Your project seems to be something like a miniature planetary model with a variety of climatic and experiential zones. How did this idea originate?

Pablo Castro: BEATFUSE! was inspired by the way the DJs mix their music. It accentuates the fact that we are all unique individuals and move to different beats. The project is a celebration of a momentary fusion of our diversity. That's why all the shells here are slightly different and they are intersected in a variety of ways. The project serves as a venue for the annual music festival Warm Up, which is organized by P.S.1. This event attracts up to seven[ty] thousand people every summer. And the people who come here represent a cross section of a very diverse population in New York. It is based on [the] New York tradition of a block party and it is an opportunity to celebrate New York's vitality as a multicultural city. So we felt that it was the most interesting aspect to be celebrated through the design. We wanted to create a container or a backdrop for this party and present the party in itself as a work of art. Since it gets very hot in summers here in New York we thought it would be very important to address in our work the issue of a climatic condition. This event has become a true public institution for civic enjoyment and being architecture students that we are, we immediately recognized here a parallel with one of the oldest architectural institutions for civic enjoyment - the Roman baths in classical antiquity. There is the same basic idea - the party takes place in the heat. Curiously enough the museum's courtyard is divided into three zones which presented an interesting match with three main zones defining the Roman baths: tepidarium (warm room), caldarium (hot room) and finally frigidarium (cold room). So we chose to express the space through the use of interconnected spheres that are lined in three different ways to produce three temperature zones.

Based on the history of this competition what type of questions did you ask yourselves when you started working on the project? What did you want to avoid and what were your goals?

PC: The first question that we asked ourselves was more practical - how can we realize our ideas and fit into the available budget? It was a challenge, but also an opportunity to express our thoughts based on the ideas of the Italian art movement called Arte Povera. It is about a notion that various limitations of choices are not detrimental to the quality of the project, but can be used as an advantage. Disciplined focusing on limited resources and choosing the right materials became the soul of the project. If you don't have too many choices you have to make the right ones. The things that we wanted to avoid were to use forms that are seen more sculptural than architectural. In fact, one of the remarks of the organizers of the competition was: "We don't want a work of art; we want a work of architecture." In other words the idea was not to design an object but a space for potential to be inhabited. Because of the budget limitations we made a conscientious effort to spread the material very thin and make it perform in a very precise manner to take advantage of the inherited qualities of various materials.

What kind of innovations - technical or conceptual - are you proposing here?

PC: To us everything became an innovation. For example, we were working together with our engineers Robert Silman Associates on the design of the arches and domes. They told us that it would be a very long, elaborate and ultimately a very expensive process to determine the right materials and their precise thicknesses. And that first we would have to design everything ourselves intuitively - through trial and error and experimentation. So these limited choices forced us to make very precise decisions and selects all materials and forms because they can perform in a certain way. Many of the choices we made were done not purely for stylistic reasons and not simply because we were told what would work best for our engineers, but through very close analyses and studies of certain qualities and performance of different materials that we personally explored. We admire what German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys said: "By producing art we lend our conscience to the things of the world. So they become our conscience." That's what we are trying to do - we try to lend our conscience to all materials here and we feel very responsible for this project. An object is chosen because it can perform in a certain way and because we are looking for a certain performance. Forms are generated by particular circumstances and therefore become unique.

How did you react to the news that you won the competition?

PC: We were very happy. The jury was very supportive and enthusiastic during the presentation. Towards the end Terrence Riley, the jury member said: "Now is the time for a tough question. How are you going to produce this project for $70,000?" So Jennifer said: "Well, over the years that we were doing architecture we haven't made a lot of money, but we made a lot of friends. So we guarantee you that we can get it done." And that was exactly the way it came out. A lot of our friends came through and a lot of our people were inspired by the P.S. 1 message and what P.S. 1 and MoMA stand for. So a lot of people were very eager to participate and through realizing this project we made a lot of new friends. A lot of people donated their labor, time, materials and expertise. And because of it we also worked very, very hard. Right after winning the competition we started [a] fundraising campaign. We would spend a lot of time on the phone and every night we would send five or six FedEx packages with materials about the project. It was very effective. We had raised additionally about as much as the museum gave us for the project.

What do you think is the real budget here if a lot of the materials and labor were donated?

PC: There are certain things here that you can't really quantify. I believe that when architecture has a soul it has power of being inspiring. For example, the contractors tell me that they never know where they are going to go next and what kind of project they are going to work on, but this is something that is very unique and they really want to prolong it and are willing to put extra effort. The party that everybody anticipates is already happening at the level of construction. There is a great sense of comradeship and this experience is very dear to us and it is a lot more than just learning professionally.

