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Constructed Geographies:
DREAM ARCHITECTURE
Bryan Emanuel & Christos Ganos
Architecture: Robert van Embricqs
"What is beauty? Certainly nothing that can be calculated or measured. It is always something imponderable, something that lies in between things." – Mies van der Rohe
Does an architect speak of beauty? From the beginning morsels of consciousness, philosophers took the western stage to fly in the face of the aesthetic, and explained reality in terms of matter. Matter made sense by way of its functionality. What's true lived in the house of what's best used. The pretty organization of philosophy, an Alexander the Great, glad and bloated, blocked the sun. Traditional philosophy has not been friendly to art. Plato himself distrusted the inspirational nature of the poet because their product, blown in from some unclear land, was not circumscribed by absolute understanding. It has been said – philosophy since Plato has only been a series of footnotes. Amen. The tyranny of functionality never lost steam. What gall then of art construction to be, as Oscar Wilde says, useless. To bethink whatever it is that lies between. The art of the surrealist relied precisely on the dream experience, where individually a narrative blows in from some unclear land. A formative experience occurred for Salvador Dali while drifting on a boat. As he drifted he observed change, at each moment, in the countenance of a distant rock formation. He perceived of the single object – its alterity. Being, if aesthetic, was dynamic. The movement of the eye and the complexity of the object is a Heraclitean fire, being devouring non-being, continually. Where there is an absence, there our dream fills in. What is true is an architectonic wonder, on the turn of the unknown.
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In Dream Architecture, geographical space is manipulated and remodeled according to individual needs. It is an operative transformation of imagination into reality and a synaesthetic recoding to experience. Landscapes are no more reminiscent of the virtual duplicate encountered in parallel realities but are rather transformed to tactical relationships: oneiric material of corporal engagement. The impermeable neural/visceral double interweaves in a process of recursive intermediary stages, it crystallizes somewhere in between. There, a new topology emerges where architecture transgresses the frontier of monetary profit and returns to the sanctuary of libidinal energy, in our terms - the cortical life instinct. Impossibilities are no longer dictated by construction-restrictions, but by the limits of multidimensional rendition.
Dream architecture is playful and erratic; it partners with surrealism but is not limited by its character. It offers multiplicity over the real/surreal double, not extension nor transformation, but additional elements of transcribed variability in a game of reversed geomancy. In the words of Ezra pound is quite out of place amid resistance to current exacerbations Dream Architecture yields an armor against utter consternation.
If brain evolution is translated to inhibitory control, dream architecture transgresses, proceeds and revolves around disinhibition. Extricated from the suffocating notion of vestigial physical necessities and performance-optimization, it becomes supererogatory, but also ecliptic. Dream architecture converts the singular masking of creative compulsion; it is not based on passion, which in its extreme leads to malevolence and calamity, but it is the opposite of that. It is not confined to the need for ownership but rather deals with the effacement of borders. It sums up submerged impressions – more than just an equivalent of neuroses that surface in a frenzy of incredulous constructions.
PROJECTS
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