Holland House Library damaged by German bombs, London, 1940

This visual itinerary starts from perplexity and hope. Perplexity is caused by the moment of the world, a loud confusion that we strive to hear and pretend to understand. Hope comes from the endless bank of contemporary images, a fascinating legacy which we suspect can shed some light to help us interpret our surroundings. Le Corbusier said that architects can be compared with asses, but with asses that can see, and that adversative conjunction summarizes the humble pride of this profession. Here, the images gathered by the voracious eye of the architect are put together as words in speech, and the brief texts that join them in their itinerary serve only as a weakly argumental and probably dispensable mortar. When the pieces fit together, the verbal cement becomes redundant; but not all the stones have been able to find their final place in this stubbornly modular structure, with three sections divided into 2+2 chapters each containing four epigraphs, the same as the two chapters added to serve as prologue and epilogue...[+]