There is no sign on the door of the building, actually there is no clue at all to the reality that lies inside. The office occupies what previously was an auto-workshop in one of Lisbon‘s historical neighborhoods. The triangular floorplan sets up a two storey room that went through minor interventions, remaining in a typological ambiguity that lends some sort of palpable meaning to the work environment. At one of the edges of the triangle, cornered by two wooden walls, stands a single cubicle, once the mechanic’s office, now the small work room Diogo shares with his wife, Patricia. A wooden desk, smoothed by time and work, stood between Diogo and me. He calmly sat back, smoking at a steady rhythm, invitingly answering the questions posed to him. This was not the first time we met, I attended a lecture he gave to a group of swiss students on a study trip to Lisbon. The topic he chose to address was not the obvious choice; hidden historical streets in Lisbon. In the course of his lecture, he drew our attention to the fact that this decayed streets that lay behind and under avenues are, at least, as deserving of a visit as the rest of the city’s monuments. The uncommon way he presented Lisbon to the students matches his approach to Architecture. Diogo studied architecture at the FAUTL in Lisbon at a time when Porto was at its prime. He focussed on acquiring a strong theoretical base before jumping into practical work. He co-authored a book on urban realities (1) shortly after his studies. He was co-editor of Prototypo, a magazine he co-founded, he is now co-editor of the Portuguese Architectural Guild magazine (J-A) and co-curator of the next Lisbon‘s Architecture Trienal. He works with his wife in Barbas Lopes Arquitectos. He shares his work and the results of his work. Diogo is worth sharing.

What we share shapes our society and changes our personal habits within these relationships. With the increasing number of people living alone in cities it can be asked how this solitude shapes our personal identity. If there exists an urban hermit, a lone dweller, then what could be the role of sharing his personal life to others? In order to approach the idea of sharing, let us first explore the very opposite of the seemingly public medium of our social affairs in the embodiment of a hermit,  a person who lives in seclusion from society.

The very word we use here hermit, from Latin ĕrēmīta, meaning ‘of the desert’ originates from Christian hermits who lived in the Egyptian deserts. It is important to note that the content of the word has various nuances and forms of practices for different cultures and beliefs worldwide. While some forms became institutionalised, such as the desert communities became the models for Christian monasticism, others remained solely dependent on individuals. Although mostly carried by religious reasons, the underlying idea during the period of seclusion is to renounce from one’s daily habits and personal volition in search for a higher consciousness.

Most of Asian Buddhism follows the idea that a person should at least once be apart from his contemporary earthly way of living. In some branches of Tibetan Buddhism it is required of monks to do solo retreat for three years and three months. They live in caves and forests for deep contemplation. The monks in search for solitude would not necessarily avoid villages that come to their way. Instead, they would unconditionally help the inhabitants, if only for a fee of a piece of bread to eat. The hermit steps under the service of other living beings with the absence of ego. While committing solely to others, the person no longer is in the centre of his actions himself, therefore entirely sharing himself with the world. This very absence of ego can be seen as absolute sharing. A hermit in order to fully depart from his self could act as a scarecrow on the fields. To abandon one’s personal identity within the society by living in an absolute absence of self, leads ultimately as far as identifying a hermit to the forces of nature – like a wind that someone felt and then is already gone.

Funnily enough, and as a contradiction, hermits who could not hide their traces were immediately wanted as great teachers. Hermits were even followed and looked up for. The paradox lies in the fact that after returning from seclusion, sharing these experiences as great stories would only promote the hermit’s new identity as a survivor and therefore reinforce his/her ego. We might as well say that hermits we know today by name, as poets or writers, are actually failed ones. We can read their curated stories and imagine them without experiencing them in reality. Although this is the beauty of literature, we could also ask if we were supposed to read them. The question lies in the beginning if the act of sharing itself was appropriate by the hermit. (1) Social changes such as the rise of the solo dweller, the surge in social networks, peer-to-peer logistics, combined with an ageing population common in Western countries, change the way people interact with each other. There is less dependency on communities people reside with, while at the same time highly individualised control over daily habits is increasing, communication being one of them. Events are organised casually, food is delivered, news is read and friends are made without leaving personal territories. Although living densely side-by-side, stitched to urban fabrics of services and infrastructure, there is no urgent need for sharing heated bathrooms or kitchens anymore. The number of one-person households has been on the increase worldwide. (2) Living alone is common and it can be wondered if a modern dweller is turning into an urban hermit. Although solitude is the common ground, it is important to differ how they share themselves with others. Unlike a hermit who aims to lose its ego, a solo dweller finds advantage in solitude in order to customise everything for the ego. Solitude here does not immediately mean loneliness, since great cities are vibrant with intriguing individuals to meet. A hermit can offer help in a village while a solo dweller catches up with friends downtown, but the underlying difference is how the decisions are taken the first being accidental and the latter organised.

