Entre dos intemperies. Apuntes sobre las relaciones entre el foro y el mercado

Abstract

This essay encompasses three levels. The first, on the question of the genuine utility of architecture, defined in the origins, determines that architecture preserves the life of two classes of adversity: the physical adversity, seeking to achieve a balance with the environment (homeostasis) and the moral adversity seeking orientation with time and space. This double utility is fulfilled and expressed by some non-arbitrary specific and universal tools, necessary and objective forms, archetypes that forge the tradition of individual methods of architecture in history. To shape itself, the human ethos, whose nucleus is conscience, will take the formal substance from the formality of these tools, from the moment at which it is capable of averting life destroying weather and time-intermittent but never ending forces, and of exorcising amorphous space-a continuous space and confounder of nature. Those tools form a tectonic relief, superimposed on that granted by nature, which we call landscape. The second level reveals that the structure of that landscape rests on the similarity between these objective forms and the characteristics of the market and the forum that correspond, respectively, with the idea of homeostasis and that of orientation. The third level studies the modalities of relationship between forum and market with the intention of finding tools with which to make a critique of the present. The main criterion is that forum and market must maintain, in reality, a dialogic, (to conserve its contradiction or composition) and not a dialectic relationship because an imbalance between them, when it occurs, entails a decline in the formality of the conscience, reduces the human ethos and produces ethical bankruptcy of the landscape.