Nader Khalili

Descobri recentemente um livro do visionário Nader Khalili e não resisti em partilhar estas palavras com quem visita o blog.

"The more we know about clay's ingredients and its technical properties of elasticity, the more we replace it with plastics. This is a problem of technology, which gives us only piecemeal knowledge of each individual substance of a test tube.

We can't see the clay as a mass with a soul that might create new phenomena should we, for example, set fire to it. We talk about its low strength and unpredictable behaviour. We don't talk about how rocks and mountains are created from it.The simple elements of water, earth, air and fire can still create, if the magic of their intimacy is understood, the most perpetual relationship between matter and spirit.

(...)

How is that humans created the most beautiful structures and spaces out of clay before the technology of today stopped them at the elastic limit of this material?

How is it that since the strengths of materials have been known and sophisticated calculations have been developed, no architect or engineers dares to build a mud vault or more than a 3 metre span? And yet, far bigger spans were built hundreds of years ago and still stand in the ancient cities, such as Yazd and Kashan, along the great desert.

Those 6 metre mud vaults were not built from mathematical theories, but from the freedom of soul to soar beyond the accepted 3 metre limit. To say that we know a lot more about clay and its properties today than at any previous time in history is no justification for the fact that we have lost the feel for it."

Khalili, N. (1983) Racing Alone: A visionary architect's quest for houses Made with earth and fire. New York: Harper & Row Publishers