The possibility to switch on and off, to busy and to offline or even to invisible only reinforces one’s ego and increases the highly individually curated self where unwanted topics can be simply avoided. Modern social media has offered us the best means to curate our self- image. The actions taken are increasingly in the centre of personal commitment. Our personal knowledge, visual perception, valuable information and quite often not that valuable information are continuously shared through a neatly personalised filter. In a similar but extreme manner it can be thought that the very act of sharing has also become the means to represent a personal image and not the actual content of the shared information. Sharing becomes the victim of objectification. While it still remains the medium that binds the society, it is less accidental and more personalised.Furthermore gratitude or feedback is expected from the contributor’s followers, regardless if the real content was even received. The anxious state of waiting for people to like or to respond only raises self-awareness and personal identity.

It can be therefore critically considered what is shared around us. Was this story just worth sharing? It might be that the increasing amount of urban solo dwellers that live their seemingly customised dream lives, appear to be more like curated hermits that only want to tell their stories. The underlying questions still remain if we were supposed to read them at all. Although these stories can be imagined, talked about and gossiped about, it should be considered if this was actually for sharing or was it for self promotion.

“Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then we can build” (1)

Martin Heidegger in: Bauen, Wohnen, Denken 1951. Based on etymology, Heidegger states that build “Bauen”, relates to the Old English and Old High German word for building, “buan”, which means “to dwell”, to remain or stay in a place. Bauen, according to Heidegger it relates as well to nearness and neighbourliness and implies to spare and preserve (2). For Heidegger dwelling is the basic character of being, we unconsciously dwell, but only when we’re conscious about it we can build, “build out of dwelling and think for the sake of dwelling”. (3)

Although Heidegger etymologies apply almost ex- clusively in German language, the reflections coming out of them are somehow of universal value, influencing many architects who focused mostly on cultural, historical and emotional values to create architecture which is “richly associative” (4) to the everyday life and the way we inhabit space. There is no question about the fact that we all have different ways of dwelling and different conceptions of home that may vary depending on each of our cultural and social backgrounds and there is no question that a proper understanding of dwelling may lead to a proper understanding of building; However it is of utmost importance to keep in mind that dwelling is a concept in constant change and that even if certain cultural, historical and emotional values remain, the dynamics of society change at a faster rate than architecture does and usually architecture is a consequence of these changes.

As Sheller and Urry affirm in their influential paper The new mobilities paradigm (5), probably one of the most important changes in societies in the last decades has been the fact that a constant movement within different entities (cities, countries or even continents) has become not only more affordable and frequent but in some cases even necessary. Work, studies, pleasure or forced displacement has driven people to name home several places at the same time, appropriating and dwelling different spaces in very short periods of time. Having this in mind, the concept of dwelling becomes more complex; how could we define dwelling in a present where a significant percentage of the population lives in a constant travel? Where more and more individuals dwell simultaneously multiple locations, making it difficult to define the concept of home.

If we define home as the place we appropriate and dwell regularly, then home is the apartment we share 10 days a month, our parents’ house, that charming place we found in Airbnb; Home is Europe, is America, is the intercontinental flight between them; Home is the airports and train stations we know by memory, they become our home for the couple of hours we inhabit them every week (if only all of them had free access wireless).

Inception

Ten minutes into Stefano Orani’s lecture, the room was silent. It was late April 2014, and around twelve people were sitting in a white living room, some on the couch, others on the floor. A side table had snacks and drinks at hand. Stefano stood in front of a projection of a spectacular image, a chronological diagram of the universe’s expansion since the Big Bang. A physical cosmologist, Stefano was one of the first guests of TEOK, an informal lecture series founded in Basel in early 2014, and he was sharing what he knew and loved about the first instants of the life of the universe. Guests were silent, absorbed by this larger-than-life topic that expanded way beyond what our brains are used to think about in daily life’s many menial tasks. The solemnity of the topic was, however, quickly interrupted by questions and doubts, in an approach that helped understand its complexity, bringing it closer to the minds and hearts of all those attending. By the end of the lecture, laughter filled the room – the sunset light was still strong, and a series of equations projected onto the wall lingered on as guests and speaker continued conversation.

