Aprender a (p)rezar na era da técnica: Responsabilidade e arbítrio em arquitectura. Lado A

Abstract

Learning to Pray in the Age of Technique is an attempt to understand what we may designate as the social function of architecture. It is an attempt, through the notions of responsibility and will, to substantiate the idea that architecture may, through its very own disciplinary acts, play a role of political relevance in the development of freedom. This premise ends up guiding the whole investigation towards a mobilization of arguments that frame a personal project of architecture through the awareness of (its) political agency. In the first part, we try to contextualize the tendencies of global contemporary architecture, seeking to understand the overall state of the discipline itself so that, subsequently, we can identify and establish the basis for the framing of a critical relationship with (disciplinary) reality, that will ultimately nurture the construction of an idea - or a project - of architecture that accepts its own instability as a productive condition. Thus, also an idea that embraces adversity and contradiction as productive conditions. Lastly, reaffirming the belief in the subjective objectivity (or maybe the objective subjectivity) of the designing process, in which the individual confronting of circumstance, action can move between responsibility (that belongs to the individual-collective domain) and will, between awareness and the libertarian dimension of action (as the place of designing). For this reason, this dissertation is also an attempt to understand and reiterate the artistic-scientific condition of architecture, its borderline, multidimensional condition. Formally, this work is divided in two parts, A-side and B-side, as a double-sided disc record, that materialize the complicity between thinking and doing. The A-side consolidates the arguments that uphold the responsibility of practice, the B-side invigorates or contradicts those same fundaments through the proof of the authenticity and contradiction of designing.