BONJOUR TRISTESSE

The truth is that architecture is not a private matter, last night some kids told me about “social architecture”.

“It’s a tautology” I thought; how does the architecture not to be social? It’s everywhere, for everyone, always in the middle, so pervasive, its ugliness, its beauty, its being there.

And the amazing thing is that regardless of who created it, the weaning takes place immediately after removing the scaffolding, it goes alone, disobedient, wild. Who knows how to listen to this siren call it can talk about places with dense flavor, of a knowledge that is fantasy, and technique, it’s much more. An eternal game of references and calls, never, almost never, and end in itself.

I read “Bonjour Tristesse” many years ago, that book seems to me still today, a powerful mastepiece, so skinny, white, pure and unfair. Thus began.

“I don’t know wheter to give the beautiful name of sadness to the solemn strange feeling that torments me with its troubles and its sweetness. It’s a feeling so absolute and almost selfish that I’m ashamed, but the sadness I always seemed honorable. I didn’t now what it was, I had tried just boredom, regret, remorse, more rarely. Today something is closing in on me like a silk, irritanting and sweet, and separates me from others.”

I found that title many years later, walking through Berlin, sniffing a trip that opened many eyes to myself, where the discovery that the architect can’t get the milkman, or whoever for him. The strenght of the hand that marked the Siza’s building, perhaps astride upon that and left open to breathe.

In the middle of Kreuzberg reigned this explosion of expressionism, tentatively conclused with the lines, to form two words, the S wonderfully mirrored, the imperfection, a triumph of humanity. This building is beautiful, look it, seek it. Be the hand that draws the S, be the ear who can smell the small events of a city.

text by Giorgia Sborlino Garcia