Minor architecture as major architecture

critic | all 2 3 2 3 EDITED: critic|all PRESS + Departamento de Proyectos Arquitectónicos (ETSAM - UPM) ISBN: 978-84-09-29471-8 © 2021criticall. © Texts and photographs of the authors This work is published under Creative Commons Licence. Attribution-NonCommercial-NonDerivs 2.5 Generic. Saõ Paulo 25-26 March 2021 IV DIGITAL PROCEEDINGS critic | all 4 5 4 5 SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEEORGANIZING COMMITTEE Luis Rojo Luiz Recamán José Aragüez Marta Caldeira Andrés Cánovas Marina Correira Enrique de Teresa Juan Elvira Enrique Encabo Carmen Espegel Ricardo Fabbrini Ivo Girotto Vanessa Grossman Juan Herreros Fernando Lara Otavio Leonidio Javier Maroto Guiomar Martín Sergio Martín Blas Nicolás Maruri Nieves Mestre Nelson Mota Maria Cristina Nascentes Cabral Alberto Nicolau Claudia Piantá Costa Cabral Maria José Pizarro Katrin Rappl Fernando Rodríguez Eduardo Roig Marcos Rosa Lizete Maria Rubano Ruy Sardinha Lopes Ignacio Senra Jesús Ulargui Jesús Vassallo Silvia Colmenares I Director Leandro Medrano I Director Luis Rojo I Scientific Committee coordinator Luiz Recaman I Scientific Committee coordinator Sálvora Feliz I Assistant team Mariana Wilderon I Assistant team Raphael Grazziano I Assistant team Akemi Morita I Assistant team Alessandro Muzi I Assistant team Jaime Solares I Assistant team Tatiane Teles I Assistant team Isabel Mayoral | Digital Proceedings layout critic | all 6 7 6 7 INDEX 01 02 03 04 05 Presentation Call for Papers Conference Program Index of selected papers Papers critic | all critic | all MT 8 8 9 back to index 01 Presentation This fourth edition of Critic|all Conference consolidates the initiative that the Architectural Design Department of Madrid School of Architecture ETSAM UPM started some years ago to provide an international forum for criticism. This time, with a join event co-organized with Facultade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo of Sao Paulo University FAU USP, the Conference enhances its scope as a place of knowledge production from which to convene relevant voices around the proposed topic at each edition. We would like to thank all participants for their work and trust, as well as the members of the Scientific Committee for their effort and commitment in a quite hard time for everyone all over the planet. We would like to reinforce the idea contained in the conference’s name. Critic|all is a call on criticism, and also a call for all. An appointment that, beyond the scope of each edition, we hope will be able to enhance a more general debate on the role of architecture in the present context. Silvia Colmenares & Leandro Medrano Directors of Critic|all critic | all critic | all MT 10 10 11 back to index 02 Call for Papers #dual-ectics The binary structure of the dual seems to have lost its status. Too simple to hold the complexity of our current world, too attached to the dichotomist schematism that splits positions into for and against. However, the implicit symmetry of the dual should not make us overlook the advantages of taking things in pairs. Comparison is at the base of any intellectual activity committed to the production of knowledge, because meaning mostly stems from the observation of difference. As a primary scientific device, it generally addresses the task of confirming or refuting a certain hypothesis or theory. By pointing out the coincidence or divergence between the two terms of the comparison, it tends to rely on a logic of causality in order to proceed towards a generalization. Yet, in its barest form, comparison can also pursue a purely interpretive goal. Such is the case of analogy, based on the premise that the two terms paralleled are not at all equal, except from a specific point of view. Analogic reasoning proceeds from the particular towards the particular. From a formal logic stance, it lacks any demonstrative capacity because it relies, not on the probable, but on the plausible. The establishment of a causal relationship, a de facto link between the couple considered, is not as relevant as the things that can be learned when looking at each one in the light of the other. The pairing of images has a long tradition in the history of art. Pendant paintings consist of two pictures that are compositionally and iconographically related as a pair but are not attached to each other the way hinged diptychs are. They hang or stand side by side but separately and autonomously. The term derives from the French phrase faire pendant, adopted to express the idea of one hanging or depending from the other, and evolved into ‘pandam’ to designate the dual nature of any disposition consisting of two fundamentally similar art pieces but different in detail, which both