PREMISES

In 1883, a 25-year-old painter arrives at the Paris Salon to present his debut piece, only to be rejected. A few months later, the oportunity for the artist to exhibit his work finally arrives. He chooses to display a paintng about a group of people enjoying the Seine’s riverbanks during a sunny day. Bathers at Asnières was only the first of George Seurat’s series of pointillist paintings. As a general approach, Seurat’s canvases exhibit a smooth and seamless quality, portraying rather simplified figures of people and landscapes in an almost flat manner. Figures of people consistently face forward, or they show a perfect profile. Within this almost canonical representation lies a sense of serenity and calmness that makes Seurat’s paintings remarkable. On an even closer look, one discovers a dynamic and infinite number of juxtaposed dots. Each dot has a different nuance, color, a different type of stroke, and a different direction, contributing to the overall composition. Sometimes, intriguingly, red dots may intermingle with green dots to create the illusion of a shadow, while other times blue dots appear among yellow dots to create the image of a meadow of flowers. Each dot assumes a specific role in a big painting. It is the distinctiveness of each dot that increases the quality of Seurat’s paintings.

The word pointillism was not proposed by Seurat, or other neo- impressionist artists, but rather by the time period’s art critics, as a form of ridicule. But the term persisted, without its ill-natured meaning, for it described the nature of the brushstrokes which relied on the viewers ability to perceive and blend the pieces into a whole – a collection of color, details and rhythm which assemble meaning into a new, unfamiliar, yet powerful format. The metaphor of pointillism and Seurat’s paintings is employed here in order to express our aspirations for the COTAA Publication. COTAA stands for Collection of Texts about Architecture – and its ambition is to be just that, within times where everything – from text, to architecture, and to research in general – becomes a subject of interrogation, be it from self-reflection, or from technical advancements, such as those in the field of artificial intelligence. COTAA emerges from the desire to embrace change and to re-discover our discipline and profession through a more generous research community. Just like a Seurat painting, COTAA will take shape from the sum of individualities that are juxtaposed to form a cohesive entity.

This new publication wishes to become a platform for a diverse array of fields, and it encourages writing about architecture, as long as it brings a new idea to the table.

We hereby launch the invitation to support and contribute with any relevant ideas and perspectives through different means and related fields, to generate the very first issue of this publication.

The Core Group