When did you start construction and how long did it take to build this project?

PC: We didn't start soon enough! Overall duration of construction was going to be about three months. When our friend Terry Chance, a Brooklyn contractor who moved to Minneapolis, found out that we [were] selected for the competition he said "Don't you want me to do a mockup for you?" So he did a few mockups in 1/3 scale which we presented in the photographs. When we won the competition he offered to help us again to build the actual domes. It was actually a lot cheaper to build it in Minneapolis than in New York. Also the father of his office manager happened to have a huge track and helped us to transform all the pieces to New York. Three of our architects spent a month in Minneapolis figuring out and supervising the fabrication of all the wood parts and pieces that needed to be built there. We bought the lattice for the domes and they [were] produced by using CNC (Computer Numerical Control) milling.

This project is not very large but fairly complex. How many people are involved in helping you get it built?

PC: We have about ten people in our office, about fifteen volunteers for the duration of construction, ten people working for contractor Terry Chance in Minneapolis, six people at two CNC milling shops in Minneapolis, three people in Upstate New York, two project managers from Sciame construction, six [union carpenters]. Also I have to mention the P.S. 1 shop and group of people are very helpful. So it is a very big group of people.

You said: "Architecture is a living thing, a strange mirror that can bring us back to our own forgotten condition." Can you elaborate on this?

PC: Well, it has to do with the inhabitability of architecture. Architecture needs to become something that contains other things, to be a backdrop for life to take place in it and not overwhelm life with a form that can obliterate all the possibilities and to be open for something unexpected and undetermined. So we try to find a kind of void in architecture that would allow for a potential to transform people's lives. We relate architecture to a living thing because it is in a continuous state of transformation and it has to remain open to it and allow for that transformation. Also there is an issue of transformation in time. For example stone and wood don't have responsibility to transform themselves into stone and wood, but human beings have to transform themselves into human beings as they grow up in a certain way. Our being is not a given. So we feel responsible to create something more than just material by lending our conscience to the things of the world that don't have conscience. In other words we try to give a certain tension and direction to materials to become something. In a way it is framework to something that has a potential to happen within it. So it can be the most important thing because that's where everything happens and it needs to be designed in a very subtle and receptive way.

Do you think architecture is similar to telling stories?

PC: Yes, but in a very different way. In modern art there has been a kind of relinquishing of the narrative and a fixed perspective because it determines a certain particular reading. So modern art tends to present itself free of a particular meaning and allow[s] the viewer to bring their own interpretation into the work. The idea is that the art is incomplete and it is only complete by the viewer. For example, such objects that have no artistic pretence as a mirror that reflects the viewer in a group of other figures or a handrail, attached to a wall that you can lean on or involve the viewer. The opportunity for narrative is there, but it is not defined with the beginning, middle and end that proscribe a certain meaning. It is a narrative but open-ended.

Your work is distinguished by the idea of movement through space while experiencing such phenomena as light, sound, smell and touch. How do you try to personify your architecture? Is it important to find something unique and your own in architecture?

PC: Well, to find something unique is the most important thing. We have been inspired greatly by the work of Steven Holl and his attention to light and nature of materials. We both were fortunate to work for him and naturally admire his philosophy. But we also have a different cultural background. I come from Latin America where the relation of the things with the world is a lot less mediated. For example, I had a very personal experience with such elemental things as mud, sky because I spent a lot of time in the country. That's part of my upbringing. We're always exploring the quality of experience. We are interested in how objects and materials acquire a certain personality.

June 2006, New York

We experience music as an inhabitable three-dimensional continuous fabric. Built as an interweaving of melodic lines, we enter it through an immersion in its progression of harmonies which leads us decisively from one recognizable place to another.

Not unlike architecture, music is inhabited as an unfolding of time and is made intelligible by the memory of where we have been and the expectation of where we may be going. Both such journeys are experienced as a crossing of the threshold between the behind and the beyond of the void we inhabit, in music as dissonance, in architecture as chiaroscuro.

The city that builds an Opera House and a Concert Hall builds a celebration of the cultural achievements of its population. Current plans for the development of Seoul extending 15 years into the future envision the gradual definition of four urban quarters of clear individual character and particular flavor: the Axis of Ecology and Reunification; the Axis of World Culture; the Axis of Modern Culture and the Axis of Pop Culture while the Hangang river, cutting through the city center, is identified as the locus of a further urban aspiration: The Seoul Cultural Belt. It befits plans for Nodeul Island to envision its inevitable transformation into an important space for the people of Seoul both as cultural landmark and public place of urban quality and civic enjoyment.

