Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
virtual architecture
concept - method

Virtual architecture Virtual architecture is a method: - Virtual comes from the Latin virtus - which means potentiality, not absence or reduction of means. Every element of the architecture and the architectural process must be considered as a potential singularity. - Method is essential. Only with it we are able to criticize our own work and ourselves. - The basic strategy of a design must be determined by the crossing of a large quantity of metabolic structures - like water, electricity, communication, fluxes, winds, images, sounds, vegetables, soil, Sun, landscape, culture, history and so on. - The design must establish logical references not connected to the designer's intention. They can be natural or mathematical phenomena. Those structural references are a counterpoint with the language, also architectural, projecting differential moments - logical traps - and, therefore, consciousness, enlightenment, because only difference produces consciousness. - In space, difference is fundamental - because only difference generates consciousness. But, on the other hand, only monotony, redundancy, provokes emotion. - The architect must be always attentive to the unity of the design - unity is the essential element in communication. - Architecture as result of its time, its historical time. But all people passed to pertain to all traditions, all times, not while content but yes being metabolism. East and West, North and South became our common heritage, from all times. - Architecture, like art, must be a criticism of culture, not while content, but in its modus operandi. - Architecture is not a symbolic element and, thus, a degenerated sign relation - but a process projected by the flux of everything through the human, like a nervous system. - Computers or any other kind of sensorial extension or prosthesis are not devices to help design. They are part of the design itself while process. - In design, like in the modern movement, structural elements must not be hidden. Nothing must be hidden. - Each new design must be a new invention - because it will always be a different moment in time, different people and, thus, a different environment. - To design a space is to design a sensorial palette - each one of our senses is a different logical complex. Sensorial design is to establish logical complexes, designing thought. - In each design paradigms must be transformed into syntagma, questioning ceiling and walls, tension and pressure and so on. - Each design must be characterized by a deprogrammable approach. A space must be easily deprogrammable and reprogrammable, because each person is changing, all the time. - Architecture is made for people, not just for pictures - that is, it is to be lived by all our senses. Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, 1982