Remembering the Academy
Thinking Space
The student residences project was an appropriate way to approach the housing issue. I was a student and I was surrounded by them. So it was obvious that those who would inhabit this building would be people like me. Apart from the necessities that were a requirement within the program, I included in my own way two activities that were fundamental in my questioning and which I believed should be part of contemporary housing. Obviously it was an image theme. The screen should be a primary part of the home. Through the use of collective computer rooms to work, or through the activity of watching television as a fundamental part of the leisure of the modern inhabitant of the city.
So when we ask ourselves what it is to inhabit, we discover with surprise that to inhabit is simply the office of living. Living daily is the essence of life. Dwelling becomes, in a certain way, the action of daily living. This demands of our attention, implies a continuous learning, is to be alert in a drift of alternatives. In this activity, although we rarely notice it, it is where we use most of our time and, in turn, claims a deliberate investment of energy. Constantly we inhabit, and it is when we understand the act of inhabiting, that surprises us the naturalness with which we execute the diverse and complex rituals of the habitable space. And just as language, skill in use, is acquired with habit. In this way inhabiting includes in its context, a wide deck of alternatives.
This question we must constantly ask ourselves, because the atmosphere of sensations varies constantly; And through technological advances, this rate of change has increased significantly. Now, at this moment, the question of what it is to inhabit implies, if not a developed interest in the implications of technical advances in the home and in living, a recognition of this fact as a destructor of the traditional meanings of dwelling. What television means, placed before our eyes in its etymological meaning, is the fact of seeing through the distance. It is the fact of breaking with the barriers of distance, time and space. Television allows us ubiquity. This event can not remain isolated from the understanding of contemporary architecture. Architecture has its essence in the architectural object, in its space-time specificity. In the here and now.
The theoretical tradition of architecture has had throughout history, its basis in this fact, because architecture is the fact built from a system of thought that represents the spirit of the age (Zeirgeist). Taking into account the factors mentioned previously in this writing, the questioning of what it means to live can not be isolated from the appropriation of the contemporary reality that we all do.
