Monoambiente

A plate of noodles?

An endless tangle that we want to embrace—but we must follow its rules.
Many almost magical transformations and mutations happen when we cook. when cooking becomes experience, when we eat, we are turned into “dinners”.
Rice noodles undergo a deep transformation
when cooked in hot oil, they burst, come out crunchy and turgent, extravagant. Then, when drizzled with syrup, they cease to be sheer texture and become complex, sweet-and-sour and hot; they soften in a surprising fashion.
Eating them can be a little awkward: we find the childhood scandal of eating with our hands disarming,
we become more permeable, littler, more playful and adventuresome.
The mess, the heap, brings disarray and even upsets, but it also excites and relaxes.
While snacking besieges our mind
creating a pleasant if addictive feeling of madness, an instant celebration.
We can’t stop,
we don’t want to stop!
The snack’s strategy is to render us defenseless.
Its formula is to repeat a single crunchy item with an intense flavor.
Generally speaking, the flavor is steeped in elements designed to make us produce more saliva than required to swallow the mouthful,
which means that one not only wants, but physically needs, to keep eating.
Since snacks do not feed us—that’s not their job—the tie between food and nutrition is broken: they are free to heed only the happy phase of eating at any hour of the day—

They mock timetables, rituals, protocols.
Snacks are like the demons of nutrition. they appeal to our weakness for temptation, for mindless fun.
noodles, one of the staples around the world and
symbol of comfort food, are here turned into a snack.

nudels!

In architectural practice, the architect works out the details and description of the project by giving instructions that an array of craftspeople and specialists carries out during a specific timeframe. The fiction of the conceived document turns into a material object that may later be adjusted according to limitations of a technical, budgetary, or material nature.
The tie between the two parts, the project and the final construction, are materials that go from space A to space B to form part of the resulting whole.

This phenomenology of actions to be carried out by third parties is the basis of architectural practice, which I attempt to appropriate here as something distant, something in a parallel space.

While Herencia (Legacy) is a project that will be carried out once I have left the gallery space, it will begin some time before that, when the instructions are written and the materials that will be used in the actions are left in the space. The project ensues in three phases: the opening phase (reading of the legacy), the performance of the actions, and the final visit of the transformed materials.

Architecture is usually understood as an action that ends when the building is handed over to the client/user, but that is when the legacy begins. Lived experience is what gives the material weight.

Architecture evolves through use and needs, adding invisible layers of symbolism and meaning.

Is just any 60W domestic light bulb worth as much as one that has lit up the bedroom of the Fansworth house for eight years? How can we visualize or perform actions that give objects unique value?

LIST

1-Light bulb: Exchange of a building’s light.

2-Cloth. Use a cotton cloth to pick the dust and filth on a surface area the same size as the cloth itself from a building’s façade. Transfering the equal surface. Brutalist building or building with a facade whose form has a particularity, one where that dust might be placed.

3-Gum. Three pieces of gum, three ways of seeing architecture, will be stuck to a board. Three generations and discourses.

4-Lacquered aluminum panel. One or more panel will be scratched by the buildings’ facade or by the furniture in them. Building with metal structure or metal details. Option 2, building with a pointy surface.

5-Bucket: The water from a building—an emblematic and largely inaccessible one—will be placed in a bucket.

6-A material or object will sleep over, spending a number of days in the building until the project is completed (it will live with the silence and the emptiness). Office buildings, work spaces that, at night, are out of use and inhabited only by objects.

7-Glass: Put the pane of glass from one window in another.

8-Soap. Provide an architect with a bar of soap to be used for the duration of the project, about one month. The result of that intimate relationship of hands will be gathered at the end.

9-Hidden. An ID photo will be hidden in a crack in the building and never removed. Sheer loss, it will stay there forever.

10-Drill bit. Make a hole, penetrate the building’s material, gather the dust produced in the process and the drill bit. Put the dust gathered in a clear Ziploc bag.

11-Blank sheet to be drawn on without seeing the ink. The architect will draw one of his or her works, outlining it on a sheet using a pencil or pen, but the only thing that will be exhibited is the sheet underneath the drawn sheet.

12-Metal molding or soft metal piece to be folded up against part of the building in order to capture the geometric shape of the building’s stairway or another one of its structures.

13. Yardstick. The measurement of a module that structures a building’s geometry is transferred on a wooden yardstick. The yardstick will be cut to that measurement, which will be used to modify the object. Modular building.