VISUAL ESSAY
ACTS OF HESITATION - JORGE MÁRIO JÁUREGUI’S INVESTIGATIVE SKETCHES
¿Para qué sirve un diagrama para un arquitecto? Un diagrama es, en la perspectiva que nos interesa, la huella de lo que existe, pero ya encaminándose para lo que puede venir a existir. Incluye entonces para un “arquitectourbanista” una tensión entre lo real (inaprensible) y la potencia lógica ordenadora de que habla Lacan. Potencia lógica ésta, que presupone una pulsión estética. Hay, por esta razón, desde el inicio, una cierta intención ordenadora que organiza estéticamente, que tiende hacia “lo bello”, signifique esto lo que signifique (JÁUREGUI, 2012, p.87).
The need to unveil “spaces” as a genesis and revert idealized representation categories of an urbanistic practice brings diagrams to the scene, the same ones that conduce the architect Jorge Mário Jáuregui throughout his investigations on conceiving an architecture os sense of Beauty. Deconstructing the opacity of a mediating architecture (of properties, quantities, distances, measuring) that rationally and progressively imposes senses to places, assigns names, detains ordering laws, is an essential part of the making of diagrams. Those are what Jorge Mário Jáuregui uses for the (de)construction of socialspatial articulation, the production of spaces interacting with everyday life. As a creative process with psychoanalytic resonances, that the architect Jáuregui remits to lacanian studies and to the apprehended disorder in the Urbis, it would reveal the implicit potency of the “sense of the Beautiful” in an “aesthetic drive”.
Everyday life anchored in intention, interlacing space-times; exchanging bodies, texts, memories, visions in which glimpses (hesitations) make potentialities of situations emerge (as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty would invite us to consider), as well as of silent moments; almost gestures that announce words (MERLEAU-PONTY, 2004). It provides meaning to what Jáuregui says offers the possibility of opening the visible to the field of articulations (JAUREGUI, 2012).
Hesitations allowing words that announce actions to come to the surface, express the potency of the hand, that which the architect says is immanent to a state of pleasure submersed into abstractions (JAUREGUI, 2012). And would not those abstractions be the shadows that emanated from the light coming to tension renaissance painting and space, deriving from contrasts between spirituality and rationalism implied in baroque?
In his treaty On Painting, renaissance painter Leon Battista Alberti states that the painter is able to follow with his hand what he has comprehended with his intelligence (ALBERTI, 2014), and celebrates the immanence act of a space that is yet to come. And would not those be the empty hands, says Jáuregui, that long for the outflow of impulses conducted by advertences coming from the realm of thought, (as pointed by Merleau-Ponty (2004), announcers of the possible interaction between language-forming signs)? As Alberti (2014, p.96, tradução do autor) says that the architect “borrowed from the paintors the architraves, the capitols, the bases, the facades and other things”1and that “maybe art cannot be taken without having trends with paintings such as beauty is in a certain sense in between things that emerge from painting”2(ALBERTI, 2014, p.98, tradução do autor) he reinforces drawing as a mere instrument to mediate the composition of forms implicit in nature.
By mediating a comprehension of the world like the process similar to a painting that represents what is seen with feeling, the diagram, in this case, would reveal traces as Impressions (JAUREGUI, 2012) and would later impel the design of the ideas. The Jauregui diagram, like an albertinian painting that does not distinguish beauty, reality and representation seems infused in the tension that it reveals through potency - of the beauty, the alive - an aesthetic structured in the transformations of happenings.
The apprehension of signs born in the practice Jáuregui applies in his diagrams becomes a field of form perception that installs itself before the architect’s intention to plastically order and organize the space according to an organic logic - both functional and structuring. Plastic intention in the condition of an arch-experimental writing that is charged and drawing, as in the costinian sketches, and that reveals a “determinant intention”3(COSTA, 2001, p.39, tradução do autor), rules the trace as a sign that acts between sense and reason, in the difficult conversation of the subject relation in the continuous unravelling cycle that defies logic. Persistence of baroque ambiguity.
Jáuregui seems to have persisted in the hesitations of Leon Battista Alberti as to the renaissance space, foreseeing the drawing’s imperfections literally shadowed by baroque space. Personifying the role of painter/architect, he deconstructs the universal representation contained in Merleau-Ponty (2004) ponderation that ‘culture never offers completely transparent meanings, the genesis of the sense is never completed’ and makes rationality and subjectivity collide in paintings/diagrams of the human phenomena.