A chiaroscuro from naked sunlight to the thickest leafy shade connecting the two extremes of Nodeul Island is proposed as a landscape of dissonance between the "Primitive" and the "Modern,” between diminishing luxuriance and increasing cultivation. At the quieter deeply shaded end of the island, amongst trees, rocks, animals and natural phenomena, sits the Amphitheater of Intuition, dedicated to young people and the adventurous spirit of improvisation and experimentation. Amidst freedom from tradition and a commitment to constant renewal, music can retain its primeval link to the supernatural. All the way at the other end of the island under the sunny sky and the angular shadows of the Opera House and Concert Hall buildings the Reflection Square will define a realm in a context of cultural consensus as common property unfolding in the production of educated works in a dialogue of conscious creation.

Dirt from the building construction excavation is used to form the landscape of the island and to create berms to each side of the street. The road is redesigned to create vehicular drop-off points for pedestrians to each of the newly created parks on both sides of the island through new access ramps and to provide entry to parking, theater drop-off points and service access all underground. This arrangement ensures the urban quality of the island as a public place with no vehicular traffic, while taking advantage of the existing island shore below flood level, transforming it into spacious underground facilities with little excavation expense.

Kim Jong-ho's 1861 map of Seoul emphasizes natural and topographic features, in their rendition they seem to evoke subtle changes in personal mood and lived experience. The many streams depicted in the map weave together a multiplicity of topographic conditions, while a certain recurrence of character seems to hold it all together as if nursed by an inner disquiet, not unlike the shifting naturalistic harmonies of an Impressionistic composition. The paths of human movement through the chiaroscuro of Nodeul Island mediate in an similar manner the disparate conditions of inhabitation of forest, urban square and building interior. The architectural counterpart of these paths through the landscape stream over them as diaphanous long thin buildings resting on arcades and fusing themselves into the denser masses of the Opera House and the Concert Hall. These buildings house administrative areas, musicians’ studios and individual rehearsal spaces, classrooms, cafeterias and other facilities where employees can work on the day-to-day tasks that would benefit from natural sunlight, cross ventilation and rewarding views of the river and the city beyond. They define courtyard spaces that create meaningful gradations of openness between exterior and interior while under the arcades visitors can stroll, linger or gather protected from the rain or excessive sun exposure. In the evenings the thin buildings broadcast to the whole city their luminous embrace of Nodeul Island.

The large buildings of the Concert Hall and the Opera House aspire to an almost musical integration of form and content. As meaning in music resides in a coherence that lends a sense of inevitability to the ideas, these buildings seek to find expression in an identity between form and content, between issues of acoustical conditioning, audience movement, the creation of public space in the city and the shapes and materials which incarnate them. Both the Concert Hall and the Opera House enunciate the importance of the entry lobby as a public urban space almost exterior in nature by virtue of its size and configuration. As such, these entry spaces are crucially articulated in the continuum of space experienced, ranging from exposure to raw natural elements at the far end of the island to the comfort of a seat amongst the audience in the Concert Hall or the Opera House.

The Concert Hall is conceived as a large portal opening to both sides of the city across each shore of the Hangang and thus conveying its openness to all. Upon entry through the large blackened steel and glass enclosures to both sides, the audience encounters the vast open space of the entry lobby sheltered by the curving belly of the auditorium's floor suspended overhead. The ceiling will be lit from the lobby's floor, acting as an expansive iridescent reflective surface encompassing the entire room. Each of the short ends of the space is defined by the vertical structural piers that support the auditorium above; through them the audience will mount stairs and elevators to ascend while enjoying progressively higher views of the river and city outside. In between the piers on the lobby level, the ticket booth, coat-check, cafe and other support facilities will be found.

Inside the auditorium, the floor descends in a bowl-like shape creating the vineyard seating layout within a room of about 17,000 cubic meters, ideal for the reverberation time desired of approximately 2 seconds. The roof is composed of shells which in their convexity reflect sound without concentrated echo, while the two long side walls contain cavities for audience circulation, mechanical distribution and stage and house lighting. The auditorium is also equipped with large double glass windows with frosted interior layers and black-out equipment in between, if so desired during matinee performances, sunlight can be allowed in perhaps to more faithfully reproduce period instrument performances under the conditions of pre-electricity concert halls. The walls and ceiling of the auditorium will be finished in plaster colored the kingfisher green "secret color" of Koryo celadon wares and polished to their same subtle opalescence; the floors and stage side walls will be damask-stained wood.

