, obviously beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries, are in search of an architecture for a finite world where resources are limited, cultures are precious, and purpose in life is a common perception of humanity; an architecture that may recognize the primacy of the ethical imperative, its ties with language and the imagination, and its response-ability as form beyond stylistic formalism and instrumentality.

Dr. Alberto Pérez-Gómez
Montréal, September 1996.

Recomposer les lieux en devenir Patricia Boileau
A Prayer Machine Alice Guess
Construction à cru Christophe Guignard
Self-Portrait... a chest of drawers Jodi La Coe
Prosthetic for a Lost Love Gordon Alexander Nicholson
Dialectical Furniture for Highway Interchanges David Rifkind
Hand Gardens for the Elemental Magician Megan Spriggs
Within the Labyrinth Michael Wilk
Records and Voices Carole Yocum