Aivaras Onaitis

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It’s been three months since we started hanging around the streets and the beach of Valencia, watching the architecture, the great variety of its forms. The arhythmia of the small architecture at the seacoast is unbelievable, the color combinations are incompatible for a northerner, and the heights of the buildings are completely chaotic. We admire the flaking stucco, the paint faded by the sun, the stone fences with chips of glass stuck in them. Further apart there is a row of palms with their leaves tied up together ...These are views that you cannot see in booklets inviting you to Spain, in textbooks or architecture magazines. No, this context was not created by great aces of architecture. It‘s not ancient enough to be preserved by the municipalities who would respect its age. This is a context which emerged in the absence of aesthetic stimulus and depended on individual needs and conception of beauty. Why does our mind rather fix on a wicker rocking-chair put in the middle of a narrow street or a wry reedy blind on a half-open window than the laconic modern architecture or historical pomposity? The latter are right here, just some blocks away. The chair will soon be occupied by an old man puffing his cigar. The blind will cast a shadow at someone resting from the heat at siesta time. Why bother about a crack in the pane or a passer-by who doesn‘t like the way I painted the walls of my house. The whole setting is the colors of the dwellers‘ lives. They are creating the context, themselves, and the context is creating them too. It affects us too, we who pitch our tents in it. We are overwhelmed with delight for these people.

Valencia, Spain

(“Letters for an architectural context”, “Archiforma”. Lithuanian architectural review, 2000/2. Vilnius)

© Amber-Chamber studio, MMIII

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