Acoustically, the hall assumes a shoebox form incorporating a dynamic vineyard seating arrangement. The strong parallel walls will help promote lateral reflections as will the upstands to the seating blocks. The ceiling form will help promote sound diffusion and mixing and will be enhanced with surface texture as required to meet the acoustical requirements. If amplification is used in the room, for performances such as Jazz or Classical Guitar, the room can incorporate variable sound absorbing banners that could descend from the roof void to cover 90% of the wall area. These will be deployed incrementally as necessary for the type of performance.

The Opera House is configured as a vertical multi-ring horseshoe space allowing proximity to the stage and clear sight-lines to the entire audience and including a 18 meter wide stage equipped with hydraulic lifts, a back stage with turn table, a total of four side stages and high fly tower. The entry lobby opens to Reflection Square on one side while perched at the island's edge overlooking the city on the other. The multiple ramps that access the many balcony levels in the house develop in the interior, the theme of the thin buildings that characterize the design of the island and lend the space a kinetic quality of spectacle with the audience coming and going to and fro the house during seating and intermission.

The interior walls of the house are entirely finished in a lattice of damask stained wood panels that can be open for the adjustment of acoustic conditions through the installation of either absorbent or reflective material. The large stage apron and blank wall panels to each side will promote the early sound reflections that guarantee the broadcasting of the voices to the highest seats. Acoustic requirements and structural resolution coincide in the configuration of the large cantilevered convex concrete shell roof finished in white plaster and surrounded by a double enclosure of frosted glass containing mechanical distribution, stage and house lighting and black-out system. As in the Auditorium, natural light can be allowed in at suitable moments during the performance or during intermission. The curved chalky surface of the plaster ceiling would then reflect sunlight in the reversed manner it reflects sound from the stage. During evening functions the house lights contained in the double glass enclosure transform the ceiling into a giant plaster chandelier which, a lighthouse to the river, announces across the city a performance underway.

The Opera House, shares its facilities with a proposed "House of Change", a small theater for 400 to 600 people. Located on the top of the building, The House of Change will be equipped with the latest stage technology and will be dedicated to electronic music and all forms of avant-garde performing arts. The Seoul Night Cafe located in its lobby will enjoy a commanding view of the city’s night skyline.

Jon Brunberg: What inspired you to take on the challenge of this particular competition to design the memorial complex on Salvokop Hill?

Pablo Castro: Besides the desire to involve our work in the worthy cause of honoring those who fought against oppression, we were most interested by the nature of the challenge at the heart of the project, namely that of turning memory into built form. Built memory of a kind that can introduce some friction into the process of forgetting, a most understandable process considering the horrific nature of events here being memorialized. We saw, in the intention of creating a memorial structure and recounting the past events in the spatial narrative of a museum, a basic optimistic attitude we felt compelled to endorse. Engaging in this kind of project means confining the events in question to a definitive past, one that has been overcome and is "remembered" from the vantage point of a new shared situation.

JB: I find the buildings' beehive-like forms to be quite unusual, from my limited horizon I should add. What was the idea behind the use of that formal element in the design?

PC: There is a tradition belonging to some African communities of burying the remains of important deceased community members inside the trunk of old baobab trees found in the vicinity. Given their imposing presence in the landscape and vital significance (baobab trees provide for humans and animals in many different ways) and the fact that they live for thousands of years, the ritual provides the deceased with a form of "eternal" life. We felt this tradition provided a fitting and unique model for remembering the martyrs of Apartheid, and we designed the memorial to be a 30 meter height brick hollowed-out tree trunk in the shape of a baobab. In its void the sun projects a circling parade of the ghostly likeness of the martyrs' faces acid-etched on the glass windows inserted on the walls of the structure.

JB: What material would be used for the facade of the buildings?

PC: The exterior of all the structures in the project is to be finished in handmade brick. We envisioned the same red dirt of Salvokop Hill to be used as the raw material from which the bricks are to be baked, effecting a literal integration of site and building. This would of course require considerable amounts of labor, but given the relatively high rates of unemployment endemic in some neighboring communities and considering the scale of the project, we regarded this as an opportunity to initiate local residents in a new trade and foster an early emotional bond of interdependence between buildings and people.

JB: The section drawing published at UIA's website shows the museum, if I understand it correctly. Is the memorial also included in the main building?

PC: The memorial stands separately at the end of the spiraling path that defines the ascent to the hill and approach to the structures. It is set at the top of the hill as a "lone tree" surrounded by the proposed "Garden of Remembrance" and facing the museum at the other side of the vast "Gathering Space". The museum in turn is configured as four tree trunks fused together, as if four trees growing in close proximity to each other had in time fused into one.