rely on each other to make full meaning of one another. Meaningful arguments dealing with a dual structure of the subject matter need to address resemblance and coincidence as well as dissimilitude and divergence. Correlation is always a question of proportion: How much of ‘this’ is present in ‘that’? The confrontation of two objects, concepts, authors or works does not necessarily imply an oppositional choice. When put into practice by exemplifying exclusionary terms, comparison might only lead to the confirmation of previous convictions and the enunciation of value judgements. Instead, we suggest that placing two things face to face can be both systematic and remain open to unexpected results. A procedure clearly related to the practice of dialogue. Any dialogue implies two logoi or reasons that agree at least to discuss a disagreement. Plato took this technique to its highest level as a means to push any argumentation forward. Such a dialectical mode of thinking always implies a sense of transformation. Therefore, dialectics raises as a self-conscious process which, by confronting the consequences of the simultaneous affirmation and negation of a proposition, achieves a certain explanation for this contradiction through a synthesis. Today, even if this ‘resolutive’ approach might be questioned, we must still acknowledge one real effect of dialectics: it forces us to remain critical towards reality. We propose to carry out a critique based on a duality that avoids the oscillatory pendulum of alternative sides as much as it avoids the need to supersede this opposition with a third term. An exercise in sheer comparison, in the midst of today’s growing complexities and multiplicities, that might lead to a deeper understanding of our discipline. critic | all 12 13 back to index critic | all MT 12 back to index 03 Conference Program Sven-Olov Wallenstein Professor of Philosophy Södertörn University, Stockholm Break (15’) panel #1 The dialectics of the case I Cathelijne Nuijsink ETH Zürich. Switzerland Guillermo Lockhart Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, ETSAM, Madrid, Spain Angelica Ponzio Universidade Federal do Rio grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Andrea Machado Universidade Federal do Rio grande do Su, Porto Alegre, Brazil Bárbara Salazar Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile Conducted by: Vanessa Grossman TUDelft Lunch time panel #2 The dialectics of the case II Suelen Camerin Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Juan Alejandro Saldarriaga Sierra Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Medellín, Colombia Carlos Eduardo Comas Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Fernanda Carlovich Columbia University, New York, EEUU Conducted by: Marina Correia UFRJ Break (15’) Welcome and Presentation Key-note speaker “Architecture and the Critical Project” “`Disprogramming`, `Plan-less`, `Non-movement`, `No Style`: Dialectic Strategies in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965–2019)” “(Post) Studio architecture: Buren VS Warhol” “A Filter to the Frame – from the fenêtre en longueur to the finestra arredata” “Between a house and a museum: Redefining an emerging typology of exhibition” Discussion “Trust in brick: parallels between Dieste and Benítez/ Cabral” “The In-between practice. La Fragua and Previ by Germán Samper Gnecco (1958-1969)” “The Sesc Project: A Tale of Two Units” “Traveling Dome. Claims and climbs over Lebanese and Brazilian domes” Discussion THURSDAY 25·03·2021 All schedule indicates local time Sao Paolo. Brazil (UTC/GMT -3 hours) 09:00 - 09:30 09:30 - 10:30 10:30 - 10:45 10:45 - 12:15 10:45 11:00 11:15 11:30 11:45 12:15 - 13:00 13:00 - 14:30 13:00 13:15 13:30 13:45 14:00 14:30 - 14:45 critic | all critic | all 14 15 back to index back to index panel #3 Identity Construction (through difference) I Guilherme Wisnik São Paulo State University, USP, Brazil Luana Cavalcante + Raquel Paulino University of Porto, Portugal Ricardo Paiva Federal University of Ceará, Brazil Daniela Moro Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Alice Queiroz Universidade Estadual de Minas Gerais, Minas Gerais, Brazil Eric Crevels Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft, Netherlands Conducted by: Nelson Mota TUDelft Break (15’) panel #4 Identity Construction (through difference) II Rafael Urano Frajndlich + Gabriel Romero + Fernando Cavichioli Unicamp, Campinas, Brazil Adriana Pablos GSD Harvard, Cambridge, EEUU Jale Sari Yasar University, Turkey Jesús Utrillas Acerete Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid, Spain Conducted by: Marcos Rosa FAUUSP Break (30’) Gareth Doherty Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Program, GSD, Harvard Carmen Espegel Full