We paint the Museum of the Nation

[On the painting of Lima's Museo de la Nación]

We are responsible for the refurbishment of the Continental Bank Building. We chose to cover the Civic Centre with aluminum plates imitating the colour of the original casted concrete. We allowed the renovations of the Ricardo Palma Clinic. We are going to demolish the ex San José de Cluny School.

You, me, each and every one of the members of the College for Architects, each member of the union and every student and teacher at the schools of architecture. We are the responsible, the only responsible.

And we are not responsible because we could not stop it; nor because our small and useless cries for protest, which does seem to reach nowhere. We are responsible of the initial cause of all these interventions: we are responsible for the anonymity of our Peruvian architecture.

Because, let’s be honest, outside particular academic spheres and outside our own groups, who would know what was the architectonic importance of the Museum of the Nation (Ministry of Fisheries)? Did anybody ever hear the word ‘brutalism’? Did anybody even care?

No. And it is pointless to blame “the ignorance of the people” in such absurdly generic terms.

It is our fault.

Is the fault of those who do have the answers to those questions but do not bother to share them with our community. And the community does not care anyway, because the gap existing between them and us (starting from the fact of expressing ourselves in terms of “them” and “us”) is too broad. We architects have never cared about reaching to people. We are the demiurge, the creator, the inventor, the creative. Never the link, the connection, the dialogue, the professional serving.

If the architect have never cared about accompanying the citizen in discovering its own city, if he or she had never listened, if, instead of a dialogue he or she has chosen the monologue, then that architect has no right to complain, if that very citizen, ignored (and thus ignorant), decides to act upon something which meaning we have never bothered to explain.

If we have not have interest in sharing what we do, in “diffuse” (if we want to use a fashionable term) what architecture is about and when it is good, if we impose our ideas without bothering to explain and we collide with differences, it is only our fault.

It is, fellow architects, out fault. We are painting the Museum of the Nation. And it is turning out ugly.

Everyday Architectural Criticism

Everyday Architectural Criticism (II)

Everyday Architectural Criticism

Is architectural criticism just for us architects? Or is it meant for the common citizen, the one who dwells, lives and dreams inside architecture?

If we are to agree that architectural criticism is written just for a relatively small group of professionals and academics, there is hardly anything to add to the matter. We can assume then that we are members of a guild of sorts and we can carry on with our debates.

If, as I hope, we sustain that architectural criticism – as architecture itself – is meant to serve people, then we are forced to see there is an ever growing gap between it and its intended public. From the words we use to the examples we posed, it seems that architectural critics purposely tried to scare away their intended readers.

Meanwhile, when most readers think about architecture they picture two very different things: those great buildings made by recognised architectures and, as if it were something entirely non-related, their own houses, the shops they go into and their places of work or leisure.

Architecture criticism should be a bridge between architects and users, between our profession and everyday architecture, for there is architecture that we architects are not aware of. For instance, what the user does to a finished building after moving in or, more dramatically, when it is the user the one who designs and builds without an architect help or counsel.

While it is unquestionable the role of criticism when it is applied to those great creations, we have yet to focus our efforts on a responsible critic of that every-day architecture, that is also friendly to the public.

Using the case of the peripheral architecture in Lima (Perú) and some examples of architectural criticism, we will propose a line of action for what we call everyday architectural criticism.

Abstract for the Symposium Writing Architecture, Birsbane, August 2009.