{"id":41230,"date":"2023-02-28T07:49:39","date_gmt":"2023-02-28T06:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/?p=41230"},"modified":"2023-07-10T11:24:55","modified_gmt":"2023-07-10T09:24:55","slug":"arquitectura-y-placer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/arquitectura-y-placer\/","title":{"rendered":"Architecture and Pleasure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I once read an interview with Elizabeth Bishop, the great 20<sup>th\u00a0<\/sup>century poet and traveler, in which she was asked why she traveled so much. She answered, without hesitating: \u201cEssentially, architecture moves me. I travel to see buildings.\u201d She impressed me with her answer because it is what I would want to respond (though I probably wouldn\u2019t dare to do so) if someone were to ask me the same question.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, it\u2019s more fashionable to respond: \u201cI travel to live new experiences, to sample other cuisines, to understand other cultures, to meet new friends.\u201d Someone who answers that she travels mainly \u201cto see buildings\u201d would be considered detached, elitist, inhumane. I have argued a lot with fellow travelers who found my thirst to \u201csee churches\u201d incomprehensible and tiresome. And yet, the pleasure that we feel when seeing architecture (that verb is lame: better to say when visiting, occupying, incorporating it into us and incorporating ourselves into it), encompasses all those trivialities of experiences, culture, and even friendship.<\/p>\n<p>The pleasure that architecture provides is total pleasure: it encompasses all five senses, the whole body, memory, imagination, our sense of space and time. Walking in silence and seeing the evolution of spaces, the gradual understanding through the eyes but also the feet and touch, is a blessing for the nervous and the impatient, for those of us who find it difficult to stand for a long time in front of a work, sit through a lecture or watch a long video (reading and cinema are different for that\u2019s where the complex pleasure of fiction comes in, which would take at least another essay to explain).<\/p>\n<p>I think that the four authors who contribute to this issue enjoy, as I do, the undaunted silence and mineral patience of architecture, its inalienable dignity, its solidity, its refusal to convert experience into banal and easily digestible merchandise (the Netflixification of reality that Miguel \u00c1ngel Hern\u00e1ndez talks about in his text). I think these are not antisocial writers, but quite the contrary, they are deeply interested in everything human and enjoy life, as well. I admit I like writers who enjoy life more than tormented ones.<\/p>\n<p>Architecture is, along with sex, the closest thing humans have invented as vehicles to enjoy pleasure trips through time: places and moments in which time expands, contracts, accumulates and overlaps. These are, I believe, the pre- or post-apocalyptic restaurants of <a href=\"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/sashimi-de-celacanto\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Esther Garc\u00eda Llovet<\/a>, the always exquisitely problematic house-museums of <a href=\"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/giorgio-de-chirico-no-tiene-fanta-en-casa\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mercedes Cebri\u00e1n<\/a>, the perverse glass houses of <a href=\"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/magazine\/que-esconden-las-casas-de-vidrio\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Vicente Monroy<\/a>, and the eroticized digital architectures of <a href=\"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/el-fetichismo-del-espacio\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Miguel \u00c1ngel Hern\u00e1ndez<\/a>. Whoever is not interested in architecture is not interested in life or the pleasure of feeling alive. I have long considered this pleasure a touchstone and a measuring stick when choosing friends or books to read. Living life to live architecture is a fuller and more intense way of living, period.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>[Front pic: Moragas building hall at Via Augusta in Barcelona.\u00a0<span class=\"copyfoto\">Photo: Salva L\u00f3pez<\/span>]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I once read an interview with Elizabeth Bishop, the great 20th\u00a0century poet and traveler, in which she was asked why she traveled so much. She answered, without hesitating: \u201cEssentially, architecture&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2808,"featured_media":41225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6267],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Architecture and Pleasure by Javier Montes<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Texto editorial del tema del mes &quot;Architecture and Pleasure&quot; by 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