MIGUEL ANGEL ROCA

Architecture and its Principles

 

 

There are three essential principles, matter, structure, light. 
But we cannot put them into action without incorporating both feeling and thinking. Thinking is finding ideas in relation to needs, size, proportions, scale. 
Ideas are what reconcile all these needs in ways encompassing intentionality, composition and intentional structure.  Ideas we come up with are nothing more than shaped images, ordered configurations, functional syntheses, intentional organisation/construction, i.e. composition in a specific place. 
Thinking, on the other hand, is not just rationality, it must also encompass feeling, spatial order enhanced by light and matter.  The place or system of places conveys an order that is simply the meaning of a given institution, an institutional idea, the character of these institutions, an arrangement of lights. 
Ideas give rise to architecture, matter defines structure, structure defines light, and light enhances and gives meaning/destiny to spaces. Ideas come from answering questions such as what; why, where and when. Ideas satisfy the essence, origin, purpose, place, time and spirit of the origin in question, its reason for being, the spirit of its sentiment and spirit of its setting, as well as a given moment in time. 

 

Casa Nekola  Colachanga, Río Ceballos, Córdoba, Argentina, 2011
 

Teaching means teaching how to learn and also think and build. Because there are no architectural ideas if there are no buildable ideas to be built. An idea is timeless and must refer to the past (origin), present and, above all, the future. Technique is not ethical, but it must be used ethically. Technique is not aesthetic, but without it there can be no aesthetic design. 
In Re Aedificatoria, Alberti claimed that architecture is design, planning, intentional composition and construction. 
Technique and construction have been catalysts of the collective psyche in the modern architectural design. This kind of modern design identifies with the future and with an idea of the future. 
Building means building in a setting that must be read, recognised as one's own to make it appropriate, to make that particular project different or to enhance the setting while always creating a new identity. 
An idea is constructed and is first a design before it becomes a work, it is an intentional composition entailing a series of predictions about future acts of construction.

 

Casa Beamonte, Río IV, Córdoba, Argentina, 2009
 

A design is an omen, a prophecy and, as such, it is a complete work in itself and also a means of prefiguration. A work is first seen mentally through the power of thought. We expect work to produce something whole, a totality in which nothing can be replaced. 
But the modern movement has devalued this sense of conformity, sometimes making context as a text instilling meaning. No less valid is the opposite principle of the dialectical contrast between closed and open, integrity and fragmentation, transparency and opacity. This process of contrasting configurations, problematic and internally or externally unstable, is also worthwhile. 
But order and disorder or chaos require compositional rigour. There is no random disorder in a composite whole. Compound disorder or complex order demand a quest for hidden order, the fundamental principle, the kind of patient, slow reading demanded by one's own image. 
Since architecture is polysemic, precision is not necessarily necessary, so demands deriving from structural computation will inevitably be modified for visual reasons. We can speak of the imprecise precision of architecture being that which allows for recycling, adapting existing structures coming from fluctuating functions, but modular organisation and co-ordination have enabled changing demands to be easily reactivated.

Casa en Calamuchita Falda de Los Reartes, Córdoba, Argentina, 1999 - 2004
 

This principle of unity can only be overcome by acknowledging that architecture is not always a key player in the fabric of the city and should not (except when celebrating some social monument) be excessively to the fore, demanding only a certain degree of linguistic intensity, whatever its underlying logic and communicative force. A work as a construction only in terms of its usage and appropriation can be understood and valued validly and definitively, which makes the experience of architecture irreplaceable. 
A work is a text composed of various writings, but this text becomes a form with a meaning that must be understood in its stylistic, typological and technological spatial organisation; but all this takes place in a material, sensorial, visual, tactile realm.

Banco de la Provincia de Córdoba, Sucursal Bajada Pucará, Cordoba, Argentina, 1976
 

Architecture must be worked on as a constructed work, a construction project, in order to understand it and think about it. Teaching how to envisage architecture as an idea means contaminate yourself with its construction processes without gently crossing the world without understanding architecture, without living, thinking or creating it; we cannot think without doing, just as we cannot do something meaningful without thinking.