OLIVIER ETCHEGARAY

2018, Bekak
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Punta Zorroza

By definition, architecture remains essentially an artistic activity and must inexorably claim to be so. To reinvent the city, the process should be considered above all as an artistic approach. The shape of a city should not be derived from technical specifications, Sustainable Development Goals should be priorly considered as technical data to be integrated into a projet.

Punta Zorroza is a work about exploring artistic ideas within an urban planning project. The city could be envisage as a potential field for spatial and urban experiences. I first use hand-drawing technique as a tool for exploring space, and also like a phenomenology exercise. The aims is using the representation of emotion in fine art into the scale of architecture and urban planning.

I find particularly interesting to approach the notion of spatiality as a multitude of dimensions superposed into different configurations. The dimensions of the constructions and the dimensions of its environment produce just a single space, like in the quantum world. Architecture becomes landscape, and vice versa. There are no longer any spatial boundaries. There is only space, and nothing is space. Space does not exist in the same way than time does not exist according to the loop quantum gravity.

The city is planned like a three-dimensional painting. Some of the rules from the traditional composition in western painting are reused in order to erase spatial boundaries. Everything becomes foreground, background and backdrop. Colors take us back to nature and history of art. The sky, vegetation and water are enhanced by a crimson-pink shading, in reference to Allegorie ed effetti del Buono e Cattivo Governo by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and to The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. To reinvent the city, it seems more judicious to look at the nature, to analyse the modern application of some practices dating back from the Renaissance, rather than the outdated aspect of the high-tech style, a kind of aesthetic banality (Jean Baudrillard) which has already reached its peak in the post-industrial era.

Reinventing a city will only succeed through the redistribution of today’s powers and the degree of commitment for each individual to act. Urban planning projects will demand that some influences currently exercised to be repositioned in the decision-making order. Politicians will have to question their power as a form of authority in favor of power as an opportunity to act. Architects will have to re-evaluate their role, which sometimes tends to be overly dominant to the detriment of the future inhabitants. It seems to me that the idea of working collaboratively is doomed to failure, as it presupposes only one form of consultation, taking advice, from various influential parties to the detriment of freedom of choice and taking responsibility. It is up to the architects to propose a new spatial relationship with the city, to its future inhabitants and all the other actors to deliberately decide how to occupy the space, to the politicians to translate the possible into something real.