Dear Architecture,

My humble life mirrors the world. Sometimes gloomy and polluted. Sometimes beautiful. Sometimes distorted. My pictorial existence confirms this. Once a beautiful play of light and shadow over the contours of form *, as the great architect once said, you have shaped my daily life. An intimate reality. Program and function, usefulness and uselessness, form and content, eternal problems of organization of space, time and moment, have become part of my subconscious. Constantly persecuted by their laws, I questioned my own. Thus, aware of my intellectual reach and limitations, on the border of reason and madness, I happened. Alter ego. Suddenly, I met You. Through fragments, memories and clips of unrelated thoughts. Architecture, hidden around the corner constantly awaiting its revelation. Never complete. Always partial. Guessed through sequences. Moments. Through thoughts that come and go. In the search for You, the current of consciousness is inevitable. You appear in monologues, following philosophical searches through stray thoughts. Consequently, my subconscious, traveling through my own memories, suddenly experienced Eureka;

Concept is recognition. The sun blinded me the moment I found myself in front of Santa Maria Novella: Alberti's facade fragments echoed your meaning. Repetitive mathematical forms confirmed two-dimensional plasticity - full and empty alternated in a continuous rhythm - 0 1 0 1. Firmitas utilitas venustas cited on the façade. White and green marble defined by triangles, circles and squares. The harmonious architectural landscape confirmed the belief in the eternal validity of mathematical relations as a source of beauty. Or in other words, quoting the author; Beauty: "adjustment of all parts proportionally so that they cannot be added or subtracted without compromising the harmony of the whole". De Re Aedificatoria is real. The art of building is real.

Concept is above form; light and shadow, figure and background, you exist in the Suprematist composition of Malevich's Architect, in the abstraction of his visible artistry, the subtle definition of x-y-z spatiality; then, you exist in the beginnings of deconstructivism, decomposition, and fragmentation, in Kurt Schwitters' spatial bricolage Marzebau, his seemingly chaotic organization; you exist in the sound of a tuned and stuffed piano and the dissonant 38 bar of John Cage's Metarmophosis; then, in a collection of identical elements, a program reduced to identical furniture, in a city without beginning and end, an infinite air-conditioned repetitive space, No - Stop Citiy by Archizoom.

Concept is normality; I find you in Heidegger's seemingly ordinary wooden hut, in its absence as an author, in the landscape it is surrounded by; vernacular traits that tend to transcendental. In construction, in being and thinking. I find you in the damp asphalt of my daily life, the down-to-earth character of my own street, and the successive balcony ledges formed; finally, I found You in my room, my desk, and a simple view out the window into the courtyard;

Concept is in between; between the virtual and the tangible, the text of pleasure and the text of ecstasy, as Ronald Barthes states; between a classical and a horizontal window, as on the entrance portal of Venturi's house for his mother marked with an arch; between Me and You, and our newly created tension; 

Concept is inside; within the hidden stronghold of my own mind, in the depths of my psyche; Ego, Superego and Id. I meet you in conversation with myself, like Louis Kahn's monologue with the brick, the architect's most sincere attitude towards You; I discover you in the hidden staircase of the Unfinished House of the architect Shinohara, in the atrium of the tripartite Azuma house of the architect Ando; then, in the space reduced to the two-dimensional surface of Matisse's Red Room;

Concept is timeless, without hierarchy and memory; The city is made of the built. Genericism exists. Architecture; the speed of your emergence (disappearance) is understood through universal oblivion. Your walls, of which I am a slave, set me free. Prisoner only to the superficial spectator, I remain vague. Really, I'm here voluntarily. At this point, in his mind, in the space that has become a place. In the foreboding of tactile cognition, I recognize your outlines through the roughness of the concrete surface, the scratched window glass, the thrown light that gives the bodies shape ...

Forever yours ,

K.D.