What is architecture? When I leaf through Architectural Record, my eyes cross at the new extravagant, unusual, eccentric, even suicidal structures that are mushrooming all over the world. These choreographies in concrete try to insert themselves into that part of nature that we want to keep. They are an attempt to put human beings into harmony with themselves. For that reason, I am tempted to go to see the He Art Museum, the latest creation of Tadao Ando in Foshan, China, a marvelous blend of tradition and new technologies. I can already feel my exaltation, just looking at these photographs. Nevertheless, the images of these new temples of culture in grandiose forms trouble me when the magazine’s cover talks about “cultural buildings” and the article on Tadao Ando presents his phenomenal work as a destination for “the country’s increasingly affluent and sophisticated population.” Thus, we are dealing with temples of power and cathedrals of culture whose doors only open to money.
My first question returns, but this time it is more personal: What does architecture represent for me? Where does the relationship to these forms, which have defined my choice to live in cities, come from since I was born in the African bush. What is the source for my passion for architecture?
Paris! City of tender memories: our marriage and the birth of our son. Place of infinite walks from park to park, from square to square, from avenues to streets lined with buildings of elegant proportions and simple houses with a provincial flare. It’s a place where I learned to walk with my gaze in the air, on the lookout for details susceptible of bringing me closer to humanity. It is there that I absorbed the city as a landscape, certainly constructed, but whose lines and curves are also connecting points with our daily routines and our dreams.
Architecture carries memories. Here in this image, a former factory has been transformed into residential housing. What remains of the words, the sweat, the cries, the smiles of the past, and the small gestures? The culmination, the chimney, is still their witness and its elevation towards the sky, like the point of a spear, brings the earth closer to the universal.
Regardless of its function, a building establishes its roots. It represents an insertion by humans and a colonization of space. From my early childhood, my family moved ... a lot. From one continent to another, from one country to another, from city to city. Very young, I began to have the fantasy that I could possess a space of which I would be in charge, that I could configure, arrange to my liking. But very quickly a mute anxiety of having roots, of seeing everything around me age, made me continue my physical and emotional journey. Don’t get me wrong, I love to arrange things, to decorate and to fill the place where I live with memories, to cook, and to welcome friends. My security depends on that. But my life of the nomad let me adjust to a dream of renewal which I held on to no doubt because of my family’s adaptability to immigration.
La Cité Radieuse, Marseille. Forms, color, utopia, controversy. Other facets of architecture: here, the relationship to the exterior comes from astonishment faced with technological challenge. The forms are pure and intense, although worn here and there by the weather and the lack of maintenance. Nevertheless, I can relate to them by lifting my gaze, by seeing the colored honeycomb panels and by imagining what is behind this facade that breathes. This becomes my temporary dwelling. A dwelling that I find at the bend of my path and which I can sculpt according to my taste. I give myself the privilege of later completely rejecting the dwelling or of keeping some fragments that I can eventually integrating into my other imagined dwellings, like a composition in progress.
“Gothic cathedrals? They can disappear and I won’t shed a tear.” Such were the cutting words of a friend, who was also a colleague in the art department in Egypt’s American University of Cairo. Shocked at first, it took me time to live in that country of sand, stone and earth to value the fundamental notion of mud brick architecture, to understand the duality of the concepts of permanence and impermanence. To go back to the sources of African habitats constructed of earth, brush, the trunks of trees and seashells. So many elements drawn from the soil, from nature, from the sea; so many components returning to earth as the result of storms, insects, sun and time; impermanence in its essence. And a thousand miles from there on the coast of Virginia in the United States, these assembled boxes destined to fish for crabs made me think once again to the precarious architecture, the perishable, skeletal structures, which today are spreading across the globe to shelter a population in exile.
