Weaving networks, an inseparable interweaving of nature and society

I warn you: we are not talking here about tactical urbanism or Trombe walls, although they will also have a place (and a central one at that) in the story. We do not speak here (yet) of villes, but of cités: we are not describing physical spaces, but spheres or "regimes" of action, organized by central, legitimate values, which allow us to agree on what we have done right or wrong, who embodies and deploys these values (who shows "greatness" or, if they lack them, "meanness", "smallness"), where, when and how we will put these actions to the test.

We all, especially women architects, move between different situations with different logics, with sometimes unclear boundaries, in the framework of which we need to cooperate. We, therefore, need to recognize together the nature of these situations, and which orders of value frame them: only in this way will we be able to define how we will resolve the conflicts that constantly emerge, draw out the controversies, assign value(s) to the participants and their actions, and also reach compromises, always unstable, between these values.

For example, we would be surprised if someone were to apply the criteria of the industrial city, efficiency, applied scientific-technical knowledge, to family relations, to the domestic city, instead of affection, respect, or fidelity. The ravages of neoliberalism can be described as the hypostatization and consequent invasion of other cities by the values of the market city, which organizes its sphere of action, so expansive in the last half century, based on the supreme value of competition between those who seek profit in the market. This corrodes the foundations of the civic city, whose values are those of solidarity and equality, or those of the inspired city, inhabited not only by artists, who marvel at the unusual, passion, and spontaneity, but also, sometimes indistinguishably, by madmen, geniuses and the enlightened.

Few occupations lend themselves better to being described in all their complexity by this grammar of describing worlds than that of architects. Few occupations lead their practitioners to deal simultaneously with values and evidence rooted in different cities, often in radical conflict. Think, especially, of the compromises that must be reached between different orders: how, for example, the city of opinion, which manages renown, reputation, values visibility, and scorns banality and ignorance, comes into conflict or reaches truces on the covers of architectural magazines with the industrial city of ceramic materials or thermal inertia, or with the attention to the democratic collective of the civic city.


Scheme "Cities" by Emilio Luque.

Andrés Perea's tireless work, in his professional, pedagogical and intellectual career, has consisted precisely in being practical in this tempestuous navigation for which no port offers shelter, because there is only ocean and more uncertain ocean. But he has also tried, by all means, and incessantly innovating methods and references, to ensure that the dozens of cohorts of architecture students who have passed through the classrooms where he has taught, alone or in the company of others, are no strangers to this need to work in and from this tension (one is tempted to say that, in reality, they all learned to "work in flexion"): the uncertainty and ambiguity of those who must inhabit at once the inspired city, the civic city, the industrial city, the mercantile city, the city of projects?

Because complexity and uncertainty, so often invoked by Andrés Perea in his positions, his programs, his bets, are a consubstantial, radical part of contemporaneity, inserted in a "polycrisis", defined by fire by the secular vector of climate change, and even clearer after the COVID-19 pandemic. As if the difficulty of justifying and justifying actions according to these multiple orders of value, in constant imbalance, were not enough, we are "imputed", as Perea often says: we are called upon to introduce an eighth ecological city, which we take up here from Bruno Latour's proposal. Not that of energy efficiency, the green product or the circular economy, or the defense of natural heritage, which are relatively easy to accommodate in industrial, commercial, or domestic cities. Once again, we have to move away from received ideas, now from "classical" environmentalism.-
 

This city is defined precisely by this ability to manage uncertainty and complexity, to keep definitions open, and to never take for granted the imbroglios of humans and non-humans that make up this inseparable web of nature and society. It, therefore, requires radically expanding the range of actors, languages, and knowledge: the small one is here, Latour tells us, the one who knows things, irreversibly, without allowing us to see their links. The big one is the one who can work within the social-ecological-material-political imbroglio, always experimenting, always groping, always reconstructing collectives. It is this city that architects must also and above all inhabit, as Perea has been militantly reminding us, actively trying to ensure that training programs rethought from their roots train them in the skills necessary to orient themselves in this "landing".

But if there is one city in which Andrés Perea is great, it is the city by projects. I ask your attention once again: we must read projects here in a somewhat different way from the way it is usually done in this profession. However, I believe that the social, political, and moral nature of architectural projects can also be (better) understood as organized in this city, an "order of value" that captures spaces previously defined by the industrial or mercantile city. What is valued in this regime of action, which would govern the extension of networks, and the proliferation of links, within the framework of active projects? What qualities do we value? Enthusiasm, autonomy, flexibility, connection with others and the drive for others to be connected. You will see by now that it is easy to guess the figure of Andrés Perea in this profile.


Scheme "Cities" by Emilio Luque.

Because what I want to emphasize (and be grateful for) is the energy and conviction with which Andrés Perea works in this city as a "mailleur", i.e. a networker. As Boltanski and Chiapello say.-

In charge or originator of very diverse initiatives, he has always called upon people from different perspectives, within and, as can be deduced from my participation, outside architecture, to promote them (and few could refuse his impulse). So it was in the framework of the Grupo de Exploración Proyectual de la ETSAM (which for me was the beginning of this brief detour in the country of architects that has lasted a couple of decades, together with the much-missed Javier Izquierdo, Fabián Muniesa, Jorge Lago and Arturo Lahera, on the "social" side, or Izaskun Chinchilla, Paula Montoya, Rafa Torrelo and Andrés Jaque, on the "arqui" side). Also at the Universidad Europea, leading the Master's Degree in Sustainability and Energy Rehabilitation. But also in other non-teaching fields, such as those referring to the innovation of materials used by architects within the MATCOAM initiative, where I met, for example, Pedro Molina, a geographer who unveils layers of meaning and history(s) in the landscape, or Luis de Pereda, who energetically rehabilitated what he could of my meager knowledge.

Keynes said that practical men are often slaves, without knowing it, to some deceased economist, to the ideas that frame their self-image, their judgments, and their values. Architects judge their work and that of others, and justify or criticize the goodness of their activity, in the plural, unstable, and often tense and conflictive, moral and political language of cities. Few Spanish architects have done as much as Andrés Perea, by himself and through the networks he has woven, to renew and articulate their new and old shared senses of justice, their conflicts, and compromises, and also their promise and validity.