International Competitions in Architecture
A HOUSE FOR HAFIZ
It is snowing here and cold. It is January. But in May it will be different. Hopefully. Will flowers rescue the world? Could these most fragile ones change us? Yesterday we were looking through the book called: The Case of Wagner, by Friedrich Nietzsche. We were doing so, hoping that we might find there some interesting thoughts on Wagner, searching for a possible new theme for a possible new competition: “A House for Wagner." Instead, we arrived somewhere else... there is a passage in the book where Nietzsche opposes the artists who create out of hate for life (Wagner, Flaubert - says Nietzsche)), to those who create out of an overabundance of love for life: Hafiz, Goethe. So immediately we thought that perhaps we should try to imagine a House for Hafiz, the great Persian poet of the fourteenth century. How appropriate, also, since at this very moment tens of thousands of heavily armed men (and women, unfortunately) face each other, at a certain frontier... How else could we oppose war if not through the simple words of a poet like Hafiz?!? So, imagine that in May we will organize an exhibition with projects for a house for the Persian poet within ourselves: for a new/old Hafiz. Let the missiles gather new numbers, let the numbers of soldiers at a certain frontier increase every day, let technology discover eternally new ways of deceiving itself that it can conquer evil, when in fact helping it... we prefer instead to imagine a beautiful House for Hafiz. One that might inspire a new Frank Lloyd Wright to use the same admiring words the "old" one used vis-a-vis Persian Architecture. Isn't it surprising that we arrive at Hafiz through the words / thoughts of the one whom the Nazi considered the prophet of an arrogant, Aryan man? But Zarathustra and Hafiz taught Nietzsche the virtues of dancing, while the boots of the heavily armed soldiers marched the world... And these very boots continue marching, as if the lessons of history were never written... Welcome to: A House for Hafiz! Or perhaps: A Garden for Hafiz. Or both. It is up to you.
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