Professor Architectural Design Department and Director of the Master in Advanced Architectural Design, MPAA. ETSAM-UPM Break (15’) “Being Public in Private Spaces and Vice Versa: Brazilian Art and Architecture in the Late 1960s” “(Dis)continuities in the treatment of the public-private interface in social housing produced in Brazil and Portugal” “Blurring the map: Depicting the city of Curitiba as both Spectacle and Experience” “Urban Predation: the symbolic economy of the pixo” Discussion “The Dialectics of National and International in Oscar Niemeyer’s career: on his connections in the United States of America (1938-1947)” “Adaptation: Ubiquitous and Monofunctional Modernist Residential District” “From one Louvre to another: cultural constructs of the self through the other” “Åzone Futures Market. Insert Cåin to Start Playing” Discussion Key-note speaker “Critical Landscapes” Key-note speaker “No limits” 14:45 - 16:15 14:45 15:00 15:15 15:30 15:45 16:15 - 16:30 16:30 – 18:00 16:30 16:45 17:00 17:15 17:30 18:00 - 18:30 18:30 - 19:30 09:30 - 10:30 10:30 - 10:45 panel #5 Critical Dualities (Methodologies) Marco Salazar Universidad Central del Ecuador, Quito, Ecuador Magda Mària + Silvia Musquera Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain Gabriel Elias de Souza Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro, UFRRJ, Brazil Nikola Matevski University of São Paulo, Brazil Conducted by: Sergio Martín Blas ETSAM-UPM Lunch time panel #6 Conceptual Constructions (through difference) Martin Cajade Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Urbanismo, FADU Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay Silvana Castro Nicolli Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio de Janeiro, PUC-Rio, Brazil Sergio Motomura + Rovenir Duarte State University of Londrina, Brazil Conducted by: Guiomar Martín ETSAM-UPM Break (30’) panel #7 Extreme Dualities (A test of the methodology) Maria Paula Recena Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Felipe Ferla Da Costa + Maria Paula Recena Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil Peng Xue University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom Daniel Movilla + Esperanza Campaña Barquero Umeå University, Sweden Conducted by: Ignacio Senra ETSAM-UPM Break (15’) Tom Avermaete Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design ETH Zürich “Speculations on (Con)temporary Domestic Architecture: Politics, Domesticity, and the Irrelevance of Architecture in Two Rolling Projects” “Learning by comparing” “The architect’s book as self-promotion and selfproduction: contrasting Rem Koolhaas S, M, L, XL and Bjarke Ingel’s Yes is More” “Representing architecture on film. The case of Roberto Rossellini and Centre Pompidou” Discussion “USA Neighbourhood Unit vs USSR Microrayon: A Cold War battle for the ultimate urban project of the twentieth century” “Nature and Reversed Mimesis in Toyo Ito’s Architecture” “Decomposition of the hierarchical system: dualities in SANAA architecture” Discussion “Elements of Architecture and Choreographic Objects: a new critical viewpoint” “Eisenman e Reich: confluences and divergences between formal operations” “A Radical Dual-ectics of Urban Formulation. Dashilar as a Heterotopic Partner to the Forbidden City” “Corset and Domestic Space: Ortho-architectural Exoskeletons in the Disciplinary Era” Discussion Key-note speaker “Architecture ‘Talks Back’: On the (Im Possibilities of a Critical Architectural Project” 10:45 - 12:15 10:45 11:00 11:15 11:30 11:45 12:15 - 13:00 13:00 -14:30 13:00 13:15 13:30 13:45 14:15 - 14:45 14:45 – 16:15 14:45 15:00 15:15 15:30 15:45 16:15 - 16:30 16:30 - 17:30 FRIDAY 26·03·2021 All schedule indicates local time Sao Paolo. Brazil (UTC/GMT -3 hours) critic | all 16 17 back to index critic | all MT 16 back to index 04 Index of selected papers Arbara, Sophia Calzado López, Rocio Astudillo Sacoto, Pedro Esteban Bernacchi, Antonio Lazzaroni, Alicia Cajade, Martin Camerin, Suelen Carlovich, Fernanda Carruthers, Luz Graschinsky, Darío Carvalho, Bruno Castro, Caio Castro Nicolli, Silvana Cavalcante, Luana Paulino, Raquel Paiva, Ricardo Comas, Carlos Eduardo Costa, Federico Costa, Phillipe De Miguel, María Delgado, Fernando Días Gomes, Julia Días Gomes, Leticia Dias, Sofía Sschmid, Aloísio Diniz, Maria Luisa Consalter Duarte, Rovenir In between a nomadic and a sedentary practice The EU case. Escola Paulista geneaology. Building Stories and Writing Projects Speculative Ecocriticism through Design. USA Neighbourhood Unit vs USSR Microrayon. Trust in brick: parallels between Eladio Dieste and Gabinete de Arquitectura. Traveling Dome. Claims and climbs over Lebanese and Brazilian domes. Doppelgänger Architecture. The Dialectical Pair or the Dialectics of the