Tag: narratives

Today, a post about architecture. Or perhaps about friends, and some (mental, physical) conversations with them.

Traveling faraway always provides beautiful opportunities for adding some texture to our ongoing conversations with friends, with life, with books. Experiencing the unfamiliar (and finding unexplainable familiarity, perhaps only apparent, perhaps fooling oneself) while imagining narratives to understand that unfamiliar and hopefully transmit it to the familiar, is an exercise in perception and imagination. In shifting time (back and forward), in rearranging one’s life.

I was, on a Saturday morning a few days ago. while still quite jet-lagged, in Kobe (Japan), quite literally almost at the other side of the world. In front of the Pacific Ocean (which in Kobe is an industrial coast, with beautiful Japanese bridges and bright-colored depots – almost a manga-like feel in the light and blue of the sea and the red paint of so many structures), in Tadao Andō’s construction of a municipal museum (with the very unassuming name Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art – who would imagine such an architectural marvel, with such a low-key name?).

A fresh letter from Alex Cruz, directed to Fernando Zalamea on the occasion of his retirement from our University, arrived while I was drinking some coffee, right after visiting the museum.

And the vortex came to life in a different way.

While the spaces in the building were a marvel to me, what really caught my imagination beyond any expectation was this external spiral staircase. Being next to the Pacific Ocean in Kobe, it conveys the strong feeling of a vortex, of a field of energy sucking in the Ocean’s dynamics while also, in its relative smallness, a small/big tribute to forces of nature that go beyond ourselves. For Kobe is also the land of brutal earthquakes and possible tsunamis, of vortices of nature possibly subsuming any of our small creations.

In my mind (and I mentioned this in my own response to Alex’s letter to Fernando), the image of a whirlwind, of a vortex of energy evoking tsunamis and earthquakes, tectonic shifts and transitions of phase, of the Pacific and Tadao Andō’s buildings, got mixed with what Fernando Zalamea has meant for my life (and, I think, for the life of many other, young and old, mathematicians here in Colombia and Latin America, for the life of artists who are willing to engage in the very difficult but extremely fruitful dialogue with Mathematics that Fernando has laid out for them, for philosophers who are willing to let go of their analytical pastiches [and their frozen jelly-like constructs] and explore the incredible flavors and textures of the best possible tarte tatin philosophy may offer them!). Zalamea evokes a vortex of energies, like a whirlwind of passion (heart and reason, razón and co/razón), with the energy of an Ocean like the Pacific but coming from many aspects of culture and mathematics (Peirce, Grothendieck, Valéry, Simone Weil, Llull, …).

The image was clear and bright in front of me, in the Tadao Andō building.

Here is a collection of photos I took of that vortex.

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And here is another glimpse of Tadao Andō’s architecture. Andō’s spaces are very brutalist, on first glimpse, and very poetic, extremely so. He seems to be concerned with the way light infuses spaces of the buildings, openings between different areas. The stairs in an internal hall brought to my mind very Borgesian overtones.