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Aereal view of Rio de Janeiro

These are a set of experiences and lifestyles, but on top of everything it is a critical reflection on reality and an attempt to investigate what is hidden behind some derivative fundamental intuitions from a practical and continuous reflection. The faith in determined certainties and the line of thinking (not always straight) that people can trace on different territorial realities, makes me think that things, as they are, can and must be transformed.

It is for this reason that each project must be referred to a theoretical global proposal, constituting itself in an essential aspect of the working method that cannot be realized without a thorough investigation of each specific place of action, as a way to surpass the functionalist approach that reduces the complexity and multi-dimensionality of architecture, to the one-dimensionality of function.

In each project, each intervention, be it city-planning or architecture, the conceptual structure is always different depending on the characteristics of the place, the program, the relation with the client and the conditions of circumstance.

Form, in this context, refers not only to the architectural language (formal vocabulary) but simultaneously to the structure of the foundation, the character of the section, the conception of the assembly, and the qualification of the space. This inquiry of contemporary aesthetics occupies the central place of my investigation in as far as it is understood as that which permits the unification of fragments. Aesthetics, in this sense, is that which ties it together.

Place, presupposes empirically, historically, and conceptually, a specific point to begin each project, being necessary to render much attention to the thought that arises immediately after knowing the site.

Architecture is a form of art that demands the interweaving of the visual, conceptual, sensorial, accidental and social, looking to establish small parcels of order in a context infinitely disorganized.

Simplicity and complexity are two ways to understand the challenges, cultivating the doubt, looking to not privilege one point of view for another, distrusting all limits (the site, the demands of the client, and also the strains of your own thought) thus we know that the alchimie of the project depends on the nourishment used to bring it to conception, and its degree of openness to the world.

Indefectible fidelity to the work in the informal areas and the luck of having intellectual foundation, is why the professors of architecture and urbanism have the responsibility to work for the transformation of the conditions of life specifically in a large part of the population of our continent, but even on the world.

To project implicates, from this perspective, combining programmatic arguments with subjective perceptions. Thus, to study a subject is to not necessarily raise one unique idea, but rather a set of ideas that form the spine of a project and the significance of the work raises when you find the manner in which the interconnected variables come together, especially, the forces that are acting on a place.

Facing each challenge of a project, treat it as if it is an experiment and not like a form just to maintain a productive structure. The question is, always, to find the highest potential of the idea.

Jorge Mario Jáuregui
Translated by Annemarie Gray