Cooking Ideas I

Talking with Tony today (25^th June 2008) he said so many suggesting things. Some were still buzzing in my mind later in the afternoon.

I haven’t talk about the topic of my thesis yet. I haven’t written about it because, sincerely, I get lost doing it. It’s so important to me and it has been with me for so long now that it’s difficult to start it.

“Sometimes the world speaks too loud” and we need to be systematic in the way we tell things. It links with what Laura told me ones “I need a clear mind, brand new and clean.” I would love too… but it seems that I cannot, it’s not going to be easy, I can hear the world. It’s talking multiple languages, at the same time, with different voice tunes… I hear them… A lot of people do… Sometimes it’s hard to digest, sometimes it makes life better… and I will try to explain systematically what they say.

….Art and Citizen….

How Art already coexist with citizens in the street in a very spontaneous manner, in the way the world turns. So why don’t we turn around the question that comes in Urban process “When should we do the Community process?”. Why couldn’t the question be “How and when the professionals come into the frame and act, and proposed?”

A Catalogue of what is already being done on the street. A narrative of what is already happening. Doing a focused set of examples will help, as Gertrude Stein said “description is explanation”.

I need a method that doesn’t increased burocracy. A more organic method that doesn’t include paperwork in front of an institutional window. We need the human touch…. (I cannot let it be too conceptual…)

This has to do with improvisation, with the way we program things. Everybody that has work in our discipline, or maybe that has work, knows that we have to know how to improvised solutions to problems in minutes in the construction… One day, in Bermeo a port on the gulf of Vizcaya we woke up with a 9meter whale dead in the side of the construction. It had to lay down in the main construction area for 24 hours until we decided with the mayor to preserve it and finally make a space for her in the waterfront and program a maritime museum use to install the intact bones when it will be built. The project is a-waiting-for-state-money to get started. The whale is waiting for the money to rest in peace in the main hall of our project too….

Why everybody is so scared at what is going to be, at what is going to happen, why not “program the unexpected”. It’s my gestalt. How to do it? Maybe everything follows that process, but I’m thinking about doing it deliberately. Architecture has a lot to do about control, but we have to know where we don’t have to control. (I’m sure this was inspired by Tony)

Yona Friedman Illustration

This has to do with the conversation with Peter about the nature of change. How we can know give some “easy” variables about change:

We can rate it. We can say when is going to happen, the frequency, speed and money hat has to be spent. We can measure it and give a reference in size, scale and physical dimensions. But how do we categorize the type of change, what does that mean?

I just learnt that the technical word to say might be “trade offs”. Have I understood right? But who is the master? Who decides? Who do we want to listen to? Or Do we want to listen or guide?

This is important for me, but right now. I just want to go to bed.

Buenas noches!

PD:
I once read “the anticipation makes the food tastes better”.

We can anticipate, we can predict, but let it cook !!!!

Karlos Arguiñano. The best basque cooker.