The task of liberating architecture from disciplinary shackles has barely begun and is therefore a nearly untouched field awaiting substantiated methodologies. In the following pages, Luis Fernandez-Galiano proposes a system of ≪fragments≫ —not elements— that would arise from a dialogue between poetry and treatise. The dialogue would be augmented by the interferences provoked by the pictorial re-creation of architectonic spaces.
The collection of texts that comprise this incomplete dictionary is aimed at making architectural elements (and, therefore, home elements) comprehensible by uniting the history of things with the history of ideas. Through fragmentary exploration, one can thus begin constructing an elementary archeology of daily life. The echos of old dreams and projects can be heard in such a proposal; we have Kubler’s history of objects and his master Focillon’s life of forms, Braudel’s studies of the structures of daily life, Aby Warburg’s history of material culture and his obsessive altlas of memory and, above all, the conception of technique as metaphor put forth by Semper, who has been largely forgotten...[+]