JB: What solution for the memorial did you propose? One of the stills on your website depicts portraits projected onto the walls in one of the main halls and I assume that it shows the memorial rather than a museum exhibition.

PC: The proposed solution considers the basic quality of memory as a factor of lives spent, as a kind of detritus of the experience of passing time, the dimension of our human awareness. The memorial is built around two different concepts, the first one regarding space and mass, the mysterious aura of presence that characterizes all life and is most moving when conveyed through the expressions of the human face. Here we rely upon the mass of the brick "baobab" and the luminous portraits in constant motion through the space. The second one has to do with time, and relies on the "powering" of the memorial through sunlight and its movement, evoking a new connection to old rituals of cosmic rhythm and, of course, a "materialization" of the passing of time.

JB: What is the function of the freestanding building on the model?

PC: There are three separate structures proposed for the hill, the memorial on top, the museum flanking it and the administrative facilities at the bottom. If you would like to receive additional documentation on the project, we would be happy to provide it.

JB: You also designed a war memorial in San Jose. What is in your opinion the challenge with designing memorials that relates to conflict?

PC: The Freedom Park project occupies a special place in the body of our work, maybe not so much because of the inherent significance of its proposed content (which it has), but perhaps because it best aligns with the expression of a dimension that is basic to all of our work. This is the aspect that is hardest to capture in words, maybe even it has something to do with the impulse people have to build memorials or, if we can be allowed to go a little bit further, to commission Architecture and expect to get something that transcends simple construction. In the case of memorials or museums, a more secular interpretation of a program fulfilling similar functions, it is easier to find acceptance for the introduction into the project of considerations relating aspects of existence that are perhaps obscure and mysterious to most people in our times and therefore regarded as eccentric and dispensable when discussing most projects.

On the other hand, we do share an ambivalence about memorials, monuments and museums, to the extent that they can be seen as an effort to materialize and fix conditions of privilege and power. In that sense, we have tried to disassociate our work from traditional monumentalizing architectural strategies. Choosing instead to focus on fostering a relationship between the built work and found (natural) processes and presences, and also to define the forms as enmeshed in a process of spatial and temporal development in which we have to invest our bodies to comprehend. Curved interpenetrating forms which cannot be exhausted when perceived from stationary points of view and require constant repositioning in three dimensions. These forms are typically equipped with sweeping ramps that enlist visitors as part of the work itself and transcend perspectival experience stretching perception to incorporate changing sound, touch, and muscular exertion.

JB: How do you, in the design process, deal with and take into consideration the strong emotional forces that I assume must inevitably be a part of these kinds of projects?

PC: We can perhaps consider that if well understood, all architectural projects should elicit the same kind of emotional forces you mention in relationship to the particular type of project we are discussing here. Architecture has the ability to convey the immanence of lived experience because it proposes as its subject matter the possibility of alternative modes of inhabiting a hollow object and also because its experience must by necessity unfold in time. It then becomes particularly suited to be considered as a metaphor for memory. It is perhaps difficult to say how to address the emotional component of a work that is supposed to touch people's lives, and we rely on an intuitive process that unfolds in a dialectic of trial and error until we "know" that what we have is good.

In his work Marcel Proust made a clear distinction between memoire voluntaire and memoire involuntaire, the former responds to intellectual promptings and retains no real trace of the past experience, presenting the past as irreparably beyond the rescuing efforts of the intelligence. The latter discovers the past as "unmistakably present in some material object, though we have no idea which one it is."

11 October 2005 Interview with Jon Brunberg, Visual Artist, Stockholm, Sweden

The Polynational War Memorial web site: www.war-memorial.net ... more about freedom park

Architecture is not a thing. Subject to perpetual transformation, architecture exists in time and lacks the completeness characteristic of things. The city, as architecture's "natural" milieu, expands its unfinished quality to the entire space of human existence. Architecture may be instead what allows for things to be. Appealing to our attention upon the background of reality, things demand to be held by a void. Architecture's essential emptiness provides the void in which we perceive the things that are. Architecture may have originally developed as a second thought, not meant for its own sake, it may have grownout of the desire for emptiness needed to support all other things. This we can sense in the architecture by subtraction of ancient cave buildings. Lacking the simple constant presence of things but providing the condition of their being, we can think of architecture not as an object but instead as a subject, the one human creation that most accurately resembles ourselves. This intuition was present in Louis Kahn's desire: "I want to give the wall a consciousness."

