LIGA 10: Luis Aldrete (Mex). Mock up of a common place
Photography: Luis Gallardo
A certain dubious idea of originality has ruled out the commonplace. As if anything within common reach were —at the very least— useless, if not flat out harmful. “You keep repeating commonplaces” is something usually said to someone who employs a well-known argument, as if this alone rendered it invalid. But for classical rhetoric the commonplace was the structural basis of any argumentation. A speech is literally the course the orator guides us through from one place to the next, between several commonplaces that we can recognize because of their familiarity.
Images that will help the orator follow the thread of his discourse and not lose the idea are placed there. Finally, if they favor invention and memory, it is logical that commonplaces will also be a learning aid. In his introduction to the book by John Lock A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books —commonplace books were collections of phrases and ideas that were generally agreed upon— Monsieur Le Cler writes that “in every kind of learning, specially when studying languages, memory is the treasury or storage, but it is judgment that disposes of it: it orders what it extracts from the memory. If the memory is oppressed or is overloaded with too many things, we exercise order and method.” When memory fails and to prevent this from happening, we need to put things in their place, their common place.
Therefore, we could assume that for architecture, the commonplace has at least two courses. The first collects all the variations of the rhetorical figure of the topoi mentioned above. Thus, proportion, utility and beauty, meaning, function and form subdued to it, detail and the attention it deserves are all commonplaces of architecture. They are figures within architectural discourse that we can all make reference to, even —or specially— to deny their importance. The other sense would be the physical and material one: the place in space or that which lies in contrast or in front of space— to reach another commonplace, in the first sense. In the second sense it would be a space open for communication and community, one that we recognize and in which we recognize ourselves, with all the burden of its sense and identity —two more commonplaces, undoubtedly.
The intervention of Luis Alderete in LIGA works around both senses of commonplace. In that small corner of the building by Augusto Álvarez and Juan Sordo Madaleno in Insurgentes, there is a tiny garden —ancestral figure of the commonplace— fenced on two sides: by the existing building and by a wooden fence used for formwork. Condemned to shadows, the garden reflects itself on a couple of mirrors and becomes infinite. It is a place for contemplation —another commonplace— built without any attention to detail and embracing the circumstances dictated by chance —again, more commonplaces to be accepted or denied. Hence, in the end some of these commonplaces —in the first sense— can cancel each other out, producing another common place —in the second sense— one that supports on another form of community: common sense. A sensus communis, an aesthetic community, a shared and communicable sensation and sensibility that open themselves there, which I would like to name a zero degree of architecture. But that is surely another common place.
