draw a potato
My friend Jason architectures. No typo: that’s architecture as a verb. When he says he wants to architecture, he’s trying to reimagine a discipline and a profession from the point of view of its capacity to generate movement, not just objects. There’s no way to think this, he believes, without a twist of language, an invention in which a noun becomes a verb, shedding its identity and its thingness and leaving as traces only a wake of effects.
Given the powerful institutional conventions – born and perpetuated of a desire to secure stability over time – constraining the realization of this vision, Jason has discovered that, in his teaching, research and design work, it is essential to delay the problem-solving impulse. Architecture-as-noun (profession, discipline, identity) has purchased its credibility in the world on the promise that its practitioners will solve problems from the smallest remodeling job to the largest urban complex.
Of course, individual architects are favored to the degree that they can successfully express a unique style in the course of solving a problem, but solving a problem is the sine qua non of architecture-as-noun. Jason has found, particularly among younger architects (concerned ultimately with solving the problem of how to earn a living in architecture), that the anxious desire to formulate and solve problems has the unintended long-term side effect of atrophying their ability to see and think and write independently, creatively, and critically.
At stake is an ethics of practice, a kind of rudder students might use to steer through the bewildering demands of discipline and profession — especially when those demands begin to drown out the quieter call of their own creative impulses. I’m thinking of Jason’s delay – asking students to draw a potato, to site a project on the bed of a tractor trailer, to design a tower (no glass allowed) for reading – because I find in it a strong echo of Julio’s own ethics of creativity.
Julio asks himself what is the responsibility of a Latin American intellectual and he begins by refusing to give the categories any special determining significance. He doesn’t deny that he is Latin American or intellectual. He merely maintains that his responsibility, his ability to respond, doesn’t stem from those attributes in particular. He doesn’t deny that there are problems to be solved [Ù53]. He only denies that a writer can solve them through writing unless she first makes a detour — a delay in which her attention falls fully upon the problems within writing itself. [Ù13, 19, 55]. Only then might she somehow contribute to an ongoing, collective attempt to make things new. New and better.