Pair. Memory museums as representative places in Latin America. Two design solutions in Lisbon around a rail overpass and the riverfront. Nature and Reversed Mimesis in Toyo Ito’s Architecture. (Dis)continuities in the public-private interface: the case of the projects of Caraíba by Joaquim Guedes in Brazil and Malagueira by Álvaro Siza in Portugal. The SESC project: a tale of two units. Enclaves of civilization. Modern monuments of Lina Bo Bardi and Oscar Niemeyer in and against the metropolis.Space and the otherness. Information Tectonics. A Critical Review of Digital and Hybrid Technologies in Architecture. Beds without bedrooms. Fragments of history in Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s Chapel of Saint Peter. The relation between common and ephemeral: a critic analysis about the concepts. Social barrier regarding energy: critical analysis from a dual perspective. Two perspectives on design culture. From architectural design to metadesign. 22 29 41 48 58 68 79 87 96 106 116 127 135 144 152 159 169 178 186 Authors Papers pag. critic | all critic | all 590 591 back to index back to index In the second case, the temporal displacement generates an earthquake towards the past that wou ld, when the wave comes back around, give the reaction a greater amplitude of sense than it had in i ts time. That is why we said that its contemporaneity was not clear. Like Plato portrayed as Leonar do, this would define one more symptom of dispersion and uncertainty in terms of the moment a nd architecture, but it would give credit to the minor action. But we have already said that such action also has to relate to the comparison with its becoming, which Stoner establishes in the revision of 4 ba sic myths in individual chapters: that of the object, the subject, interior, and nature. What is strange abo ut the treatment of these myths in her book is that there is no clear reference to the moment or to the most revealing literature that highlights the architectural impulse due to the secular invariance of these myths10. Perhaps it is Rykwert's reading for that of nature, but there is only one mention to Lucreti us in a note. And we know nothing of the myth of the interior, perhaps Platonic. The review by B remner & Till (2012) on Stoner's book does not doubt that this categorization of the four myths has a pertinent affiliation with the history of architecture, without needing to verify its origin. The fact is tha t, based on them, Stoner makes it possible for minor architecture to become a playing field, for its int eriors to behave like escapes, for the natural truth (that painted by Raphael) to be shown in ea ch building through deterritorialization, and for architectural subjects to be defined by their relati onships. The veil entails dissidence, but also fragility, let us not forget. It is not that we want to delegit imize this proposal of Bloomer and Stoner or of the minor wherever it is shown. Our intention is to achieve more rigorous precision. So, let us be like Bloomer in this: KAFKA. 6. Looking up with your eyes closed: doing (and not just reading) minor architecture "I dan ced at 'Café Müller'. We all had our eyes closed. When we did a repeat, I couldn't get the feeling of what was new, how import ant it was to me. Suddenly, I realized that it makes a big difference, behind closed eyelids, if I look down or up. That makes a difference! The right feeling comes immediately. The smallest detail matters. It's a language you can learn to read. Café Müller dancing. PINA, a film by Wim Wenders. 2013. About Pina Bausch, choreographer. Based on some drawings that Kafka made between 1907 and 1917 (Fig.4), Deleuze&Guattari (19 75:14) generate a comparison between the representations of heads bent or raised from the s paces extracted from the novels of the author of "The Castle", which also serve Stoner to extract the myt hs with which he articulates the possibility of a minor architecture. Fig. 3 head down portrait-photo =wish blocked, submitted or subdued, neutralized, with minimum connections, a memory of childhood, territoriality, or reterritorialization. erect head sound-music =wish that rises, or escapes, and opens to new connections, childhood block or animal block, deterritorialization. Fig. 4 It s hould be stressed that this ranking is not a finalist. There is a whole vibration from one to the other that prevents the comparison from being elective. The complete disarticulation of the notion of space by b oth spatial representations would make a minor architect embodied in Kafka's work understand that to look at the sky is to raise one's eyes, implying spirituality, immateriality, religion, or, conversely, that the archit ecture resulting from Kafka's understanding of the bent head