Inês Salpico University of Lusiada, School of Architecture, Lisbon, Portugal 331
give substance to a sense of self and to share our fears and weaknesses. Expectations,
achievements and speeches are diffused and polarised. As individuals we were left
alone building a personal narrative with the mighty constraint of having no explicit
constraints to build it upon.
We face a loneliness of being and growing, and have to bear the burden of total
responsibility in shaping an identity and a mental frame work. Here lies the core of
the paradox of contemporary society: how to define an identity in a system of self-
reference? If identity is essentially the result of a process of building an image in
contrast and comparison with the other, its characteristics and form being always
carved as a negative of something exterior, how does it build up within a dynamic of
self-assessment? Society, history, politics and ideologies are just not there anymore
to be engaged with or fought against. And if they are any engagement or fight will
also be one of self, individual motivations, not widely shared so as to place us with
or against society as a whole. Being a rebel or a follower implies that you define your
own cause, arguments, motivations and fragilities.
This is the key point: society is not understandable as a structural whole; we are
dealing with a process of disaggregation in which social environment consists more
and more of individual paths running in parallel, unaware of how dependent on each
other they always will inevitably be.
The matter of identity is critical in architecture practice and perhaps even more in
architecture teaching and learning. As a creative activity architecture structurally
requires a degree of self-commitment that makes it directly imbued with the author’s
idiosyncrasies. The coherence and authenticity of a work is related to whether one
is able or not to recognise these structural idiosyncrasies and give them substance
and material consequence, avoiding a mere mechanical response, literally influenced
by context or others’ work.
This made it easy for architecture to become an open field for the growth of an
individual focused working system, supporting the affirmation of a sort of individual
mythologies. As far as architecture teaching/learning is concerned the question is
therefore the same as was referred before: how to assure the coherence of a work,
assess its methods and legitimate its premises when there aren’t referential param-
eters and criteria. Everything is questionable and therefore everything is potentially
accepted. In other words, the system (or its absence) is open to any work reference
as long as it affirms a solid inner structure and is back grounded by arguments strong
enough to stand on their own.
James Dean, 1954