Subtle Construction (extract), edited by Marta Jecu

INTRODUCTION This book is meant to look at architecture considering its invisible side – connected to its intensity, to its unmanifested potentialities, to the spatial and temporal superpositions that it carries and that infuse places, situations, objects with a specific cultural memory. Identified as a capacity to temporarily manifest a virtual potential that architecture carries, this intensity is seen as a regenerative and transformative dimension, which the real carries. In visual and written forms, the explorations of space and construction processes that are gathered here show and reinforce the effectiveness with which this virtual potential of our immediate experience manifests itself. At the same time, this book intends to gather possible directions of understanding and concrete approaches of the virtual, which do not rely on digital media.

Accompanying the exhibition Subtle Construction, taking place in Lisbon in November 2011, at Plataforma Revólver, this volume continues the lines of thought that the artists Carlos Bunga, Hironari Kubota, Matias Machado, Cristian Rusu, Sancho Silva, Yukihiro Taguchi, and Sinta Werner set in motion. Their works – where space is progressively dramatized, documented, re-enacted and architecture emerges from unexpected self-generating parcourses that the involvement of different media take – aggregate performative spatial presences. Therefore, this volume also contains a dossier with images that, in a condensed manner, resituate or recall their works. Along with their works, theoreticians, architects, and curators respond in specific ways to the question of virtual and imaginary architecture. In this sense, Sancho Silva gathers fundamental concepts for both a geographical and a spiritual mapping of space, immersing the reader in Aristotelian and pre-Aristotelian thought and offering the chance of being in contact with original texts.

Luís Santiago Baptista composes a solid and grounded theoretical corpus that offers historically informed insights in the contemporary thinking of the virtual connected to architecture. João Silvério, in his own curatorial project Empty Cube, opens a curatorial perspective in dealing with the capacity of space to self-generate a conceptual substance that transiently articulates into form. Dana Bentia vividly brings us close to the edible architectures, the famous pièces montées of the grand French chef Marie-Antoine Carême and the period following the French Revolution of 1789. Carlos Bunga and Yukihiro Taguchi construct a visual convergence of images, which both document and amplify their proximate living and working space with a supplementary dimension of sensory references and information layers.

Sinta Werner and Cristian Rusu work with a graphic dimension of space that flattens space and brings it back to its surface, where the line or the fold —6—