If there is a consciousness of architecture, perhaps architecture differs from construction in similar measure to how we differ from animals, by virtue of a self-awareness that confronts us with the precariousness of being. Construction is the discipline through which we master all building techniques. These techniques are applied to the resolution of pragmatic problems, and construction exists for the resolution of those problems: it finds its reason for being in them and is, because of this, unaware of itself. Architecture is presented with the resolution of its own set of tasks, and its value will be commensurate to the importance of the tasks undertaken. But in trying to satisfy, it will transcend the tasks themselves, creating meaning and in this way becoming its own reason for being. We can say that it stands mediating between us and the world, and by doing so it speaks to us about our lives with a unique ineffable voice.

Animals, plants and even rocks and minerals, in their dormant vitality, enjoy an existence that is given. A swallow endures no responsibility for being itself; aware neither of past or future, its existence unfolds in the perpetual certainty of the present. Those with consciousness enjoy no such privilege; their being is always incomplete and granted only through the constant effort to become. Consciously or not, every lived moment is an investment made towards the creation of tomorrow. Albert Camus described this condition in The Rebel by affirming that "Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is." Such refusal, the desire to become, is a promise made to ourselves, a promise that we can only fulfill in time.

The essence of time is its own passing, Henri Bergson writes in Matter and Memory that all of our past is potentially available to our remembrance. This seems paradoxical, since at any time we only have access to a limited number of memories. But were we to be constantly aware of the past in its entirety, we would have to endure constant confrontation with all of our guilt, regrets and perhaps even an inability to fall asleep.

Aware of having hopelessly forgotten many things, we are sometimes suddenly able to remember, while dreaming or during moments of penetrating reverie, what we thought irretrievably forgotten, or even what we were never even fully aware we knew.

But time is always now, the not-yet's and no-longer's do not exist except inside consciousness, where they find a field propitious to their peculiar being. The passing of time coincides with the form of consciousness, and we could advance the equation:

The relationship between passing time and architecture is reciprocal, not only does time provide a realm for architecture to be, but architecture also endows time with spatial intelligibility. In his short story "Funes el Memorioso," Borges tells us of a young man who, after falling from a horse and momentarily losing consciousness, finds himself entrapped by perfect perception and an inability to forget. Unable to ignore unnecessary details to be able to generalize, he cannot think. He commits his time to an attempt at harnessing the overwhelming reveries into a private language. Resolving to reduce each lived day in his past to approximately 70,000 memories, he assigns numbers to each of them, but soon, he surrenders the plan realizing it would consume more time than he has left in his life. Past experience constitutes a layering upon which our lives are made meaningful, but Funes understands that memories do not suffice, and that to become meaningful they demand an organizing armature, an architecture.

If forgetting is a defense mechanism, then to reach deep into the pocket of memory we must relinquish rational control and give in to reverie as we give in to sleep after a hard day of work. Early in the design of an architectural project, ideas are in flux, progress remains erratic and possible outcome uncertain. Forms seem too diffuse and unstable to be effectively handled by efforts of the intelligence. But the project does not wait and encourages a way forward that puts action in the place of thinking, action then is freed from thinking, and enters a realm similar to that of dream, both rationally incomprehensible and liberating. It is at such moments that the projects undergo decisive transformations, assuming lives of their own. Becoming increasingly independent from our conscious desires and original hopes, they begin to incarnate the future.

Works of architecture are always in progress, their becoming extending beyond the time of their construction. As the results of a process with no end in sight, we can choose to think of their development as co-substantial with their being and therefore, paradoxically, always finished. For the same reasons, architecture, aware of itself, is faced with the impossibility of stylistic consistency. The accumulated sequence of past moments lies in the memory of architecture, and as one moment precedes the next, each lends a unique layer of meaning to every project. The changing milieu resulting from this condition suggests that an architecture that repeats itself without substantial change must be either dead or inhuman.

Meaning as accumulated time emanates from site and project brief as aural emissions suggesting the consistent structure of things of the world but never congealing as concrete form. In the same way we expect the face of everyone we know to include a nose and a mouth, but we cannot assume that their personalities will be identical. The moment of incarnation of each project presents both a vista into a continual unfolding-vulnerable to the encounters with things of the world-and a unique manner of coming to be.

Architecture's void and its willingness to clarify life by interposing itself between us and the world are both dependent on a crucial quality of space, its depth. Because they constitute our point of view of the world, our bodies remain unknown to ourselves; they remain only partially included in the field of what we perceive. Because of this, we are typically surprised by our own appearance when we first see ourselves in film or hear our voice on tape, and we fail to recognize ourselves.