revokes his space to be subdued, with repressions of desire. But Deleuze and Guattari do not allow the comparison to be settled in choice. It is a matter of finding the unformed matter extracted from each expression, be it music or photo so that the opening of deterritorialization is maintained. For this reason, we rely on Pina Bausch's inspiratio n: behind closed eyes, looking up or down gives the right feeling. But it is not said which one it is, it is not elective. To conclude, somewhat hastily because of the limited space available here, we would like to approa ch what we believe would define a minor work in architecture, in the sense that these pages h ave gathered from different times and authors: the Obrador Internacional de Dramaturgia, Teatro Sala Beckett, by the architects Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores. We do this because there is also a mino r theatre, as Sanchís Sinisterra has said, and it is linked to Beckett himself11. Everything seems to be an extension of what Bloomer and Stoner said, but revised as a distortion, as this example is one of the most successful ways for the minor to appear, as a concrete architectural project action, a work, whi ch is something that is missing in the texts of Bloomer and Stoner. Fig 5. Let us look at Figure 5. The constitution of the sky is established by the breaking of all limits. We must not look up, but if we do, we will see the architects flying like a raven who does not admit the binar y, who disintegrates the comparable. We see it in the stories superimposed on the echo of the frag ments thus found where space reaches presence. Where is the Leonardo here, in our time? He is not here to conquer an order, just as he was not when he usurped Plato's body. We will say it with the words of Juan José Lahuerta (2017) regarding this same work: the Beckett Room "is an extraordinary exerci se of recognition, which reminds me of the advice that Leonardo gave to painters: look at the bark on the trees, at the shapes of the clouds, at the patches of damp on the walls, to see in them great forms of mountains, valleys, and rivers, of characters and horses, great stories.” To consist of architecture in Flores & Prats, in the minor that resists and expands at the same time, as Lahuerta says, elevates the work from being a commodity to being "the real thing". Perhaps, if it ever stops its inherent infinit e beam of excitement. critic | all critic | all 592 593 back to index back to index Notes 1 This is literal: "Behold, one day, passing by the wall where the gods act, I heard. I was irresistibly curious..." Le Corbusier, The Modu lor 2, last sentence on the last page of the book. 2 With the intention of avoiding a possible accusation of being simplistic by attributing the actions in conflict with feeling and thinking to the work of the architect, we will reveal that our intention is to make the debate prevail as an argument at this moment about what it is to do architecture, under consciousness and theoretical understanding or about the craft and sensation. When G oethe saw Strasbourg Cathedral for the first time, he was amazed by its beauty and frustrated at not technically understanding its compositional keys. He expressed this in writing in 1772. His conflict between reason and sensation, as described by Rykwert in "Adam's Cabin in Paradise" (1999:109), was conjured up when he questioned his mentor, Abbé Laugier, about it. Carlo Lodo li, the "Socrates of Architecture", could also have been the object of his denunciation. The vision of the cathedral, at t he same time in ecstasy and uneasiness, made Goethe exclaim that heaven should provoke this same duality and he gave the architectural disciplinary body the task of the future: "Multiply, pierce the gigantic walls that you must raise against the sky so that they ascend like sublime and leafy trees of God, whose thousand branches, millions of leaves and twigs ... announce the beauty of the Lord, his owner...”. Much earlier, and Goethe (who, by the way, is recognized as the founder of modern comparat ive morphology), could have reconciled himself with having thought about that first modernist who was Brunelleschi, who clarified by replacement the Gothic emphasis in the Pazzi Chapel in Florence through a mystical vision of Heaven but with a r ampant lucidity of rationality from history and geometry (Chakraborty, 2014:42). 3 Maybe that is why both J. Quetglas and B. Colomina wanted to propose Ariadne as the first architect. Their attempt is coresponsible with the spirit of the Daedalus, although the argument is weakened by being shown as a ranking, when in fact it is not necessary. 