Muted: A revisit to a collection of projects
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Architectural acts inevitably involve a production of narratives that surge from the interaction between observer and the object (in architecture this object can be a model, a plan or a building). Such definition of narratives speaks of the cycle of invention and reinvention that intraction between observer and object, designer and design implies: things that exist in the world inevitably affect the subjects that interact with them, and in the same way, these subjects affect and condition the things that exist in the world. Awareness of the crucial role of narratives, and the urge to expand architecture’s boundaries to account to pressing environmental, social, economic issues today, have resulted in narratives becoming instrumentalized as a core element of the design process—perhaps as a way to escape the excessive-ly restricted ground in which architecture has room to play in modifying our lives: materials, elements that negotiate bounda-ries, drawings. Such preponderance of the narrative determines the design process to the extent that it defines an agenda as to how a certain act of architecture must be interpreted; it sets out a larger ‘truth’, an intention that can diverge when imagined or translated into the terms that define an architectural artefact—plans, sections, boudaries that define spaces, materials.This compilation of projects revises some of the aca-demic exercises produced during one year in an attempt to ren-der visible the disconnection between the narrative proposed by the designer and the multiple possible narratives that can emerge for a reader in the absense of an explanation. Such ar-chitectures without explanation embrace the flexibility of mean-ing and invite interpretation; they generate multiplicity instead of imposing a singular functionality to the architectural object. This doesn’t mean that the projects fail. It invites consideration of the act of architecture as one that generates questions, and not as one that intends to solve problems through the meaning it creates.