Footprints. Josep Lluís Mateo. Writings 2005-2020

This book brings together a selection of texts written between 2005 and 2020 on the subject of various issues related to architecture.

The texts are varied, chronologically and thematically, in keeping with the different aspects of my professional activity as teacher, distant critic or close agent involved in the action.
Published in different contexts or based on oral contributions that have been transcribed in writing here, the editing of this anthology aims to offer a coherent, organized reading of this multifaceted material.

Grouped by subjects, the texts – predominantly published in their original versions – simply relinquish their inevitable reiterations and references to an original context that is now irrelevant.

In this present continuous through which we are moving, the presence of these texts is like the succession of traces which we leave in the territory over time. The general line, the trajectory, is not something that interests us here; it serves simply to point out some footprints to contrast with the new places which – we hope – we are headed for.

Knowing, as the basis for action, is the attitude that informs these texts.

It is also, as I see it, a necessary attitude for facing the future, ever unpredictable, complex and changing.

Josep Lluís Mateo