Sort of spaces Original text in Spanish. This is a nonprofessional translation, not devoid of mistakes. Intimacy has a close relationship with downfall. Housing, privacy and quality. Jose Luis Pardo. 176 Architects
Public space would be for us the place to express ourselves. Forgotten the privacy mischievous meanings -our home, the built object where we can isolate- would be in public where we can show -give us- ourselves. It is, however, intrinsic to the public being a space for mediation. Refinement impel us to meet others in manners they can accept. So rules punishing any public unacceptable intimacy behavior can exist, any sort of nudity, nurturing, shitting, selling one's body, generating certain levels of noise, everything that smells to animal condition in fact. Senseless restrictions anyway when we are protected by key, when we are not stalked, in private. Even the most permissive authorities, those self-proclaimed progressist ones, sanction the validity of these rules. Only those with no goods, corporeal or fictitious, those who must live in public, beggars, dispossessed, fools to some extent, know what kind of conviction is having to expose their own privacy, the impossibility of inhabiting the public. Unable to hide so their most unpleasant behaviors to everyone's eyes , their weaknesses. The lie concerning the understanding of public as the place where we can express ourselves, where we undress. Which explains why so many of them still strive for outward exposed street life, where you can still hope to find an abandoned space, idle, useless, without access to others, sheltered somehow, to hosted public buildings, where even to the eyes of those who are like you, your intimacy's still exposed. Curious enough, the same conviction intended for those who act in the opposite way, the creeps, those who always need to be exposed, those we see one day sitting among the jurors of a meaningful award, the following one his name in the editorial board of the publication funded by the public institution that leads one of his friends. Always close to the powerful ones, his need for recognition, for visibility, deprives them from any possibility of expressing nothing on their own. His desire for notoriety depriving them of any chance of intimacy. Is so, paradoxically, by definition the public the uninhabitable space, while private one, there where a roof is protecting us, where walls refuse strangers gaze, where we can re-create our mock-up wilderness, our existence, behind our room windows, in the outwardness of our own gardens, resting in comfortable chairs. In public spaces no one is at home, because public spaces are not (they shouldn't be at least) anyone's home. So it is an awful trace when, at nightfall in contemporary cities, public spaces begin to crowd with homeless people who wander by them, without purpose or destination, humans which seem to be hoping for something or someone, but have actually lost all hope, people who simply, tragically, "are living there." When the good bourgeois shows their disapproval by pointing that this way the public space is “stained�, is expressing somehow -in a rather dispiteous way must be said- the inner condition of public space we have just mentioned (it must never be anyone's home). Housing, privacy and quality. Jose Luis Pardo. 176 Architects
Perhaps this misunderstanding, the public understood as the space where we can express ourselves, comes from its own visible nature, that of the public, while being hidden is intimacy's substance, only at reach when missed, when you sneak at it as a burglar, when an alien place is gained in an unnoticed, treacherous, punishable way, as in these pictures, or when a not completed demolition discovers us the yet painted walls and the furniture not fully broken of what once was a home. So there is something aggressive when walls fall down, when transparency reigns, when it's just glass that separates us from what our breed has teach us to prefer hidden, being Mrs. Farnsworth or Paris Hilton who is behind the screen. Perhaps it has been an unavoidable condition of the modern, one of its greatest virtues probably, violating the sanctimonious nature of the visible, questioning the public and private boundaries, between intimacy and that what could be exposed, aiming for a new way of life, devoid of prejudice. Transforming their works into a new paradigm of inhabiting. Far from being anything "inward" or "internal" intimacy is so outward and external as a ruin is: in fact it embodies the outmost degree of exposure and risk we can achieve, the soundest way of being outside, of leaving not just our home, but even ourselves, a sort of unconditional surrendering, of tearing apart every single defensive barrier we have, which is the closest way we have to reach what we might call "our place" or "the place where we belong" (understanding this is no place at all, as it has being said before and is idle to repeat, humans belong to nowhere). ... Our intimate are those who meet our ruin, and having the opportunity, refuse to exploit it. Those who are in love with us exactly because of our downfalls. In front of them we are not able to give or ask for explanations. But we do not need to. Housing, privacy and quality. Jose Luis Pardo. 176 Architects
Probably it lies in its own invisibility the property that allows our emotions to blossom, which let us, as we skip the step of rationalization, getting in touch with what we don't understand. As in the pace from sleep to consciousness, from apathy to elation, from rest to complete concentration. As in the sudden transition from darkness to light, from gloom to clarity. Where, in a moment, what we see is changed. The bodies, blurred specks, barely apprehensible at first, slowly recovering every detail, until they reach a complete definition. Something that, without understanding, we had already gazed. This transition alters our perception. Awaking our senses. Making us, by contrast, unusually aware of what surrounds us. Otherwise it would have remained hidden to us. So it happens in certain spaces. We seem to have a need impelling us to alter the boundaries of what we build, exploring our homes thresholds to their limits, even to the borders of irrationality. Transferring our privacy right there where it should not be admitted. Where all, light, nature, outside wind inhabit. A need that is not hard to trace in many buildings, especially modern ones. Where public and private boundaries are blurred. We can notice it. Without leaving a chair.
Original text in Spanish. This is a nonprofessional translation, not devoid of mistakes.