axonométrica

Contribuciones: Jacobo García-Germán. Unfinished Manifesto

Posted by miquel lacasta on 12 de diciembre de 2016 · Deja un comentario 

Unfinished Manifesto

1. Unfinished is not a material but a cultural condition.
2. Unfinished measures the success of architecture inasmuch architecture is unfinished because it becomes a collective concern, it turns collective.
3. This process of collectivization, in architecture, is facilitated by certain devices and obstructed by others. It is enhanced when architecture steps back and reveals its virtues gradually, and it is blocked when architecture over acts. Unfinished architecture prevails over time when it is sufficiently decoded as to permit its rewriting.
4. The value of unfinished travels in time and can only be traced in lines that move away from the immediate present towards the future and towards the past.
5. Unfinished as a line towards the future has to do with the openness a work of architecture, once completed, possesses in cultural terms as to be left free to interpretations of the onlooker. This openness equates to the work’s ability for inquiry and activation.
6. Unfinished as a line towards the past is measured through the layers of conscious or unconscious meaning radiating from the work of architecture. These layers also equate to the work’s ability for inquiry and activation.
7. If an unfinished architecture is that which has a degree of ambiguity towards its intentions as to be spontaneously apprehended by the receptor, then over-determination, functional specificity and formal and material intensity appear at odds with this necessary haziness.
8. If an unfinished architecture is that which has a certain density in its character from where to trace threads of invisible connections across time, then invention and singularity should give way to other, more subtle devices.
9. The idea of considering our relation to architecture as unfinished business happens when architecture produces the necessary frame for a certain reaction to occur, singular or collective. This reaction is a performative as much as a cultural one, and it is exerted by the user, the viewer, and the observer: the receptor of architecture.
10. Any architecture that closes this required openness will therefore become hermetical to any unfinished reaction. Typically, the more architecture is based upon any sort of paradigm or established discourse (parametricism, minimalism, ecology, participation…), the less it will be left to its own devices, left just as a thing out there, sufficiently unjustified by external explanations to permit new readings and interpretations: to become unfinished.

Jacobo García-Germán, MA, PhD architect. Scientific Committee Member Spanish Pavilion Venice Architecture Biennale 2016