Argument

The theme of excess is a Pharmakon (Aristotle), an undecidable (Derrida). We can only decide whether it is medicine or poison, good or bad, in the context of the use of this concept. In other words, what is excess or when is it too much? Only then can we wonder about the place of this concept in architecture.

Excess, i.e. surplus, overabundance, has the most diverse effects, from saturation to ecstasy and from intoxication to plenitude. I wrote about (in)toxic(at)e places in Bauwelt magazine (2006), suggesting this play on words (toxic/intoxicated) as a way of defining places which, instead of genies (good spirits), have djinns (evil spirits in Islamic culture). I wanted to continue, in this way, the theory of that genius loci, by Christian Norberg Schulz, who made an uncritical career also in Romania after 1989 (until the publication of a book with the same title...). I won't repeat the text here, I'll just mention the conclusion, which, in German, became the title, namely that this theory only works as far as the Carpathians. Beyond the Carpathians, cities have multiple identities, sometimes in conflict, if not even evil spirits. Now, the theory works in medieval Western and Central Europe (thus also in Sighișoara), but not in Bucharest or Slobozia. Often an intoxicated place is a mute place; sometimes a toxic place poisons over time the whole context - physical or cultural.

But the superiority relationship between the world of ideas and their material imprints also leads to the Platonic conclusion that only the world of ideas is real, an assumption shared by religious thought. In other words, the heavenly Jerusalem is more real than its lower incarnations, even if the former is only glimpsed by the prophets, while the latter is, from time to time, even demolished. It is therefore not surprising that the sacred is seen by contemporary theologians such as J. L. Marillon as the realm of saturated phenomena. In excess, in immeasurability, in the overwhelming (which it shares with the sublime in aesthetics) are the other attributes of the sacred. The two-stage motor of the ex-perception of the sacred, which Rudolf Otto spoke of, implies not only overwhelm - the vanishing of the first contact, an annihilating - but also the recomposition of the self afterwards, the desire to find out what this liminal experience was. In the beginning, yes, like King David, we fear, for the heavens of heavens cannot contain him, and shall the Lord stand in the work of man's hands? But - action and reaction - that which is unfathomable stirs up the desire to be known, and on this miracle (lest you think it an illusion) religious architecture is everywhere built.

Otherwise, for a modern mind, it was, and still is, hard to understand how the ancients could have painted - and still live - the beautiful Pentelic or Carrara marble. Horror vacui we say when we look at the verminous carvings on Indian temples. To become pastel now, still vivid - violent for yesterday's tired sensibilities - were also the frescoed church paintings. Excessive was Baroque, and Rococo - vain. Postmodernism has given pop-art excess its right of citadel, and since then excess has meant increasingly bizarre things.

In short, we are no longer just excessed, but (the youngest of us) completely kidnapped from the apparent self-similar, a-scalar incomprehensibility of parametric architecture. The reference to the world, when it comes to camouflage, no longer concerns our world, but the world of quantum scales, or infra-biological or cosmic bodies, since, now, one can speak, perhaps too casually, of quantum cosmology, as Lee Smolin does.

So let's face it: we are in over our heads. We are in ek-stasis, that is to say, we are out of our heads, intoxicated. We no longer recognize the causes that produce the effects that affect us. Too much information with too little hierarchy to structure it. Too many ways of looking at the world: directly, but also telescopically and microscopically.

The words of a student who, at the end of a course in which I was showing them the panorama of such a world:

- How should we design, Professor?