ARISTIDE ANTONAS — The booklist

ARISTIDE ANTONAS

a cura di Luca Galofaro

Libria 2014

I'm unable to write a review of a book I had curated. I prefer to tell you why I did it.

I know Antonas and his work, there are common themes, translated through words, images and projects, this book helped me a lot, to understand many things about myself.

Writing is often a need to understand the project as pratice.

Here there is a brief reflection, a text through images to convince you to read this book.

It is very difficult for me to write a text about Aristide Antonas that can follow a straight line; I could have been eased with the tools provided by the network, creating a hypertext with many links, redirecting to his website, his blog, his Flickr page, to his projects posted on some of the most important web magazines, to his many open dialogs with critics and colleagues. Even if it has been pretty difficult translating all this expressive complexity into a book, now I can say I found it very useful; following all these tracks I was able to find many common ideas and projects that brought me back to various investigations carried out with my office. In a way, I found myself lying on a couch for a psychoanalytic session dealing also with my work as a designer. This is very important for my writing: an exercise I need to understand how architecture can be a metaphor and a tool for political, social and economic change within our contemporary world.

The idea was to put together a few housing projects, “always conceived as a flatten experience related to a concept of interface where living is projected to a bare experience of self in an invisible – un-existing reality. The dwelling projects give different answers to the same question: where is dwelling driven nowadays?”

[1]

Through these projects, and the conversations with Aristide Antonas and Antonio Carbone (the publisher) we meant to design an Atlas that could embrace an imaginary where each part is directly linked to another, a map to read architecture in a different way. Antonas is strongly convinced that his digital archive must be shared online so that his philosophy should be a shared good. Try typing his name and this memory will slowly materialize in front of you through images of his projects stored in various kinds of social networks or other platforms’ data centers worldwide. Text originally written and then guarded by blogs, suggestions resulting from observing reality, collected over time in many virtual boxes

[2]

A review

through

12 immages

Antonas instead considers the network as a real place, as a space, and this space has a strong relationship with architecture; the archive is the tool he builds his own idea of the world.

The fragments of reality, are stored and replicated in designing the project. The form of representation coincides with the real.

A key factor in Antonas’ thinking lies in his idea of architecture mainly intended as a theoretical investigation ground; architecture should not be limited to represent and make the need of dwelling real; architecture is always a device for thinking, reflecting, criticizing and constructing a conceptual model whose overall meaning must return to be the definition of a space that can generate relationships.

The domestic space is the network space; here it is very difficult to define the distance between the individual and the collective condition.

The landscape

the interior is

a place

to live

Antonas is not only an architect, who divides his time between practice and theory, he also writes for the theater. This narrative mood is present in every of his writings, from the fictional ones to the architectural, to the ones made of images. Text in all its discursive forms (drawing, collage, fiction) is a parallel system of thinking, writing and design merging and complementing each other.

The Amphitheater house, responding to the client needs and placed on the thin line between what is considered a domestic space, a work space and a socialization place.

The house is conceived as an artificial landscape, to be used always in different ways by moving around the objects and furniture inside.

“The house itself is supposed to be a responsible device but it may already introduce to a new concept of responsibility while in the same time it gives a perspective towards an idiosyncratic notion of irresponsibility (founded in today’s participation in the social phenomena): it is a project of self criticism. It produces a simple observation tool that is isolated but it can include all information from the exterior world through Internet. It is already a place where one can in the same time perform an exit from the community and organize the exact type of presence through which the community itself is structured.” (Aristide Antonas)

10.

Antonas can not but agree with Baudelaire when he claims that “The whole visible universe is just a storehouse of images and signs that imagination must provide a place and a relative value to: some sort of nourishment that imagination has to assimilate and transform. All human soul abilities should be subordinated to imagination, which captures them all in one.” Antonas, therefore, is not attracted by images but from what they represent, from the order they provide to the construction of space. Seeing the world is a kind of creation and any creation is a kind of seeing.

11.

The interpretation of reality forces him to think about immediate solutions

12.

The political and performative aspect of the discipline, the idea of architecture as a social device

[1]

From a dialogue between the author and Aristide Antonas; the text was accompanied by an exchange of opinions and a constant action of re-vision. I inserted fragments of conversations or texts by Antonas himself throughout the essay as a support for my text.

[2]

https://www.flickr.com/people/antonas/

http://antonas.blogspot.it

http://www.aristideantonas.com

http://www.pinterest.com/antonas/built/