Inside - Outside

 I was an Alejandro Zaera Polo fan. I read his essays, I watched his lectures, I just bought his discounted book off amazon. I was happy. 

Then I read Inaki Abalos and realized that my underdeveloped mind and my $40 honest dollars were defrauded by a watered-down, off-brand Inaki Abalos. 

The problem with Zaera Polo’s RC Cola is his accuracy of a current paradigm. He identifies the diminished role of architects and in his lecture talks about their neglected role to the principle elements of architecture: air, water, energy, light, etc. These elements are the primary actors that are mediated through the envelope, but more generally through building. Moreover, these are deeply political resources- ones that connect to our power structures, economies, and systems of commerce. 

Architecture in the past 100 years has developed complex technologic solutions to mediate these factors, these are the “vectors of evolution” that have produced modern building assemblies that can be spec’ed and ordered without understanding the forces that created them. Zaera Polo puts it poignantly
when he talks about how we have vacated our roles as designers when we draw lines that we don’t understand. When we draw a facade elevation and then pass it onto specialists who will do the real designing - to “solve” for the water, the air penetration, the energy transfer, etc. 

Architecture is in a crisis, both Zaera Polo and Abalos would agree on this - they are both writing out of a concern for the role of architecture in modern society. As both point out, historic crises have been a catalyst for reforming architecture (much more than individual actors ever could) - this is no different from our current global crisis. Zaera Polo’s solution is to better understand our current paradigm, to understand the resource flows in the envelope and their connection to civilization, and to take ownership of it. Abalos’ solution is more idealistic to Zaera Polo, because it is a reforming of the modern paradigm of architecture. It is the embrace of the cultural aspects of the elements of architecture and the ability of architecture to create forms of life through their interiors. More straightforwardly, Abalos understands that the elements of architecture (water, light, air, heat, etc) are “solved” by a building itself and permeate throughout it. As Abalos writes on this, “[air] is one of the single most valuable materials of architecture, possibly the only one that architects should not relinquish.”

Abalos talks about how the process of westernization brought useless typologies and forms onto non-western nations that didn’t share “material and formal assumptions.” Today too in the crisis of climate, we have an abundance of useless typologies and technologies, and thus must be wary of technocratic solutions that distort the nature of our crisis. The principle elements: air, water, energy, light that both outline are so crucial to architecture and cannot simply be “solved” at the envelope and must inform the entire structure ( and whether there can be a structure). These things are the currency of life, it is the reason that we wage wars, do business, and choose our settlements - they cannot be left to the skin.