First lecture of the conferences ‘The ecologising versus the exclusionary. New ways of occupying architecture’

‘Delirious New York’ (Rem Koolhaas 1978) is the book-bible that has instituted the entire practice and theory of contemporary architecture, and founded two of its essential statements. The first is that the only possible representation of architecture is through buildings; the second is that the architect, the star-architect, is the only one capable of spatially organising the world. In order to support these theories, all the registers of gender, national diversities, the life of different bodies, or that of animals, plants, microorganisms and other living beings, as well as all the alternative cultural and political proposals that at the end of the last century shaped the cultural life of the city, and therefore the culture of the world, were excluded from the history that the book constructs about New York. The same exclusions on which, until very recently, much of contemporary architectural and urban cultural practices have hinged, and which have instituted much of the academic agenda for the teaching of architecture.

In this conference, José María Torres Nadal will address the piece he has added to this year's central exhibition, 'Inhabiting Change'. The exhibition revolves around 'ecologising architecture', that which makes ecologies. An architecture that finds an unexpected beginning in Federico G. Lorca's text 'A poet in New York' (1929): "Because we want the will of the earth to be fulfilled, which gives its fruits for all".

As an architectural practice, the piece joins those architectures that are no longer based on the statements of 'Delirious New York', explores other images through dissent with the book itself, and forces other languages by activating the idea of ecologising, that which makes ecologies. The images with which the emblematic cover drawn by Madelon Vriesendorp is redefined are:  

• The world is shaped like a chicken. 
• Long Island lives on burnt drawing stencils
• My heart would be shaped like a shoe if every village had a mermaid.
• Nature is the enshrinement of freedom
• Backpack to carry the Ego-Delirium on your back
• The origins of dissent and the flight to environmentalism
• And the video 'Architecture... in spite of Delirious New York'.

Free access until full capacity is reached. This will be followed at 7:30 p.m. by the conference 'Architecture of Appropriation: on squatting as a spatial practice', with Marina Otero.