SEEING
The possibility of architecture moving in curious ways not only challenges our perceptions of where precisely boundaries, aesthetics, and materialities are formed, but reveals a condition in which architecture speaks into the silence and makes the invisible visible.
––Mabel O. Wilson
This Theory and Criticism course at the University of Texas San Antonio, School of Architecture and Planning aimed to lift the veil, and perhaps even the historic compulsion of theory, opening our eyes to new trajectories in theory and criticism in architecture. The goal was to “see”. However, “seeing” not in the predominant form of “vision”, envisioning, or to be seen, but “seeing” as a form of how we connect, relate, and step beyond each other’s horizons, while surpassing any form of fragmentation, prevalent in architectural discourses. As much as this compilation of student work is about architecture it also is about “seeing” the echo of as it aims to speaks into the silence of the present moment without the hegemony of biases, styles, and colonizations. Collectively we have turned towards the present as an activator for an architecture that could be a primary voice, speaking in its own words without any distortions, tactics, escapisms, or representations of canons. The “unlikely” storytellers of theory were not sharing their views, values, experienced, and observations about theory, theory-slamming with people on the streets of San Antonio, family members, friends, and colleagues. We felt this approach was the only way to communicate that architecture is relational; everything else felt incompatible, lifeless, and oddly out of place in today’s environment, struggling with multidimensional awareness, humanness, and a sense for shared values, space, and resources that is not attuned to (real) life. The students, their thoughts, and levels of engagement provided evidence that their theories and architectures are attuned.
Dr. Antonio Petrov