A project originally born out of a few drunken nights and whatsapp conversations, TEOK (an acronym for The Edge of Knowledge) is an informal lecture series where uncommon, unexpected topics are presented in someone’s living room. Lecturers are encouraged to talk about things they love and know about, but that are not centrally connected to their daytime occupation. Their short presentations are interspersed with snacks and drinks, to encourage informality and stimulate conversation, and topics have ranged from food to the cosmos, internet memes and personal obsessions. The events always take place on Tuesday nights, and surprisingly to us at first, leave everyone energised and full of ideas.

The series’ inception was sparked by curiosity. As expats living and working in Basel, the TEOK co-founders were genuinely puzzled by the amount of interesting people to be found in the city, not to mention its cultural capital and international aspect. In effect, Basel is, upon careful observation, one of the most international cities any of us has lived in to date; and not only that, but also filled to the brink with early and mid-career professionals with different life and cultural experiences, most of whom are significantly competent and have come here to work, live and achieve something. This makes for an extremely singular combination, and we were fundamentally curious about what moves and intrigues these people other than their day job. The foundation of TEOK hinges on the belief that all of us, in this city, know more about something than anyone else around them; should they share their knowledge, the lives of those who surround them will become better. The event series advocates the dissemination of know- ledge in its most pure incarnation, and no topic is considered unfit for a TEOK lecture. Sharing is caring and TEOK is the living proof of this assertion.

“Le temps qui passe (mon Histoire) dépose des résidus qui s‘empilent : des photos, des dessins, des corps de stylos-feutres depuis longtemps desséchés, des chemises, des verres perdus et des verres consignés, des emballages de cigares, des boîtes, des gommes, des cartes postales, des livres, de la poussière et des bibelots : c‘est ce que j‘appelle ma fortune.”
Georges Perec

“To live is to leave traces.” (1); thus reads one of Walter Benjamin’s most notorious aphorisms. The statement is not so obvious as to present no difficulties. Above all and contrary to what one might expect it is not about melancholy; not only at least.

We live in a time dominated by the categories of abstraction and indifference; a time of definitive erasure of specificity and ultimate interchangeability: the era of the generic. „Liberated from the straitjacket of identity“ (2), everything is reduced to communication flow; rootlessly free to move from anywhere to anywhere; encountering no resistance, leaving no traces. Through the ubiquity of simulacra and the mass-mediatic conflation of time’s three horizons into an indissoluble ‘now’, we live in a condition of “eternal present” (3) where the possibility to address any sort of permanence seems to be precluded a-priori. The question is, in a world pervaded by distrust for the past and disillusion toward the future, how to turn our postmodern nihilism into simultaneously critical and operative tools. Is there any way to exploit our cynicism in order to readdress a proactive and authentic notion of life? Is there any way to use our disillusion? Certainly, since Benjamin’s times, to leave traces may have become increasingly difficult. Traces are something ephemeral, a locus of ambivalence suspended in the unstable space between construction and dispersal, presence and absence. (4) Nevertheless, although mostly unintentionally, we still do leave traces in our wake. Beyond the decay to which they bear witness, the mutability to which they testify, traces are also insistence, persistence, survival. No matter how fragile and trifling it might be; a trace is always an index of life.

The pictures that inspire this words share a sense of precariousness that is far remote from the mythic aura of timelessness that has enveloped today’s world. In all its inertia, the reality they portray is nevertheless provisional; still vulnerable to the vicissitudes of time.

With humbleness and discretion, these pictures pay homage to places that hold a strong value for their author, therefore distancing themselves also from the local indifference so typical of the globalism of our times. These picture ‘are’ the places he lives and, we can guess, he loves. Surely places he deeply experienced: his native region Emilia Romagna and its neighbouring region Veneto. Perhaps this autobiographism should discourage their intake as models for a reflection of a general nature but it is exactly the in-actuality of these images that constitutes a reason of compelling interest; being the outmoded insistence of their author on the definition of boundaries – the preliminary limitation of the field of investigation to the the well-known and the ordinary, the necessity of a solid anchorage to reality – not a contenitive work ultimately driven by the fear of chaos, but the act that makes its full exploitation and enjoyment ultimately possible.