Urbanizar favelas implica, partiendo de la estructura del lugar y de la “escucha” de las demandas interceptadas con los datos derivados de los estudios socio-económicos y culturales forzar el caos hasta convertirlo en forma (JÁUREGUI, 2012, p.118).
Figure 1
Contemporary art has contributed enormously to question the possibilities of appropriations within the public space. Readings of site specifics (KWON, 2008) works unravelling insurgent spaces of mappings ‘that resemble a net that gradually connects points and formalizes a collection of relations’, making ‘elements that juxtapose, contrapose and imply one another’ appear, formalize a specific structuralist configuration contained in one place, that which Foucault calls heterotopology (FOCAULT, 1984). According to Jáuregui this heterotopology manifests itself in architecture as a form of art that demands the intertwinement of the visual, the conceptual, the sensorial, the accidental and the social, trying to achieve tiny bits of order in an infinitely disordered context. (JÁUREGUI, 2012).
As heterotopologies, Jáuregui’s diagrams inscribe a ‘fragmentary sequence of events and narratives’ of the experiences’ interaction, the architect and the community, with the place where the urbanization projects will be set up in the future. This process, as a dissident vector of the urban practice dissected by Kevin Lynch in his book The Image of the City (1960), composed by the mapping of the perception of elements that structure the images of cities, grouped in five types - paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks - permeates the configuration of places. This configuration does not differ much from the remarks of American artist Robert Smithson, one of the pioneers of site specific. His work, “taken to dismistify distinction between theory and pratice from ways on ensuring aesthetic experiences as the dimensions of time and space, evaluates a dialogical relation betrween thinking, object and place”4(PÉREZ-ORAMA, 2012, online, tradução do autor) that becomes part of a place and restructures its organization in conceptual terms and in the field of perception.
In Jáuregui, this procedure became the means to process the ‘perceived space’ - mediated by the simultaneity of ‘looking while walking’-, telling stories and revealing fabrics, intrinsic as it is to the investigations that the architect relativizes the inability of avoiding maximizing the space of his natural tendencies towards the community. In this order, Járegui exposes the city to the facing of its traumas and affirms that “a new connection of the whole urban structure, enabling the articulation of differences when those become intolerable” is plausible. Conflict is a positive work agenda and the slam is the place of the pure becoming! Powering the use of a space within the interaction of formal and informal, leaving new meanings adrift, translates the ‘art-architecture integration’ set in motion by states of ambiguity the architect sees as an ‘aesthetics that unites fragments’. These considerations foster Jáuregui’s participation in Kassel’s Documenta 12, 2007, entitled The migration of forms, invited by the curator Roger M. Buergel, to expose the aesthetic experiences of spaces/times dimensions that originate from his diagrams.
Kassel’s Documenta 12 consisted of discussions on the transfiguration of forms taken by the production of visual culture and humanity’s history in other shapes, that accommodated different contexts and purposes allured to by the History of Art discipline. Curatorship revealed content intersections and resemblances with its focus on the contemporary implicit process of new interpretations, which promotes unexpected situations, shedding light on new relations among works of different historical periods. These similarities and intersections predispose the migration of aesthetic forms throughout moments and cultural boundaries (12° DOCUMENTA DE KASSEL, 2007).
For Jáuregui, projecting has always implied in this perspective. The mixing of themes and perceptions would be the most important component in the backbone of a project whose inter-disciplinarity permeates the experiences intrinsic to the routine practices of the Urbis. The latter compose, at each moment, adverse situations of experience and readings that fuse rationality and intuition.
El punto de partida de partida para la formulación del Partido Urbanístico (que busca capturar e estructurar las órdenes espaciales que subyacen a los paisajes, configurados aparentemente sin sentido) es la elaboración del esquema de lectura de la estructura del lugar, que representa gráficamente la configuración descontínua y no homogénea, aunque conectiva, de cada sitio, identificando relaciones entre áreas de la intensidad diferencial, dentro de un campo coherente (JÁUREGUI, 2102, p.121).
Would Jáuregui’s architecture be Hélio Oitica’s environmental art, one that the artist conceives as a sensorial collection ordinated according to a ‘order hierarchy’ - all directed towards the creation of an environmental world? (PEDROSA, 2004). Diagrams as articulations between organic expressions and forms in the order of establishing relations among art, architecture and history would serve, at its very least, as correspondences with Alberti’s assumptions, providing the real world with the possibility of being the expression of its own spacialization.
The advice offered by the renaissance painter - “as we paint we should be opened to all that see and to each one to hear”5(ALBERTI, 2014, p.139, tradução do autor) -builds up a strong dialogue with the architecture of the senses advanced by Jorge Mário Jáuregui.