muchieast-to exist is to resist

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The best manifesto is the one that is meant to be edited. 2Exist is 2Resist is a collection of principles intended to be anything but dogmatic. On the contrary, it is an ongoing manifesto that believes its validity is directly proportional to how easily it may be changed, adapted, reshaped. Today's principles are valid now; we will see what happens tomorrow.

1. Low-tech is high-tech, high-tech is low-tech. Just as nature is high-tech and low-tech at the same time, the geopolitical map of the world -developed and developing countries- defines two different approaches to sustainable development: the first one is based on technological advances and the belief that technology alone is the major force capable of reversing the current situation of environmental decline; the second approach, less self-conscious, is based on lower-tech, higher-efficiency solutions that have worked historically in societies with fewer economic resources and, thus, a better understanding of the value of economies of scale that come from self-imposed resourcefulness. Nowadays, both approaches remain hermetic to each other. The great opportunity is to accept that low-tech and high-tech are two sides of the same coin: the future of sustainable development is in how both approaches may influence each other.

2. Thinking with one's hands. The mind dictates. The hand translates. The machine obeys. Every creative process, digital or not, is manual by definition. The hands mediate between our ideas and their physical manifestation. The design process, for most architects and designers, has gone from entirely manual not too long ago, to entirely digital today. This transition, in most cases, has been automatic and lacking critical reflection. Every medium has its virtues and limitations; as an alternative to today's unchallenged technophilia and its effect of completely eliminating manual production, I propose a hybrid, complex, adaptive design process, one based on thinking by making, thinking with one´s hands and combining different media, the more the better.

3. Question branded sustainability; be an environmentalist. While good architecture has always been sustainable, performance considerations alone do not guarantee good architecture. The confusion today is that so-called sustainable architecture has become a matter of performance only, and concerns itself with the how much in detriment of the how and the what. A building or a master plan´s ambition should be more than meeting a list of criteria in order to achieve this or that rating. Architecture is a complex activity. And my feeling is that today's branded sustainable architecture is trying really hard to stultify it, forgetting that architecture is about what the building is and how it transforms human lives, not only about its energy performance. Architects and designers should critically define environmentalism in their own terms. And question arbitrary standards. I suggest revisiting Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman or Bucky Fuller. They did get green.

4. Interdisciplinary...again? Interdisciplinary has always been the case: throughout history, the great makers and the great achievers have always been interdisciplinary, even if they might not have been labeled by others as such. Today's renewed interest in this term, specially in academic circles, is revisionist rather than innovative. What does interdisciplinary really mean, under today's circumstances? First, the opportunity to explore the fringe zones between disciplines, rather than the comfortable discipline-specific areas. Second, interdisciplinary at its best is equivalent to intercultural rather than interprofessional. Third, interdisciplinary or not the work needs to stand on its own. And if it does, who cares how it is labeled?

5. The new is always old (and viceversa). In tha last century architecture went from "history means nothing" to "history is everything." What is happening today? One of the interesting things about this particular time is that past and future have inevitably merged and become accessible in the present. Thanks to the fluidity of virtual space and the new global communication networks, everything is interwoven temporally. And the boundaries between past, present and future are blurrier than ever. Oscillating between past and future is, today, an important factor in how we define our present. This suggests a new definition of history as selective continuum: human civilization presents itself to us, for the first time, in a panoramic view. Let's take advantage of it!

6. Keep low, keep moving. A maxim full of wisdom from my good friend Joe Murphy: keep a low profile, keep working. Or, perhaps: keep a low profile in order to keep doing meaningful work.