Plenty Dossier
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1) Talking about the present means talking about the whole world.
Not about images of the world or world models. Just the whole world.
>>Das Herz schlägt dem Ganzen entgegen.<< [1]
2) The present is not a fixed point in a straight timeline with a common past and a common future anymore.
Rather, it’s a chaos of simultaneous realities, contingencies, differences, and dissonances.
To be able to generate value from the actuality of one’s own reality, one has to stand up within the chaos.
From this vantage point, the aim is not to structure the past or to plan the future, but to invent the present. To crystallise an essence out of the plenty.
Plenty doesn’t aspire to define what architecture is, but to accumulate what it can be about.
Keeping the notion of architecture in circulation, always open to inflections and reinterpretations. Not to be owned, contained, or precisely located. Always in flux.
Architecture ceases to be a disciplinary noun and becomes a verb — a continuous process of densification and enrichment.
Not to be true. Not to be right. Not to develop a position. But to develop a stance.
Being with, in order to be subversive at the same time.
Plenty claims that architecture has always been an art of articulation. But not about making an argument. Not about producing statements. Not about reasoning. About placing something, somewhere.
We should talk about architecture in an open way and use all possibilities at hand to think critically.
Talking has a connecting force.
It’s interesting to talk about the things that are on everybody’s mind but nobody can control.
Plenty talks about architecture, not by using language but by relating to it.
Since any artistic, scientific, or technological happening is also always a linguistic happening, we need to seek clarity about what language actually is.
>>Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch. Der Mensch spricht nur, indem er geschickt der Sprache entspricht.<< [2]
Thus, we aim to overcome the idea of language as merely a means of communication, because this view expresses only a technical relation to the world. Language is never fully available for control or instrumental use. We can only participate in a process of transmission.
Nevertheless, in the non-calculative language of poetry, being as a whole is touched. The poetic word establishes connections in the world, leaving open spaces for unspoken meanings, enriching the world with semantic references.
In conclusion, we relate to language and employ poetic means to talk about the things we care about.
Plenty sets out to create milieus of potentially conflicted things. Environments charged with productive tension.
Plenty is an instrument to become more sophisticated. More sensible. More differentiated. More articulate.
Plenty invents the present, speaks with a loose tongue, and reflects on the world as it unfolds — diffuse, intensified, uncertain, and, above all, full of potential.
[1] Han, Byung-Chul. Heideggers Herz. Zum Begriff der Stimmung bei Martin Heidegger (1996)
[2] Heidegger, Martin. Der Satz vom Grund (1971)