This project will use the photographic apparatus in an attempt to answer the question: How can we begin to approach the creative act of architecture as an expression that resonates with the nature of our existence, and not merely as an aesthetic or programmatic exercise?
The approach to the nature of life is here situated within Lebensphilophie, the philosophical movement which turned away from purely theoretical knowledge and towards the undistorted fullness of lived experience, claiming that life can only be understood from within. Of particular significance to this project, is Henri Bergson´s idea of time as lived experience and his concepts of duration, intuition and élan vital.
With the acceptance of Bergson´s position that life, as duration, is a qualitative multiplicity within which we are inexorably bound, comes the problem of how then are we to obtain the distance that is necessary to form the ideas that constitute our intentions and which inform our creative acts by way of the intellect?
It is the position of this project that photography is the ideal, if not the only, means of enriching the intellect through intuition, and vice versa. The photograph is simultaneously a record and a spontaneous symbol that transcends its referent, it is what Alfred Stieglitz termed an Equivalent. This insightful crystallization by and because of the photographic apparatus is for this particular moment, for this particular place, for this particular person, beyond doubt, and in this sense the photograph is absolute.
There are undeniable affinities and continuities between Bergson’s thought and Stieglitz’s practice of the Equivalent. This project is an elaboration on and a continuation of these, and it will use the narrative form as a way of exploring and expressing the vital presence of the photographic absolute. Minor White´s sequences and the collaborative projects of John Berger with Jean Mohr are pivotal precedents in this attempt to allow the photographs to blend as elements in a field of coexistence which is transformed into a living experience and lends itself to reflection.
This reflective gesture will in this case point towards architecture in an effort to reveal new concepts for its creative praxis which resonate with the nature of our existence. It is thus, that the photographic absolute can become an architectural beginning.