The body of architecture is similarly limited, either present as an exterior or as an interior, and in both cases partially unavailable as depth, a "beyond" or a "behind," only knowable through a movement of endless investigation.

The design process tries to capture this indeterminable nature of reality and envision the repercussions of possible interventions. Here, physical models provide the best approximation to the mystery of the changing experience of depth. Digital renderings and animations are based on precisely known geometric relationships projected on a flat surface and, although useful for other purposes, fail to provide a reliable approximation of the real by virtue of lacking both depth and indeterminacy.

The paradoxical life of architecture is a void made present by a body that cannot be totally apprehended. Losing itself to the pursuit of objects, it becomes indirectly present as a layering of time. This strange quality gives architecture the ability to suggest the universal in the immediacy of the familiar and concrete. De-familiarized, the things of the world are handed back to us free of the obscuring varnish of accumulated habit, and we can then see them for the first time. In Art as Technique Viktor Shklovsky advocates an "increase [in] the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."

De-familiarizing or the act of "making difficult" critically depends on the observance of limits. The de-familiarization of architectural form must, by necessity, stop at the threshold of the unrecognizable. Beyond that point we enter the realm of fantasy, reality disappears and de-familiarization becomes pointless. An arrested strangeness can only become demiurgic by relying on the precise measure of its application: too little and the trivial remains as such, too much and the strange becomes idiosyncratic. The significance of the resulting phenomenon relies on the inexplicable similarity between the familiar and the strange.

Rediscovering strangeness in architecture is like making the world anew, turning it into mirror or speculum, where we see ourselves and wonder at the rediscovery. Describing the way reflection straddles consciousness and the world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes in The Phenomenology of Perception: "Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire." Architecture is the spatial vehicle of this speculation. It presents us with a vista of our life and reminds us of our own existence as we proceed to forget it, while becoming, in our image, the incarnation of an idea.

The term "Architettura Povera" is transposed from the famous description of "Arte Povera" made by Germano Celant when writing about a group of young artists working in Italy in the late sixties. The group, more than working under the protective conceptual umbrella of any defined manifesto, shared a disposition of disdain towards preconceived artistic principles. They were not only weary of theoretical frameworks to define the art, but also of any defined artistic language, which was viewed by them as more of an impediment to become intimate with the things of the world than an aid, in that sense. They tended to use the simplest materials found in nature, for example, metal, dirt, water, rivers, land, snow, fire, glass, air, stone, leaves, newspaper, and also, light, weight, electricity, measurement, stress, people, time, smell, and horses.

The materials were invariably left uncovered and relied on the specificity of their material substance for their effect. Rather than an exhaustive review of the works of Arte Povera, we recall these artists for their willingness to attempt an erasure of distinction between doing art and living. We would like to offer a consideration of Arte Povera in relationship to architecture to provide a kind of sympathetic lens through which to look at our recent work. The term "povera" or "poor" coincides with a desire to avoid material gloss and to get as close as possible to the elemental being of the matter involved, but in this consideration and as employed by Celant has more to do more with a self-imposed limitation of choices and assumptions. Or, as Gide would have it, "Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better."

We would like to provide eight principles, albeit somewhat un-Arte Povera to suggest such an ordering, and therefore we propose eight PROVISIONAL principles underlying the work.

1. We are doomed from the start. "To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail." Beckett

We work to achieve certain mysterious moments of rare correspondence between an initial act of intuition and what would seem to be a real "ideal object" with a unique presence. Naturally, this kind of work is perpetually besieged by doubt. One aspect of the distinction between architecture and everyday lived reality that would be befitting to an Architettura Povera would be a treatment of the sense of time, analogous to the way we experience it in reality. How do you work in architecture with an idea of time that is different from the time of clocks and watches, the time of minutes and seconds, time chopped up and quantified, with rather time as it is felt, this chronological space that we're in and we can't escape from? It is both a reassuring and a terrifying predicament. For example, in the case of the project of the Freedom Park Memorial, how do we achieve that sense of time about which Spinoza proclaimed, "We know and feel that we are eternal." How do you do something like that in architecture? From the outset we are doomed to failure.

2. To be honest with you, we always do the same thing.

We aspire to extend the intentions of our work from project to project, constantly looking for the possibility to address the same problems, leaving behind any orthodox notion of regionalism or site specificity. It is precisely because we always try to do the same thing that projects are very different from each other. The infinite variety of the nature of things is responsible for the difference between them. We might try to reinvent the wheel, but we always are trying to make the same wheel, it just comes out differently with each effort.

