Landscapes of anatexis: A ritual using a razor sharp blade for resurrecting the phoenix. (1st December 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Varnavas, Nasios
• Is Part Of: Design ecologies. Volume 4:Number 1(2014)
• Page Start: 28
• Page End: 60
• Publication Date: 2015-12-01
• Subjects: Design -- Environmental aspects -- Periodicals; Architecture -- Environmental aspects -- Periodicals; Sustainable architecture -- Periodicals; Sustainable design -- Periodicals; 720.47
• DOI: 10.1386/des.4.1-2.28_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2043-0698

Abstract

Power and capital often enslave forms of poetic expression. By standardizing processes they tend to dissolve the original form, intent and true psyche of creative statements. Thinking and acting in a specific, fast-paced, efficient, mechanized or institutionalized rationale many times removes the very human factor or presence, which is scarily displaced by regulatory measures and ideological or capital concepts of a greedy consumerist pseudo-culture. In today's highly scientific or technological jungle driven by the above, narrative, vision, belief and romance, key ingredients of intellectual evolution, seem to be getting increasingly diluted in a big pile of neutrality and mediocrity led by fat tasteless money. Architecture, which depends greatly on the booming economic landscapes, has found itself in stagnant waters, unable to shift, inspire or propose new forms of tectonic resistance to envision the future and overcome the clichés of reliving its past. It has been for years in a state of latency or safe paralysis, injected with properness, apologetic behaviour, excessive okayness and coolness, losing its once dexterous mind and body. This article imagines a 24-hour ritual, as partly scientific and partly empirical form of practice, and studies ten different fragments of architectural events/artefacts that suggest novelty: identifying specific and fragile tipping points, augmenting, subverting, challenging notions of constructing or deconstructing, and eventually restructuring the existing architectural 'corpse', staging its dangerous yet bright awakening. A quasi-fictional flight or daydream across these interwoven landscapes, paralleled to a human body cursed by the illness of preconception and perfection, synthesizes an anxious implicit critique on the current state of architecture, attacking it, to resurrect it from its deep lethargic sleep. Each word or slice becomes a cut seeking to fill its corpus with an eternal bright light and to suggest forms of seeing or conceiving other than the rational. The highly intuitive mechanisms formed by this ritual aim to generate a living manifesto, a way of looking at things with a will to change them. Operation tools transform from literal to metaphorical linguistic concepts and aim to metamorphose the passive architectural 'object' into an active container 'body' catalysing the restless fluid motions of life: Anatexis.