Promoting a work is not easy. Yet many people face this challenge. Designing and shaping our environment seems to be an almost universal impulse among us. The politician feels obliged to promote infrastructures and emblematic buildings, the businessman to build or remodel his company and the individual to build the house of his dreams. I repeat, promoting a project is no easy task. Many factors, people and specialities are involved, making construction a complex and costly process. This makes it essential for each of the actors to know their role and be recognised in it. In this way they can carry out their work in an effective and responsible manner.
The first question that arises then is about the architect and architecture. What is his or her role in the building process? What should we talk to the architect about? What decisions should he or she make? The first step in answering these questions will be to realise that the engine that shapes architecture is human relationships, while what shapes construction is materials. Architecture is fundamentally theoretical while construction is the execution of architecture, its end.
Architecture is responsible for resolving the spaces in which the present and the immediate future take place. And each time has its own spirit formed by the combination of the universal with the local, of tradition with emerging trends, of the personal with the social. From this perspective, the architect becomes a planner of human relations and a manager of the relationship between human beings and the environment.
It is then that the work ceases to be a mechanical application of regulated solutions or systematised processes to give way to the analysis of the priorities to be resolved on each scale until a balanced proposal is reached. In this way, themes such as the family, the couple, free time, rest, the neighbourhood, are addressed and interwoven to arrive at the concrete details of light control, the curtain, the door, the furniture, the handrail, the joint cover, the paving, etc.
The architect’s role is to translate the developer’s will, which is often diffuse and abstract, into the design and realisation of a specific space that responds to the needs for which it was proposed.
In conclusion, beyond signing papers, the architect can and must become the person in charge of translating the vital project of people and communities into space. Although, of course, to do so, one must be willing to listen.
