Thoughts
Plenty is interested in architecture and the present, operating under the premise of two considerations:
1)
Contemporary physical culture is self-sufficient, rich and saturated. A boundless material and informational plenitude, stretching across the globe. Thus, talking about the present means talking about the whole world. Not about images of the world or world models. Just the whole world.
>Das Herz schlägt dem Ganzen entgegen.< [1]
2)
The present is not a fixed point in a straight timeline with a common past and a common future anymore. Rather, it’s a chaos of simultaneous realities, contingencies, differences, and dissonances. To be able to generate value from the actuality of one’s own reality, one has to stand up within the chaos. From this vantage point, the aim is not to structure the past or to plan the future, but to invent the present. To crystallise an essence out of the plenty.
Plenty is an instrument to engage with the present and consequently to compose it. To represent it. The distinction between reality and representation is dissolved since the latter is part of the former. Without having a face, mass or color itself, an identity is forged by embodying a multitude of realities.
>Like anything in the world, like everything that lives, I am a diamond, made of hard carbon that is at times pure, transparent or granular, reflecting a thousand times over the thousand and one hues of the rainbow, shining out of the multiple things of the world and of the thousands of people and living things I ever met. Matter and mirror, media and messages, white and sprouting multiple color lines, bedecked gamut of thousand reflections.< [2]
Plenty relates to language to give form to the architectural present. Architecture has always been an art of articulation. But not about making an argument. Not about producing statements. Not about reasoning. About placing something, somewhere. A stage for the writer turned architect who seeks to accommodate and compose the here and now but lacks a place for it. Writing as a silent and objective act of summation. Multiple voices generating an overlapping rhythm. Not aspiring to define what architecture is, but to accumulate what it can be about. Keeping the notion of architecture in circulation, always open to inflections and reinterpretations. Not to be owned, contained, or precisely located. Always in flux. Architecture ceases to be a disciplinary noun and becomes a verb — a continuous process of densification and enrichment. Not to be true. Not to be right. Not to develop a position. But to develop a stance. Being with, in order to be subversive at the same time.
Plenty is an instrument to become more sophisticated. More sensible. More differentiated. More articulate. To have fun.
Plenty invents the present, speaks with a loose tongue, and reflects on the world as it unfolds — diffuse, intensified, uncertain, and, above all, full of potential.
[1] Han, Byung-Chul. Heideggers Herz. Begriff der Stimmung bei Martin Heidegger (1996)
[2] Serres, Michel. Information and Thinking (2017)