4 According to Deleuze and Guattari, oedipalization constitutes an illegitimate limitation of the productive syntheses of the un conscious, because it emphasizes 1) global persons, thus excluding all parental objects of desire, 2) exclusive disjun ctions, thus banishing the subject to a chronological series of moments to which a coherent narrative can be given, and 3) a segr egative and biunivocal use of conjunctive syntheses, thus reducing the subject's identity to a coherent or static set of one s ide in a set of oppositions. 5 For those who are interested in studying architecture in-depth, we would like to point out that our research has been based o n our work as professors in the Master's Degree in Sustainable City and Architecture at the School of Architecture in Seville, Spa in. For the subject that seeks to train our students in research, we proposed that they spend one academic year working on the concept of "Minor Architecture". This research, shared between professors (J. López-Canti, F. De la Iglesia, and C. Tapia) a nd students, has given excellent results that have been uploaded to Wikipedia for international debate in Spanish. It contains t he genealogy of the term in different authors and texts that we have used here, except without that traceability as an argument, b ut as necessary sources, at the end of this paper. For more information, see the article "Devenir menor en lo arquitectónico: pol itización y potencialidades de resignificación espacial" in Thema, 5. FADU Montevideo, November 2020, signed by the pa rticipating students. 6 Note here that it is not only a matter of finding out, in order to evaluate the extent of the dissemination of so-called French Th eory in American literature departments, which of them changed their study programs but also of tracing the training of the arch itects who later took charge of the development of the most influential architectural theory in the United States and abroad. Many of them had been trained with teaching programs coming from Literature, in institutions that did not train architects. Michael Speaks, for example, dean of the Syracuse and Kentucky Schools of Architecture, among others throughout his career, studied literature with F. Jameson at Duke, in a program where Terry Eagleton S. Žižek, Franco Moretti, etc. also taught. Speaks, interv iewed by Mitášová (2014:358) recalls that, in those years, philosophy was basically analytical, incapable of generating t heory, and that French poststructuralist thought entered North America through these departments in Literature. According to Cusset (2005:90), as philosophy becomes literature, literature becomes a mere parcel of theory. This process of indistin ction of the literary and philosophical corpus was not immediate and, moreover, required the institutional apparatus of, among others, the first interdepartmental research institutes, or the regroupings between campuses, such as the influential S chool of Criticism and Theory, in Irvine. 7 Architectural attempts since Kafka's readings have been many. Bofill, for example, made several attempts that should be con sidered the best of his prolific and contradictory career. But for us, to look to Kafka means to pull back the growth around him to see his primordial stem again. 8 1988 is a unique date for the establishment of Theory within the schools of architecture. In an event organized by this Institute and published by the magazine Assemblage, all its participants declared themselves to be theorists of architecture, nei ther architects who write nor critics, nor historians. Two years later, the MoMA was already holding a symposium on arch itectural theory and practice, consecrating it. Jennifer Bloomer was one of the speakers. 9 See, "Architecture depends", lo-fi architecture concept versus hi-fi architecture. It is obvious to point out the presence of the the sis of the minor confronted with the major also in this work. 10 In Mythologies, Barthes says that the myth brings clarification, though not quite an explanation, which is what Stoner could argue to justify the way she resolves the matter without naming the origin of the selected myths. However, Barthes goes on to say that myth is also a statement of fact, so the internal record must be made visible at some point. Lebbeus Woods worked with these myths, as did John Hejduk, and they can be reconstituted from their acerbic oral narrative traditions where beings t hat embody nature or the human condition exalt it to make the characters extraordinary beings and unique architectural reso lutions. 