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The Four Elements and Architecture: Earth, Water, Air, Fire. Architectural Papers VII
by Josep Lluís Mateo and other authors, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich and Ed. ACTAR. Zürich, 2014.
At an initial stage of project development, the relation with the elements as the origin of the project refers us to archetypes: pure protection, the bunker (echoes of Paul Virilio) or the cave. At the other extreme, the fragile tent of the nomad (remember Buckminster Fuller and the dabblings of the 1960s). In the Romantic tradition (on which all of this argumentation is based), the ruin and, in general, the expressive value of the unfinished, of what has been undone yet is still to be done, also emerges as a possibility.
This is a book produced in the warmth of the teaching experience, which uses this ephemeral (and, for the student, initial) encounter with the project as a material which, divested of the anecdotal, can be elevated to category.
Josep Lluís Mateo