1900 and afterwards…
… when Primo Pari was living the mirage of the automobile culture. It was that very time of racing cars being born, of automobiles increasingly being part of life in the cities. Somewhere, actually nowhere, where his house is placed, popping up in the dust of a curve, a certain count Ambrosio tries to convince Florence Pari to let her husband be his partner in racing, as deadly then as they are now. A black and white sequence in which Ambrosio charges: “Florence, please, do learn this by heart: if you love somebody who loves you don’t every take his dreams away”. And Florence replies: “I think this is a great line in a book, except life is more complicated; however, I accept him to be with you in racing for a reason I will not declare to myself and for all of us to keep our composure.”
Let me not forget to tell you that Primo was more of a passionate than a true mechanic since he managed to fix cars while following a manual in French, a language not familiar to him. Florence would translate that for him, almost learning the text by heart.
This goes with Barrico in “This story” book while talking about the dream of an era in which the beauty of cromated radiators, leather helmets and automobile glasses is mixed with the enthusiasm and the illusion of characters.
So…
This part determined me to come up with a confession about a certain nostalgia for the technological past recently gone in which I was comfortable and enthusiast about my own modest performance on computer or other similar items (definitely higher than those of friends of a similar age). I still have a phobia though, because although I like the rotary dial phone or I remember, amused, of my old “brick” mobile with a single display line, I’ve never made it up with the fax. Worst than the modem connection to internet, the fax, although progressed a lot, still “chirrups” and makes noise. I’ve always thought of it as a bad, almost perverse instrument. It’s a voyeur, almost a physical presence at home or in the office, coming in with something so important that keeps on spying and looks at you exactly when you pass on indifferently from the place its paper fell. It needs to be collected, read right away, handed forward to be sorted out and archived. Except the three-letter word perhaps useful in scrabble, I’ve never seen it ever as being useful. Asking for a tone or giving a fax tone is inconvenient, repugnant event, not to mention the interminable button-pressing to feed its expressionless mouth with paper. Some might say I have a highly emotional relation with this old-fashioned instrument which I think is a fact. I feel a certain hardness in front of new generations of communication and computer tools and I wonder what if those instruments would suddenly start to be brighter and better, so intelligent that they could read one’s mind…
A what if whirl
Architecture and computers, all right? Let’s take it slowly: Google Earth will shortly go into legislation, it will develop as Google Law. All classified, mapping and legal certification, properties limits clarified, edificability, urban planning parameters, zone plan and local area plan, all on old Google. More than that, we may watch how the sun comes up or the movement on the street, the traffic, the flow of people and other various data on Google Move, another specialized application for designers. Once a graduate in architecture and entitled to design, you get a password and id to use a Google Move module. Projects will be realistically simulated directly in Google, including neighbouring buildings, streets, green spaces and sun, perhaps simpler for the designers, while the projects going for construction approval will be seen, commented or amended by anybody interested. Click clack and that’s all.
I said click clack but in a short while the mouse and connected thinking will be over, gone the vertex and the currently slow and hard rendering. I don’t mean a faster drawing or printing instrument. It’s about the age of dedicated intelligent gels or silicons, able to calculate not a giga, but a terra and beyond that (an infinite of infinites to end this precision). Imagine a fluorescent blue ball which, directly connected to banks of architecture solutions and suppliers, starts to understand the theme and the background from early on since it is an instrument of communicational ability and not mere commands, looks into the urban, social context, the information on the field and the neighbourhood and may simulate as a hologram the first solutions and budget (I think they still need to be faxed though, the client is old and rich…). It gets the intuition of an architect, suggests, makes sketches, creates floor plans, inserts parking areas etc.
The work on computer: a dj choreography, a science voodoo, a collaborative creation of several hands and lots of brains, that is lots of abilities, a higher control, clear and better protected copyrights, transparency, visibility, a hysterical democratization of a city and lots of other things, eventually clear technocracy.
What about architecture? How good or how common or how could it be changed?
Perhaps not too much, or perhaps something new will come up.
A smile.