3. We are unable to ever finish anything.

If one behaves as human beings typically do, with an objective in mind, one wants to get somewhere, arrive at something, achieve certain goals. Then all things become objectified, everything becomes related to those goals, and time is flattened. But, as we've pointed at in our first principle, we have very slim chances of success anyway, so why not simply postpone the idea of achieving anything? Why not scrap all objectives? Or even better, why not make the effort of trying to do whatever there is to be done the objective in and of itself? As Borges said it, much more beautifully: "Every step you take is the goal you seek." So the work is never finished, or even better, it is always complete. Then the objective and the work of pursuit itself become one and the same; action and life become one, the work never finished, and reality infinite. Time is simply filled with a sequence of things that one does to perfect the work, forward and back, coinciding with the duration of natural lives.

4. Make sure to only talk about food and drink.

Kierkegaard said about his hero Socrates, that he always talked exclusively about food and drink, but really he was talking about the infinite, while the others spent all of the time talking about the infinite in the loudest voices, while they really were only talking about food and drink. We believe that there is a deep sense of practicality that pervades the best architecture and that, well understood, summons that vertigo of the infinite much better than anything else. The infinite, as we know, can be infinitely large or infinitely small, and as such it is present in everything. Nothing converges to the essence of architecture as the potential clarified by the inhabitation it may suggest.

5. Our designs will be bettered by others.

One important aspect of a "povera" outlook is an interest for the living things of the world. The artists became interested in animals, plants, and even in the apparently dormant vitality of rocks and minerals, and of course in themselves and others. In that light a project must be left "open" to that vitality which then will have an opportunity to manifest itself by changing the architecture in both reversible and irreversible ways as time passes. When such openness is of a reversible nature, it may simply have to do with appropriately staging the potential of inhabitation. In the case of irreversible change, it has more to do with growth as analogous to biological growth, that is, not by "fragments," which beget monstrosity and deformity, but rather by "moments" in a process of continuous transformation.

6. Maybe it is good not to be understood.

The Povera artist chooses the hard life of living amongst things, aspiring everyday to travel the distance that separates our knowledge from the essence of things. This is a trip undertaken in solitude. Every thing which exists, once known, can perform a function of communication; it has the potential to be conceptually understood and also bears with it the potential to become a sign. That sign is one more obstacle in the search for the true knowledge of things; that sign is one more enemy in the effort to attain an understanding of essences. In the 1930s, Ortega y Gasset spoke of the megaphone and the radio as the new enemies of man. Unrecognizable things-obscurity-point our consciousness in unknown directions, expanding the horizon of experience away from the familiar. Or, as Germano Celant, considering the alternative, put it, "Moving within linguistic systems to remain language translates into a form of cultural kleptomania that stifles the vitality of real daily life."

7. If you want to do good architecture you have to be gullible.

St. Augustine said, "Faith is believing what you do not see; the reward of faith is to see what you believe." It is well known that the worst enemies of faith are the same as the worst enemies of art: skepticism and relativism. Skepticism suspects that nothing is true; relativism claims that everything can be true. They are both false. The belief in the effective existence of the object of perception or imagination is an aspect of their essence and the foundation of everything for us.

8. If you can't come up with anything, you are probably thinking too much.

Embodiments of energy and the vital essence of all things were cornerstones of the works of Arte Povera, centering on an interest for the lives of animals and their existence directed by instinct as non-conceptual yet marvelous adaptation to vital problems. Intuition as a method of essential inquiry is related to the idea of instinct. Thought deals with things that have already happened, things executed and completed. If I move my arm, and I think about it, I break it up into moments of that movement. Intuition, instead, happens simultaneously with the moment lived, and thus it is aware of processes in their very unfolding.

"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better." AndrŽ Gide (1869-1951)

"To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare fail..." Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). "Three Dialogues," by Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, p. 21, in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin, Prentice-Hall (1965).

"Yet it is not possible that we should remember that we existed before our body, for our body can bear no trace of such existence, neither can eternity be defined in terms of time, or have any relation to time. But, notwithstanding, we feel and know that we are eternal." Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), "Part V, On the Power of the Understanding, or of Human Freedom," in Ethics, trans. by R.H.M. Elwes (1883), MTSU Philosophy WebWorks Hypertext Edition, 1997.

"Every step you take is the goal you seek." Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. by Andrew Hurley, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 504-507. For the original Spanish version, La rosa de Paracelso, see Borges, Obras Completas, Tomo III, EmecŽ, 1996, pp. 387-390.

"Faith is believing what you do not see; the reward of faith is to see what you believe." Saint Augustine (354-430), Sermons, 43, 1.

9 April 2004