“Total Spiritual Boredom”, our fifth edition of QTS, seeks to loosely, and vaguely explore the relationship between religious ideas and architecture in the context of Le Corbusier’s La Tourette convent. We would like to somehow speculate on the notion that post-ideological indifference can lead to the necessary detachment needed to have an authentic experience and can serve as a strategy towards reflection and inwardness by creating a barrier against the chatter, superficiality and collective fantasy prevailing today. Indifference is nothing other than the “wuwei”, the Tao’s no-action, and the basis of how the sage operate in the world. In other words, it is the foundation for a deeply spiritual life. Tolstoi stated that faith constitutes the very purpose of life and the reason why mankind does not self-destruct itself and continues to live. Well, some of us have directed our set of beliefs not to the idea of an infinite God or the divinity of the soul or even the union of our actions with God, but to the petty, terribly compensated field of architecture. The will to believe (in Architecture) as William James argued, is our only way to cope with the incredibly painful realities of the world we inhabit. By having a personal experience with our discipline we can set aside the symbolic approach that seeks to read and interpret indirectly architecture in order to have a mystical connection which, as Schopenhauer noted, can act as a free expression of an immediate metaphysical knowledge that completely disregards the powerful objections of reason. Would it be possible to advocate then for the suppression of architectural pedagogy in favor of a purer alternative to access its non-empirical foundations? Can we unlearn everything we have been taught in order to clear the Way for the necessary passivity to comprehend our discipline? Or perhaps, what we have come to refer as Architecture is nothing but, paraphrasing Agamben, the way in which the anonymous we call architect, in constant relationship with a practice, seeks to constitute his life as a way-of-life: the life of the architect, in which as in any form of life, what is in question is nothing less than his or her happiness.”

Juan García Mosqueda
Paris, France