With scientific accuracy these pictures follow life and its unfolding, accompanying the patient accumulation of its traces, their vanishing as well as their survival, in order to restitute us the sedimented history of a place. Combining the apparent detachment of an archive with the impossibility to establish an emotional distance from the object of their attentions, they subtly unveil a strong meditative charge. In these images the border between intuition and knowledge, analysis and affection, distance and intimacy continuously blur. With generosity, these pictures do not judge the life they record; they are not the medium conveying their author’s opinions, but simply the medium that allows us to share his experiences. Each picture is not only the record of a fleeting impression over the artist’s eye, but a thoughtful contribution to the understanding of a context that is plural from the very beginning; a background from which the photographer – as anybody else – can emerge only momentarily, before seamlessly blending into it and ultimately – as dictates the destiny we all share – vanishing. Each of these images is the act of participation to a collective project. “I do photographs to see better, with more clarity. Maybe then, the others will also see better.” (5)

Not worth sharing: visual snacks

The problem with most architectural media is that the largest share of their content is made up of visual snacks – those smooth renderings and glossy photographs we see flashing by in our social media feeds. Fast food is the quickest and easiest way to satisfy an appetite, while it hardly contains anything substantial. That’s why you’ll crave for more soon after your first snack, which again won’t benefit your health. Architectural media fill a demand for luscious images, but substantial reflection on the social and public relevance of celebrated projects is sparse. This has a detrimental impact on the condition of the architectural profession and what it produces: the built world we live in. If you were to create a live feed of the latest updates from the most-visited architectural websites and blogs – which is child’s play with all the great sharing tools available – what you would see is a constant flood of either fantasy renderings that can never become reality or stylised photographs of luxurious design scenery. Both of which have nothing to do with the real lives that most of us live. Call it the 99 per- cent, if you like.

Indeed, this is already an alarming observation, but what is worse is that this visual overload is hardly met with suspect. Architectural projects should be questioned for their actual functioning in reality, for their societal impact, their political meaning or their developers’ intentions. That’s just a few of the crucial criteria that are often overlooked or ignored. Instead, designs are merely consumed as visual fast food and architecture seems to have been completely de-politicised and reduced to an aesthetic undertaking for the media that cover it.

The demand for the newest, most spectacular snacks to look at is insatiable. We continually browse the optimistic imaginations of what the future could look like and aren’t interested in what the visual treats say about a culture or mean for a society. What’s up- loaded today is out-dated tomorrow. There’s an endless, vicious cycle in force: if the design is not spectacular enough, it’s not published and if it’s not published, it’s obviously not spectacular enough. To make it even more incestuous, the main consumers of these media are architects or aspiring designers. Who are they designing for? Moreover, what are architects-in-training to expect of their future career when following the media that cover their desired profession? What are architects to expect their designs to be judged on?

The media are contributing to a dumbing down of how we see architecture. Reporting on architecture is less and less about creating better cities in an equitable way, but increasingly describes individual projects without analysing architecture as a larger social project and the separate designs as an articulation of political, economic and social choices. Most design media con- tent only consists of aggregations of blindly republished press releases, renderings and photos that are sent in by architecture offices, while omitting interpretation. Here, the audience is withheld guidance to understand the world in which the slick projects are constructed or to decipher what they say about the culture that brings them about. Everything has to be easily digestible and instantly satisfying, and people aren’t challenged to put things in perspective. By walking down the path of today’s visual culture, the media have made their content attractive to both the layman and the architect, but naturally such a crowd-pleasing attitude goes at the expense of intelligent reflection.

The narrative of architectural history is a powerful tool for theory, if not the authentic form of theory in our discipline. It is of course being continuously analysed and debated with a huge degree of complication. Nowadays, 40 years after the reformulation of the context of architectural history by Manfredo Tafuri and his gang, merely going into the matter demands an immense amount of theoretical precision, in order to avoid repeating common knowledge or, worse, contributing to the pile of meaningless pseudo-theoretical alchemy. Nevertheless the debate is far from closed, especially if we consider new urgencies and new concerns, more real than ever. The agenda of a hundred, fifty or even ten years ago cannot be taken into account in the same way as before. We need to fish for new meaning, for new stories, so here are some thoughts about a possible one.

While the now orthodox debate on operative criticism was still radical and revolutionary, one of the founding principles of architecture as we know it was silently getting scrutiny under an angle of huge pertinence. The Doric temple, the „starting point for European architecture’’1 might have been born through a process much less self-referential than we thought until now. In 1990, Goerd Peschken, German archeologist and architectural historian published a text called „Demokratie und Tempel“2, temple and democracy. Based on the abundant visual material published by Rudofsky (3) and an earlier study by another historian, Hans Soeder (4), he attempts to explain the ancestry of the Doric order within the functional vernacular of granaries. Peschken, following Soeder’s trace, observed the similarities between the triglyph-metope sequence and the lateral walls of various types of vernacular granaries, ventilated with thin vertical openings in a rhythm of plain parts and regrouped slits. In addition, a picture of such a barn is a pretty self-explanatory statement on the columns and the capital. To protect the grain from rodents, the construction is placed on top of columns themselves finished with a horizontal plate. According to Peschken, often added to this capital were pieces of cloth drenched in repellent (Ionic order) or acanthus leaves (Corinthian order) that are naturally unpleasant to vermin.

