Albinism and Architecture

Albinism is the congenital absence of melanin pigment. Aicuña, that was the name of the town,
was an inbreeding population. Inbreeding is the crossing between genetically related individuals.
This type of communities is characterized by being closed. In this way, genes are combined within
a certain group and albinism reappears.

Architecture, and especially publications suffer from inbreeding. The same ideas, or their variants
are repeated, within a small group of architects. The specialized magazines work, refer and
circulate among architects.

In Argentina, we look (and copy) foreign architectural models. Historically, our reference was
Europe or the United States. Added to this, our peripheral reality makes us think that by producing
or consuming architecture that looks like the “first world”, we will enter into it in some way,
without thinking if local needs are answered through these models. And consequently, this idea
also does not escape the publications whose content focuses on this part of the world. In some
way, for local works that are included in the same section as large European works, they reach a
state of legitimacy. The magazines then function as establishers of what is good and what is not
without a real discussion of the subject.

We, as a professional community, do not achieve a state to be able to disagree healthily. Discuss
architecture, live in dissidence, difference and grow as a result. Inbreeding helps to maintain a
certain neutrality in opinions, or rather not to express them publicly.

I long for times in which architecture was thought, discussed and establish an agenda. Non-
publications could be a space that generates this framework, where thought flourishes: knowing
what we do, who we are and what we are thinking. Given a context in which the profession is
discredited and the general public does not understand the value of architects, and consequently
don´t hire them, architecture publications could fulfill this vital function for the profession: explain
what the architect does, what is his role in society, how It would be a city without architects.