Let me to introduce Buildingman to all of you. At the beginning we worked in him in response to a specific problem posed by an international competition. Soon, we saw that Buildingman was an almost spontaneous response to many of our concerns, some of which had remained hidden until then, latent in the back of our projects. In the Buildingman project participated, along with us, American 3d computer modeling designers specialized in human engineering with a huge experience in virtual reality movies, videogames and things like that.
I thought that he could add excitement to high density environments —not only built, high density also in communications, activity, emotion. It would be nice to overlay another element of animation in downtown Manhattan, or in a city of Southern Europe, or in Asia.
But, at the same time, I think of him in just the opposite, as in a stone of solitude, as an autistic place. Without windows, a monument to the silent, observant man unexpectedly placed in the centre of the city, inhospitable to him for belonging to a different scale, to a colossal scale. Yes, that is the question. The city exceeds us with its hostile maelstrom of conflicting interests, global activities and an incomprehensible, unfathomable dimension. If we exchange the scale difference and we do the man bigger for a moment, we perceive the reality of our insignificance, of our tiny nudity. The city gets now the scale that every normal man means to it: nothing. With his gigantism, Buildingman reveals, publicly and with large letters, the contrary aberration. Its dimension is nothing more that the denunciation of the opposite reality.
He is perhaps better full of windows, open. He is so a human mountain full of people. He is the city against itself, which has already acquired the form of man by dint of losing the identity of monument, of building, of house, of Architecture.
With windows, made transparent, is a box that holds its shape despite the glass. Is not fun? Was not the fun the goal of much recent architecture? With windows, «Who's inside? Where is the door? How have you entered?» I asked. «Why ever wonder who is in neighboring buildings?», they responded to me.
Now I like him without scale, in the landscape, in the vastness of the desert, or back into the city center, but this time understanding the city as a landscape, a dark trail of polyhedral well carved rocks. There is, alone, no one like him. Again alone, as the first of the men whose form he has copied. He lifts his head towards the sky, without shame, as the man who, with his gesture, built the first vertical aspiration. I like to think of him as the last architectural form..
