The decay of lying

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The presentation displays three recent projects of Degree Zero Architects, of various scale, which negotiate the concepts of preserving, rehabilitating and adapting to the cultural characteristics of a built / unbuilt environment. Through these applications, the studio demonstrates different approaches that form each time a set of principles, aiming to articulate a dialogue with the surroundings, generating a different balance between coexistence and opposition. Combining traditional construction techniques and the use of local materials with innovation in term of thinking, design and techniques, the studio addresses each project as a challenge, identifying the particulars of its context, aiming to create its distinct identity. Within this context, their work biases on pure functionalism and practicality, while embracing modern lifestyle and local rituals. Haunted by the rationality of modernism and the consecutive ‘decay of lying’, their projects have engraved a process of storytelling, in the pursue of creating unique spatial experience.

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* Oscar Wilde, in the 1891 essay The Death of Lying, discusses on the relationship between life and art and asserts that life (as well as nature) imitates art more than vice versa. He confers how modern expression and aesthetics have become sterile in the excessive worship of facts, science and the consequential decay of lying, as art and a generative component of story making and mythologies.