The Università Iuav di Venezia has a long tradition of large scale design, well known and appreciated by Mangado, and this is the tradition to which the architect tries to make a contribution. The aim of the exhibition is to relate the projects of the Spanish architect to the "tradition of the large scale" and to do so through a theoretical reflection on the reality of the large scale. Large scale and theory: two inseparable components that together represent the possibility of the survival of architecture in the era of immediate communication and the apparent triumph of social and political indifference.
Description of project by Francisco Mangado
I sincerely believe that the time has come to leave this refuge in which we have settled and that the architects claim again the "large scale". Let's see what I mean by that.
It is immediately clear that I do not use the term "large scale" understood exclusively as a synonym of large size. This is circumstantial, circumstance that in any case is given. Rather it is to include in the "large scale" that set of decisions, of interventions, whether or not they are edifying, that aspire to have a structuring character, ambition to intervene in the city, to abound in the public dimension of architecture and in its ability to improve the physical and social context that surrounds us.
Any architectural intervention, however small, is susceptible to its "great architecture" because it depends ultimately on the will of its author to go further, to give more than what society asks, to acquire more meaning overcoming the simple complacency for the object - this mechanism that ultimately denounces an attitude of return to the barracks of the "endogamy" -. The large scale speaks of a legitimate ambition to influence. Ambition that lately the architects are losing complexed by the market since the recent economic crisis.
We can not remain silent when we see that the decisions of structural draft on the city, urban or architectural, private or public, especially the first, are developed in a context of absence of the political, of the ideological, in short, absence of principles and the ability to impose them. We must vindicate the idea that the city and the architecture that makes it up, regardless of who promotes it, are always public and subject to a political dimension, that is, ideas and opinion. We have to finish with the installed idea that the city can function according to objectives where only the financial or economistic achievements prevail, the principles inspired by "ghost" capitals, that come and go, and to whom we do not put face. We can not remain self-conscious. More and more we have to reclaim the political function in the city. It does not make sense that urban operations of great importance, are solved with simple discussions on instrumental variables without going to assess, in a context of faits accomplis, the opportunity of the operation, that is, the basis of it.
I firmly believe that architects can not be reduced to mere "façade advisors" to those who seek to reduce us from different positions.
Retaking the idea of "large scale" means claiming the role of the architect in major architectural and urban decisions, those that define the best and fairer future, also of greater formal and vital quality for the society we serve. We must abandon complexes and claim this role by all possible means, disciplinary, professional and political. We must demand from the public authorities, starting, to make a commitment to quality in the architectural and urban areas as an equally important right as health or education, to look again at the architects that "complicity" that allowed to develop an alliance between public powers and architecture to achieve a better city and territory. Living well and with quality is a right, not a luxury and for that reason the public authorities, also today self-conscious, have to understand that we are their best partners.
More architecture, more city, more ambition. This is the large scale.
