Orality as a tool for the architectural project

Abstract

It should be no coincidence that in both the professional and academic worlds, talking is used as a strategy for architectural feedback and as a means of theoretical production. Not as a rhetorical act. And the fact is that talking is an action that adapts to everyone and allows to break down barriers between architects and todays society. Even today, more physically distant than ever, as a kind of necessary orality in times of crisis, is when we are talking more between architects and other agents to offer solutions, with all the possibilities of a digital community at our fingertips. But the place of oral history within the historiography of modern architecture is still not sufficiently understood and, therefore, its potential use has been diminished. Oral history is a dialogical process that is constructed from the spoken word. Oral accounts offer a way of reading the architecture of others, an alternative way of reading history, a way of appropriating non-canonical issues or issues that are not the subject of disciplinary attention. It is intended to show that dialogic practice in architecture is a vehicle for the production of thought with a practical, theoretical and critical function. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of the essayistic, instrumental and speculative value of oral transmission in a way that makes it architectural, just as we refer to architectural drawing.