English version: Rebecca Atkinson
The architect: what opens to man
(all, from open houses, is sanitized)
doors through -where, never doors-opposed;
doors where, free: air light reason right.
João Cabral de Melo Neto
Fable of an architect
There is a shadow that Le Corbusier’s illuminated ideal wants to do away with. A sanitization designed to get rid of anything unplanned or random. A feverish breathless ordering of the horizon. A flight to project a common, redeeming future for all humankind.
That is why the building on stilts, the structure suspended mid-air, cannot bear the flatness of the land. The transparency of the glass shroud dreams that light may penetrate it, canceling out the opacity of the illogical, reconciling dichotomies, inside and outside, high and low, in the dangerous illusion of some supreme control over mishaps or oddities. Space is endless, an absolute that crosses everything: for the void of indefinition, it would substitute the primordial, abstract refuge where the architectural fact would cease to be anything more than a tenuous limit. It would promise man-type in a universe-type unrestricted access, total realization. A promise at the same time protective and totalitarian, arrogant and petrifying.
Fugue is the title of Ana Holck’s installation for the Ministry of Education building, the first manifestation of Le Corbusier’s concepts in Brazil. It is translucent adhesive films in shades of gray covering the glass skin of the building, overlapping and shifting as windows are opened randomly here and there. These windows do not open onto the idealized world that painting once dreamt of. This flight does not flee from the randomness of the world or the chaos that governs it to hide away in the abstract embrace of transcendent space, from a logos in the center of the world, from an eye or a plane in the center of the picture. Fugue is a break in the long timeline of the predictable Horizon of History, a deviation from the fiction of the Same. Fugue in polyphony, in repetition and eternal differentiation, making lines, hues and surfaces radiate. Multiplying skins, contact with space, space for contact. Questioning the destinations and substance of this man and this world he moves in without the assurance of a point of reference… Fugue in the discovery of worlds, daring other horizons. Fugue in opening other windows. And doors.
[Marisa Flórido]
