Pedro Martinez (P.Mtz.)

Being the son of a Mexican architect who lived at the border of the United States and Mexico, there are three things that have fascinated me for as long as I can remember: architecture, culture and the spoken word. My father introduced me to architecture when I was barely old enough to walk or talk. He took me to see some of his projects come to life both on paper and in reality. The very thought of something as simple as a pencil having the power to translate images of the un-existent realm of man’s impeccable imagination into something concrete and evident was astonishing.

Living at the border of two neighboring countries that are very distant invoked my interest in culture. Growing up, I always wondered why just across the way there existed a completely different world where the people, language, currency and built environment were completely contrastive. My entire life I have never been able to have enough of culture. I often wondered what made the American side American and what made the Mexican side Mexican. It was a question that was always on my mind as a child. Eventually I came to realize that the spoken word was what made anything what is was. The spoken word was the formal indication of anything’s being and with out the word, everything remains hidden in the shadow of concealment. But how is it that the word, something that most people mistake as simple, has such an integral role in defining why something is what it is?

Now, this idea is quite erroneous. Indeed architecture, and other crafts distinct to each culture, do not use the word as their matter. But how could there ever be a temple or statues, existing for what they are, without the word? Certainly these works have no need for the descriptions of the historiography of art. But the circumstance that in a temple or in a statue there are no words as material to be worked upon and “formed” by no means proves that these “works,” in what they are and how they are, do not still need the word in an essential way.

The essence of the word does not at all consist in its vocal sound, nor in the loquacity and noise, and not in its merely technical function in the communication of information. A statue or a temple—for example—stands in silent dialogue with man in the unconcealed. If there were not the silent word, then the looking god as sight of the statue and its features could never appear. And a temple could never, without standing in the disclosive domain of the word, presents itself as the house of a god.

The Greeks did not describe and talk about their “works of art” “aesthetically” and look at their grandeur! This bears witness to the fact that their works stood well secured in the clarity of the word, without which a column would not be a column, a tympanum a tympanum and a frieze a frieze. And only therefore do their architecture and sculpture display the nobility of the build and the shaped. There works exist only in the medium of the word, i.e., in the medium of the essentially telling word, in the realm of the legendary, in the realm of myth.

One who is ignorant of culture lives in a microcosm. One who lives in a microcosm is ignorant of culture. It is the vessel—fueled by the word—with which society functions. In a time where interaction between people from all over the world is the norm, it is imperative that one has knowledge of culture.

Culture is a vital part of who I am because I belong to two contrary cultures. In my family there are those who were born and raised in Mexico and those who were born and raised in the US. Knowledge of both cultures is compulsory for everyone, even those who have little or nothing to do with the other.

This, however, is not the situation for everyone. There are those who know only about their culture. This causes problems at gatherings because some family members unintentionally offend others and others cannot communicate amongst each other due to language barriers.

The same goes for society: whenever there are misinterpretations or misunderstandings amongst ethnic, social and political groups, problems arise.

This creates the necessity for those who are willing to cross the barriers of cultural ignorance, people who are willing to live life at the threshold of cultural fusion and who are not scared to take the latter into unexplored territories. It also prevents what is common in this world: the reinvention of the wheel; those who are ignorant of culture reinvent the wheel.

But how is it that culture and the word have anything to do with architecture? These are not traditionally thought of as concepts of the field, or at least that is what I have been told by numerous architecture schools. I disagree. We must realize that the real movement in any field occurs when its basic concepts undergo a more or less radical revision, which is transparent to itself. The level a field reaches is determined by how far it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts. In such an immanent crisis the very relationship between the positively and investigative inquiry and those things themselves that are under interrogation—in our case: culture, the word and architecture—come to a point where the profession itself begins to totter.

I cannot help but recall the Herminutic Circle, which an interpretation that is understanding. It is a concept that puts everything under interrogation into a circle, a pie chart for example. In this case the concepts going in the circle are culture, the word and architecture. If we start at the word—since in the beginning there was the word—and desire to reach architecture or culture we notice that in order to get to our destination we must first cross through the other concepts; one cannot be achieved with out the other. This is my way of proving the importance of the word—which is superior and a priori—culture, which has as it indicatives art, social order, customs and many other things, and Architecture, the finest of the arts which encompasses all of the latter. Among the various disciplines everywhere today there are freshly awakened tendencies to put this way of thinking on new foundations.

I want my five-year inquiry in architecture school to teach me the complexity and diversity of the field of architecture. I want it to intrigue me while exposing me to a new level of awareness of the world that surrounds me and show me the many consequences and possibilities of architecture. I want the program to help me explore the un-chartered realm of thought with out fear; I want to reproduce my imagination without the constraints of what I perceive as possible or impossible.

I want to study current day societies as well as those of the past. I want to do in-depth studies of groups of people while focusing on cross-cultural analysis and examining specific characteristics such as religion or kinship to show the ways these vary among human groups. My goals are both to provide accurate information that facilitates cross-cultural communication and to achieve an understanding of the nature of humanity that transcends differences of time and place.

I desire to one day design for people in third world countries using nothing but local resources. I want to design structures made completely out of recycled materials that will facilitate the lives of those who have it the worst. I want to be surrounded by people, both peers and mentors, which have the same appreciation for the arts and their respective fields.

Life for me is like a boat that I have named Little Gidding. Little Gidding has been sailing the seas of ignorance looking for beacon towers along the way to impose on it the light of knowledge and help it reach its destination. In the words of T.S. Eliot, I “Shall not cease from exploration and the end of all [my] exploring will be to arrive where [I] started (the third world) and know the place for the first