If everything built that surrounds us is believed to be architecture, and in no sphere, are we fully satisfied, then, those arrangements thus integrated as “architecture,” leave something to be desired, and we must understand that they demand to be organized, from another, proper mode, since only thus, can their constituent steps be described as a sure-fitting, efficient search. For if we do not have efficient architecture with the epigonic analogical mode in which we shape it, we must understand that we are to keep searching for it, keep asking ourselves the question, Mies Van der Rohe replied, when questioned. Gropius set it out as “spiritless patchwork”… “shameful evidence” and a reading evident in any city of the universe attributable to authorities and school directors, save for the verifiable, objectifiable exceptions. In Gropius, there underlies the approach of finding its spirit, or reason, of its rational soul, its mystical science, the virtue of working from its constituent-shaping steps, its substance or generating principle, even if we have not found it thus from him, as an optimal striving elucidating understander before the open critique he asked us to make of him so that he would waste, time on us at eighty-one (81) years of age in 1964 in Cambridge, giving us five (5) minutes to win him over, and when we gave him our opinion on his errors at the university of Baghdad he put us in touch with others in the nearby library at the same time as inviting us into his house, for he had waited for us on the sidewalk watch in hand and some three hours later other commitments now required us to take our leave, he saying to everyone, how well we architects understand one another. Today we can reason as a lack of civilization the failure to seek the missing urban-architectural design method-process that the universe demands, and that we say we have, and no one has wanted to hear, but which, yes, asks to emerge, we say-insist. And for which today’s communication affords us a specific possibility.
Alberti, asked for “sure reasons” from the architect. These, as of today and from us link requirements and the emplacing site, acted upon by phenomena, asking-generating, a unique solution for each time and differentiating geographic place, with no initial prejudgment whatsoever and thus a scientific case, “a machine,” Le Corbusier rightly opined, spoiling it on the other occasion, when he defined it as “play of masses brought together in light,” as if it were not so in the dark, if it is so.
Others, show no wish to understand the epigonic architecture they are allowed to this day in their universities, in the traditional way dragged along. Others mention an artistic Vitruvius, not the one who said more than twenty (20) centuries ago that architecture is science, and when as of today architects in general understand the core of requirements to be emplaced, but do not decide to break the tradition of the epigonic paradigm, for the achievement of the demanding suitable solution. They have yet to accept that as art it does not become sure and fitting, and they do not decide to see it-make it as the science it demands to be. Something cried out for by the population of already seven billion (7,000,000,000) at a growing pace within a deteriorating universe that demands scientific mutation, already possible. Vitruvius in his time set out the scientific requirement for the correct development of the craft, demanding the correct guideline and never-ending practice, but to this day here in our Dominican Republic it is not achieved.
For from the model paradigmatic analogical epigonic typology, comes the aporia and the sum of universal destitution into which it transforms the city’s urban fabric, the citizen activity upon it, and there arises the something that obliges us to learn to design from a scientific design method-process, for the turn from art to science that the economic state demands of us in today’s 21st century. Vitruvius pronounced before the beginning of the Christian era that as architecture we had “the shadow” and not “the substance” and that only by studying the how would we achieve what we set out to do. This was understood by the one who later asserted that what we do with what we know is art and what we do for what we must study is science. And that for each time and site it is a unique and unrepeatable case, but that the necessary, indispensable knowledge comes to be knowing how to march toward the solution that must be made for each set of requirements and emplacing geographic place acted upon by its specific phenomena, and this unique instrument will be a scientific urban-architectural design method-process, which we put forward and which people in general sidestep each day with less backing for their clinging, and so up to today, let each one measure, as the person truly charged with the work that they should aspire to be, the effort that falls to them by reason-function of the occupation they decided to get involved in, for the exercise of life, functions and benefits that their existence must generate, as one obliged to give, and to render services or die without valid functions, likewise ignoring themselves in their backing of occasions. Today it is painful to observe how the many live who refuse functions they must accept, and push them to the margins, believing they let them pass, and that is not how they pass, for thus, they become the permanent harm that weighs on everyone. Universal destitution as an accepted concept of inactivity originates as a function of the field of incidences in which those charged with our urban-architectural engineering work need to act, whom we must alert by giving them a process-method to march without today’s delay toward every new requirement to be solved for everyone’s satisfaction within a proper degree, not an erratic one as is the widespread case, for thus the not having the precise definition becomes a common reason, which Mies Van der Rohe, the most striving of those charged with it, lacked, bidding us keep asking ourselves the question, until we learn to make it, define it for everyone, from a territorial planning for production, a city planning for the global satisfaction of public use and an architecture as service infrastructure for the citizenry in the exercise of life and production guaranteeing-shaping a dignified existence, and an active competitive prospective legacy as it demands to be.