Peschken’s work has come back to light with the third issue of the French architectural journal „Marnes’’, which brought along an initial debate on the implications of the matter. Most notably, in an article published in the same issue, Philippe Villien proposed to look at Peschken’s interpretation of the Doric order in line with Banham’s pledge for the well-tempered environment (5). The thick roof and the triglyph as ventilation apparatus support such an idea, but can we run away with reiterating a well-known and decently understood point where there is room for so much more? Where Villien sees an argument about climate in architecture, there is probably the missed opportunity for symbolism that goes much further than the hierarchy between structure and tubing.

Despite this argument that is no worthy counterpart to the opportunity at hand, the French architect grasps the most important point that we all need to acknowledge; „Demokratie und Tempel’’ is an excellent starting point for a very important evolutionary step in the current status quo of architectural theory. If not a call for the complete reversal of our knowledge, these observations offer a new, stimulating possibility for the whole moral genealogy behind architectural thought. Until now we thought that a given structure, the temple, invited reflection through its special character on the perfect construction and led to the sublimation of previous construction. Peschken’s and Soeder’s assumptions link this open question of the language of architecture with the most pure form of collective meaning: the agricultural and territorial organization that is the one and only origin, the unique true subject of common existence as we know it.

“What is the city today, for us? I believe that I have written something like a last love poem addressed to the city, at a time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to live there.”

Italo Calvino on ‘Invisible Cites.’

The conception of contemporary architecture relies very much on the ways in which art and culture intervene in the conversations and debates about the modern city. The paradigm of the contemporary African city in this context, Nairobi and Mogadishu specifically depends wholly on the ever changing worldview of what Africa is, what an ‘African’ is and most importantly where Africa seeks to define itself in the context of its constant conflicted reference to the West. African architecture has had a protracted engagement with the natural and material sciences – what it is experiencing now is not an organic transition but rather the constant morphing of the persona of the architect, the actor in this instance, from artist, to draftsman, to cultural consultant and occasionally in the inane role of plumber, electrician or mason.

In Africa, the architect encounters cities facing, today, the crises of post war Europe or America. These are cities long deemed incapable of meeting the demands of societies in rapid expansion but still in a constant rush to add to a concrete melee that grows more and more entangled by the day. Cities ravaged by war and economic crisis which insist on expanding along the grain and every day continue to attract immigrants from all over  an engagement forced by multiple circumstances, often urgently and without the foresight that is an urban planners dent. Government task forces and professional urbanists are constantly engaged in discussions about urban revitalisation, while the architect on the ground lays slab after slab to keep up with the demand of cities constantly on the rise.

We observe two cities, growing in tandem but confronting distinct realities. Mogadishu builds against the living legacy of a thirty year war that has ravaged a once beautiful landscape there the architect is challenged to create an experience of the land that is aesthetically rehabilitative, responding constantly to physically traumatic realities. Nairobi on the other hand attempts to erase the heavy memory of apartheid. A city built as the ideal manifestation of racial classification, the architect has the heady task of creating an environment where the city’s denizens are mobilised into a tangible social mobility, contrary to the historic restrictions of their environment.

In thinking about the possibility of architecture to profoundly alter the makeup of individual nations and the world order more broadly it is the architect’s challenge to seek out new coordinates for architecture after the exhaustion of the impositions of the modernist movement on a landscape such as this. In that respect the architect is pushed to question the purpose of architecture in the physical context, to begin with, and moreover in the metaphysical context frankly to examine the genesis of movements for which there is often little motivation beyond urgency and necessity.

It is in these ways in which the architect comes to stand precariously on untested ground. He becomes both urban planner and design theorist to a new age of architecture fitted to the social realities of a modern Africa. One where the landscape is advised by both the residue of colonialism – a long and dark legacy – and the neo “Afropolitan” fantasy which merges a savvy Africa on the move with a returning diaspora that brings new perspectives of the West perspectives which are no longer heavy with the inheritance of war, drought or hunger.