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Many current architectural proposals, consciously or unconsciously, deal with one question related with the very same specificity of architecture: its materiality. Lukács, in his Ästhetik, defines architecture -as opposed to the rest of arts that he calls "relevant"- precisely by its necessary materiality.(1)

It's not my intention now to discuss the validity of Lukács' theories in our times, but I am interested in his characterization of architecture as opposed to what we could call contemporary immateriality, and that can be best understood in the two movements of the present article: two attempts to caress the limits of immateriality.

1.

LIMITS OF THE IMMATERIAL

"They have invented a welder that works like a microwave: no flame, no heat; plastic tubes welded by vibrations. Future is already here."

Progress -future according to the excited plumber- is seemingly recognised by its most paradoxical quality: it is invisible. Anything carrying imagination to the limbo of insubstantiality, rather than to remote places, that is progress: it is future. The promise they made us (of Judaeo-Christian roots?) is that of a perfect and immaterial future. A heretical promise (or illusion) since heaven is wanted on earth.

The charm of dematerialisation is such that the best sensibilities have succumbed to its enchantment/spell. A whole new wave of vindicating justifications has risen with the advent of computers, the kingdom par excellence of immateriality. This wave works with advertising techniques: through insisting and being everywhere, a reality of its own is created, and with such strength that it finally substitutes the other reality.

Can we only imagine a future that is invisible? Isn't this aspiration the last lash of God's tail in his deathbed, still striving to be meaningful to men? Isn't this idea, after all, a heaven's mirage, an illusion of the paradise promised by religions, where miseries and limitations don't exist?

Angels are incorporeal, but have got a blazing power. Angels are microwaves.

About architecture: I like to see this struggle to become ethereal as a sour reaction against the world, like an alienation, like an incapacity of joy and love. I also like to see it as a surrender to the powerful forces of human exploitation. Because, how can otherwise be understood the will to substitute façades, windows, by advertising; knowledge by information; touch by repression of touch?

2.

ARCHITECTURE, LIMITS, MATERIALITY

We all have been in the North Pole or helped building the Pyramids in Egypt. Even though partially, movies have given us the possibility to experience feelings that don't belong to our time or to our space. Now we can not only "be" there, but also "do" something in these immaterial scenarios. Being at home we can use a library the same way we would if we were there. "There" is the place-architecture that embodies the institution, but we can imagine a library without place-architecture, existing only on the basis of digital copies reachable and transmittable at a distance. The same could be thought of a parliament or even a government: we'll have perhaps to accept that society doesn't need architecture anymore to represent itself.

In this situation, which other role is left to architecture, other that giving its vocabulary to the new information technics (site, space, forum, etc.)? We'll have to find the answer within one of its most ancient conditions: that of serving the materiality of human beings, a materiality that goes beyond its physicality to be inextricably psychological. Possibilities of architecture are not limited to this, but it is the first level of its raison d'être. Predictably, we'll continue to be linked to our material condition, and our basic needs will still exist. With that, the function of architecture won't disappear. Perhaps it will change, but this change will be one of scale and limits. The very existence of this limit, though, is where the necessity of architecture dwells.

We can still mention another limit: that of the idea of virtuality. Virtuality has to have as a limit the fact that it is an incomplete experience. Only this way it can differ from reality. If it totally supplants reality, it will become reality: reality only finishes in itself. Architecture, perhaps by definition, has to do with these complete experiences, it has to do with the materiality of reality. Its abstraction, necessarily partial, cannot substitute it. I can't think of a better characterization of architecture than saying that it is linked to a phenomenological experience and that it is also phenomenologically determinant. Food can't be virtual. Neither can architecture. Architecture is even an anchoring to materiality.

(1)Georg Lukács, Ästhetik, Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1963.