1976
The poems gathered here refer, in a more or less direct way, to issues related to architecture and urbanism, in a wider and more fun sense than should occur in these disciplines, whose limits and fields of action, on another point, appear wider and wider, and more and more confused.
An initial explanation of the reason behind the common subject matter of these poems may lie in the fact that I have always been interested in places of shelter: corners, caves rooms, passageways, buildings, squares, underground stations, and also, of course, the citizens and the city as a whole. The best memories of my life are associated with attic rooms, certain hotel rooms, houses where I used to live or in which I entered as a guest or as a sniper.
I love the life in cities, despite all the inconveniences we know so well and despite the majority of those I know being characterised by a splendid ugliness. I was born, I live and I work in a city which I love and hate, which fascinates and deceives me, which changes its face, grows, becomes unreal and sadist, surrounding my dreams and my melancholy, and pushing me towards strange, likeable places or unclassifiable meetings. And I want to continue living here, as I do not believe in the so-called idyllic return to nature, that which they now call the countryside, if it’s not to go hunting or to swim in the sea.
But all of this is not sufficient clarification of the fact that in my most recent writings quite a few poems have appeared about buildings, streets, neighbourhoods and the people who live in them, along with other compositions which specifically allude to spatial, architectural or urban questions, to the issues affecting them and to the alternatives available.
The final explanation is another, and its origins lie some fifteen years ago, when I started to talk and argue with Ricardo Bofill in cafés and other places in Barcelona. He was already then worried about the role of the architect and the artist in today’s society and that of the future. We totally disagreed with the obtuse nature of his profession, and he claimed that solely an imaginative and inter-disciplinary job could have possibilities of accomplishing an architecture which is linked to the material and cultural needs of the people of our time.
However, the result of these conversations was that I became interested in several of his lines of argument, especially those based around his conviction that by working in a group and adding together different visuals it is possible to project and make innovative and more beautiful buildings and neighbourhoods, and even to manage to change the aspect of a city or plan and modify the physical configuration of a complete territory. And I was interested in these questions because they suited my morbid tendency to imagine deep rooms, labyrinthine castles, streets as if they were engaged in a continuous fiesta, and to dream of changing cities in which people behaved in very unusual ways, that is, freer and more creative, and less stupidly. I was also pleased to see that Ricardo lived with one of the prettiest and cleverest girls in Calle Calvet; I say this because I have always distrusted artists and writers involved with or attached to ugly women or men, as I believe that they are lacking, from the outset, the aesthetic sense.
(Please do not talk to me of moral beauty!)
So, almost without realising it, I joined the Taller de Arquitectura, which at that time seemed very fashionable and peaceful from the outside, but in fact it was incubating an ambition, daringness and passion for risk which is usually only found among the founders of a religious sect or in the members of a terrorist commando.
Many things have happened in the Taller since then: projects, jobs, research, delight, difficulties, failures and works completed. From what I’ve read, my studies and reports, my conversations with Ricardo Bofill, who sometimes manages to drive me mad when asking for the highest quality possible for the images for each project, and my continual work with Anna Bofill, Manuel Núñez Yanowsky, Peter Hodgkinson, Salvador Clotas, Ramón Collado and Serena Vergano –just to cite the people who are closest to my interventions-, I gradually accumulated a series of images and subject matters which I later expressed in many of the poems collected here.
This book, therefore, owes much to the effort, cooperation and works completed by the members of the Taller de Arquitectura. I thus cannot thank my colleagues because some of these poems are, in a certain sense, their own.