11 "As opposed to the notion of the character as something compact, a more or less schematic transcript of a complete human being, representative of a certain sociological or psychological archetype, minor theatricality accepts the incomplete condition of the dramatic character, his partial and enigmatic character, revealing only a minimal part of himself. The Be ckettian image of the mutilated, blind character, reduced to a face, a mouth, a voice... has to do with this reductionism, with this minorisation of the concept of the character. A concept, by the way, that, by identifying with the notion of person, is highly ideo logized in our Judeo-Christian-Romano-Western tradition. All the questioning of the self, of the subject, undertaken by conte mporary thought, is reflected in the treatment of the character as a residue, as something incomplete and unfinished that minor theatricality advocates." Toward a Minor Theatricality. Sanchís Sinisterra (2007). Image Captions Fig. 1. Raffaello Sanzio “The School of Athens” (1509-1510). Stanza della Signatura. Vatican. Wikipedia Commons. Fig. 2. Flammarion engraving. Book by Camille Flammarion, L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 18 88) pp.163 Fig. 3. The Drawings of Franz Kafka (1907 -1917). Personal Papers. Unpublished. Fig. 4. Toward a Minor Literature. Book by Deleuze&Guattari. Excerpt pp. 14. Fig. 5. Obrador Internacional de Dramaturgia, Teatro Sala Beckett, by the architects Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores. Interior. References Notes 1 This is literal: "Behold, one day, passing by the wall where the gods act, I heard. I was irresistibly curious..." Le Corbusier, The Modulor 2, last sentence on the last page of the book. 2 With the intention of avoiding a possible accusation of being simplistic by attributing the actions in conflict with feeling and thinking to the work of the architect, we will reveal that our intention is to make the debate prevail as an argument at this moment about what it is to do architecture, under consciousness and theoretical understanding or about the craft and sensation. When Goethe saw Strasbourg Cathedral for the first time, he was amazed by its beauty and frustrated at not technically understanding its compositional keys. He expressed this in writing in 1772. His conflict between reason and sensation, as described by Rykwert in "Adam's Cabin in Paradise" (1999:109), was conjured up when he questioned his mentor, Abbé Laugier, about it. Carlo Lodoli, the "Socrates of Architecture", could also have been the object of his denunciation. The vision of the cathedral, at the same time in ecstasy and uneasiness, made Goethe exclaim that heaven should provoke this same duality and he gave the architectural disciplinary body the task of the future: "Multiply, pierce the gigantic walls that you must raise against the sky so that they ascend like sublime and leafy trees of God, whose thousand branches, millions of leaves and twigs ... announce the beauty of the Lord, his owner...”. Much earlier, and Goethe (who, by the way, is recognized as the founder of modern comparative morphology), could have reconciled himself with having thought about that first modernist who was Brunelleschi, who clarified by replacement the Gothic emphasis in the Pazzi Chapel in Florence through a mystical vision of Heaven but with a rampant lucidity of rationality from history and geometry (Chakraborty, 2014:42). 3 Maybe that is why both J. Quetglas and B. Colomina wanted to propose Ariadne as the first architect. Their attempt is coresponsible with the spirit of the Daedalus, although the argument is weakened by being shown as a ranking, when in fact it is not necessary. 4 According to Deleuze and Guattari, oedipalization constitutes an illegitimate limitation of the productive syntheses of the unconscious, because it emphasizes 1) global persons, thus excluding all parental objects of desire, 2) exclusive disjunctions, thus banishing the subject to a chronological series of moments to which a coherent narrative can be given, and 3) a segregative and biunivocal use of conjunctive syntheses, thus reducing the subject's identity to a coherent or static set of one side in a set of oppositions. 5 For those who are interested in studying architecture in-depth, we would like to point out that our research has been based on our work as professors in the Master's Degree in Sustainable City and Architecture at the School of Architecture in Seville, Spain. For the subject that seeks to train our students in research, we proposed that they spend one academic year working on the concept of "Minor Architecture". This research, shared between professors (J. López-Canti, F. De la Iglesia, and C. Tapia) and students, has given excellent results that have been uploaded to Wikipedia for international debate in Spanish. It contains the genealogy of the term in different authors and texts that we have used here, except without that traceability as an argument, but as necessary sources, at the end of this paper. For more information, see the article "Devenir menor en lo arquitectónico: politización y potencialidades de resignificación espacial" in Thema, 5. FADU Montevideo, November 2020, signed by the participating students. 