In addition to my architectural and urban projects, I produce a great number of doodles, ideograms that are the subject of this volume. They are not a natural occupation: they only come to me in discontinous, short, and generally angry bursts. They often sum up in one or two images what I had been previously trying to articulate in projects, writings, or speech. The first of such outbreaks came in 1980 after a protracted writing sweat, when in a few days I summarized two hundred pages of texto in approximately the same number of ideograms. These have mostly stringent undertone; they are, in fact, counterattacks against endured aggresions, absurdities, and paradoxes, with which life is so richly endowed.
Raw and whithout circumlocution, these ideograms are means not to console or please but reveal scandalous elements of architectural practices and ideology; they outline conceptual tools for refounding traditional urbanism and architecture. It is well known that actions cause reactions mostly of an unexpected or unintended kind. What will win as the end of human activities, of fulfilled or frustrated lives? The good or the bad, the right or the wrong, the intelligent or the stupid? Evidently neither human or artificial intelligence gains notable insight into ultimate issues. We can, however, no longer ignore that in matters of settlement, building, and energy policies, industrial civilization is engaged in a tragic impasse. We now generally build in the wrong places, in the wrong patterns, materials, types, densities, and heights, and for the wrong numeber of dwelleres.
In my opinion, the traditional architecture and building and settlement tecnhiques of the pre-fossil fuel age represent the operative tools of global ecological reconstruction. It is the condition of nature that will, as in the past, redefine our development possibilities. These doodles may help to point our thinking in that direction.
Book from the Writing Architecture Series, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts ,and London, England, 2009.
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