“We have been participants and witnesses to the disclosure of the concepts of The Architectural Performance, or Architectural Event, through the scholarly pedagogical experimentation of Carlos Campos.
He overlaps, intersects and incorporates other arts, activities, devices and playful routines towards a new revaluation of the direct perception of the spatial experience. He brings to us, exposing its interlocking layers, the revelation of the multiple dimensions of the interaction between man and its built environment.
As a research endeavor, his quest positions itself in the opposite side of the spectrum of the introverted individual digital experimentation so generalized nowadays in the contemporary northern academia milieu. The Architectural Performance focuses, sharpens the live sound and visual perception of our environment. We should also add three dimensions that are key components of the pedagogical procedures: The direct participation involving personal creativity, the action carried out in a collective modality and the incorporation, in a generally statically conceived construct, of the time dimension and the introduction of change through perceptual variations.
These aspects induce in the participants an element of exhilaration, of pleasure and joy, associated with a perception of freedom, transgression, birth of new paradigms, of new forms of understanding the crystallized world, as a scenario of the lively and free performance by man, discovering thus new dimensions.
Campos pedagogical experimentation, described in this book, originates and springs from the understanding of these phenomena at urban scales and timeframes, described and collected through a global sampling.
It originates from his most beloved city of Buenos Aires, towards an itinerary through time and space in the Planet. He makes us understand the City, and in particular its public space, as the privileged receptacle of the collective adventure of human civilization. Each generation will be adding meaning to the structures of its predecessors.
Every city is the stage of the activities it hosts, and that performance takes place between two extreme modalities, among which the Campos ‘discourse is situated: the everyday individual activities, travels and displacements, individual acts in the public space, and the activities related to encounter, meeting exchange, and the expressions of artistic, political economic and cultural collective intentions. We are really more inclined to talk about the Urban Performance, more than the architectural, as we relate to the collective realm of expression. This stage where we act could evolve, as signaled by Campos, towards the incorporation of the virtual dimensions in space and time. But this
modality would not finally succeed in replacing the multiple dimensions of the direct sensorial experience, as well as the collective action that has culturally defined us as a species, as the political actors in the Polis, and the possibility to modify reality, to introduce innovation through the intervention of the participants.
Along the book the reader will find the savvy weaving between pedagogy and practice, between analysis and intervention, between knowledge and feeling in the multiple dimensions of the collective experiencing of space.”