6 Note here that it is not only a matter of finding out, in order to evaluate the extent of the dissemination of so-called French Theory in American literature departments, which of them changed their study programs but also of tracing the training of the architects who later took charge of the development of the most influential architectural theory in the United States and abroad. Many of them had been trained with teaching programs coming from Literature, in institutions that did not train architects. Michael Speaks, for example, dean of the Syracuse and Kentucky Schools of Architecture, among others throughout his career, studied literature with F. Jameson at Duke, in a program where Terry Eagleton S. Žižek, Franco Moretti, etc. also taught. Speaks, interviewed by Mitášová (2014:358) recalls that, in those years, philosophy was basically analytical, incapable of generating theory, and that French poststructuralist thought entered North America through these departments in Literature. According to Cusset (2005:90), as philosophy becomes literature, literature becomes a mere parcel of theory. This process of indistinction of the literary and philosophical corpus was not immediate and, moreover, required the institutional apparatus of, among others, the first interdepartmental research institutes, or the regroupings between campuses, such as the influential School of Criticism and Theory, in Irvine. 7 Architectural attempts since Kafka's readings have been many. Bofill, for example, made several attempts that should be considered the best of his prolific and contradictory career. But for us, to look to Kafka means to pull back the growth around him to see his primordial stem again. 8 1988 is a unique date for the establishment of Theory within the schools of architecture. In an event organized by this Institute and published by the magazine Assemblage, all its participants declared themselves to be theorists of architecture, neither architects who write nor critics, nor historians. Two years later, the MoMA was already holding a symposium on architectural theory and practice, consecrating it. Jennifer Bloomer was one of the speakers. 9 See, "Architecture depends", lo-fi architecture concept versus hi-fi architecture. It is obvious to point out the presence of the thesis of the minor confronted with the major also in this work. 10 In Mythologies, Barthes says that the myth brings clarification, though not quite an explanation, which is what Stoner could argue to justify the way she resolves the matter without naming the origin of the selected myths. However, Barthes goes on to say that myth is also a statement of fact, so the internal record must be made visible at some point. Lebbeus Woods worked with these myths, as did John Hejduk, and they can be reconstituted from their acerbic oral narrative traditions where beings that embody nature or the human condition exalt it to make the characters extraordinary beings and unique architectural resolutions. 11 "As opposed to the notion of the character as something compact, a more or less schematic transcript of a complete human being, representative of a certain sociological or psychological archetype, minor theatricality accepts the incomplete condition of the dramatic character, his partial and enigmatic character, revealing only a minimal part of himself. The Beckettian image of the mutilated, blind character, reduced to a face, a mouth, a voice... has to do with this reductionism, with this minorisation of the concept of the character. A concept, by the way, that, by identifying with the notion of person, is highly ideologized in our Judeo-Christian-Romano-Western tradition. All the questioning of the self, of the subject, undertaken by contemporary thought, is reflected in the treatment of the character as a residue, as something incomplete and unfinished that minor theatricality advocates." Toward a Minor Theatricality. Sanchís Sinisterra (2007). Image Captions Fig. 1. Raffaello Sanzio “The School of Athens” (1509-1510). Stanza della Signatura. Vatican. Wikipedia Commons. Fig. 2. Flammarion engraving. Book by Camille Flammarion, L'Atmosphere: Météorologie Populaire (Paris, 1888) pp.163 Fig. 3. The Drawings of Franz Kafka (1907-1917). Personal Papers. Unpublished. Fig. 4. Toward a Minor Literature. Book by Deleuze&Guattari. Excerpt pp. 14. Fig. 5. Obrador Internacional de Dramaturgia, Teatro Sala Beckett, by the architects Eva Prats and Ricardo Flores. Interior. References Bloom, Harold. 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