The Flan And The Knitting Needle

In a conference held recently at the School of Architecture of the University of Texas in Austin, Alberto Campo Baeza examined and highlighted, with his usual authentic passion, the moments in which the intellectual pleasures generated by architecture are at their strongest.

- Alberto Campo Baeza

How can I express in words the overpowering feeling of intellectual enjoyment which has occasionally possessed me in recent times? Time and again, something linked to architecture touches us in such a special way that we find ourselves possessed by that intangible quality which I have come to term intellectual enjoyment. Many architects reading these words will understand perfectly what I am referring to.

As this very special je ne sais quoi has been happening to me lately, I have decided to commit to paper my thoughts on this none too original discovery. And I have discovered that what we call intellectual enjoyment, intellectual satisfaction, intellectual pleasure, tends to occur more frequently and more intensely as one gets older. The enjoyment I glean from reading Homer’s Odyssey now is quite distinct from the joyful wonder I felt the first time I came across it. And that deep, profound feeling occurs with a frequency that quite surprises me. It is like a joyous radiance that takes your breath away.

Plato once said to a young apprentice in philosophy: “The burning impetus that propels you to seek the reason why is beautiful and divine; but while you are still young, practice and train yourself in those philosophical efforts which do not initially appear to serve any purpose and are what the crowd calls idle talk; otherwise, truth will escape your grasp”. It is in this phase of renewed youth that I would like to situate myself while speaking of intellectual enjoyment, which in our case occurs particularly with architecture.

ARCHITECTURE

In architecture we can find intellectual enjoyment in many moments, of which I believe the principal three to be: recognition, conception and the final stages of a project.

RECOGNITION