Knowledge moving tools

Project description

Aldous Huxley said ‘the essay is the literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything’. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Alan Colquhoun says it moves knowledge from the hands of specialists to the hands of ’all educated people’. 1 Hiding behind Huxley’s affirmation, I’ll take a shot at this architect’s role which may or may not be still the fancy subject on the table. And I am doing it because it is exactly how I see this responsibility issue at the moment – you are able to ‘move’, to extract things from the elevated minds and pass them on to the simple people, you write good essays, it means you care at least about having a public. Exchanging weekly intelligent ideas in a closed bubble is the equivalent of writing academic papers that’ll have tens of readers in the best case. I think the essay should be the architect’s concern these days, as the way we tell the story doesn’t really matter that much - as long as we’re humble and the story is good, the world is saved twice because the days this character was supposed to save the world are long gone. And don’t get me wrong, I strongly believe he can save it, but exactly through the means he doesn’t really practice – those of exploring the interface between the charming yet complicated world of simple thoughts (inside which he should find charisma to succeed) and the intricate one of the (sometimes) complex subjects he has to keep up with. Because the troubled times we live in don’t (and shouldn’t) give him the luxury, with all the tools at hand, to simply continue designing. As an architect who has been active rather as a teacher, cultural manager and magazine editor lately, I wanted to see how people behave when they don’t actually know you’re an architect for days, maybe weeks, and what happens when they find out. And of course, I’ll go on with the scary story on how many problems the society expects us to solve and how much responsibility we actually have, as architects.