Within our culture error is assumed to be something shameful, a result alienated from our conscious authorship. We usually try to remain detached from it, as is usually associated to the result of an unintentional accident. However, it is also true that it is often put forth as a mechanism that arouses our sense of humour, curiosity, estrangement and surprise. The error in our architectonic culture lies beneath implausible messages that surround us. In the form of a briefing, these are five of the captured messages where errors are involved.
1: The history of architecture is full of different ways of doing and making decisions, design-wise. There are different approaches when confronting with a theory and a practice. They all seem safe and accurate; however there is common belief that they aren’t. The history of architecture has always been so chaotic, amusing and plagued with errors like the authors involved in its construction. A search for errors is therefore proposed emerging from the study of the theory of knowledge and logical processes that have guided Science to where we are today, the search for error in Architecture through error in epistemology.
2: In everyday Architecture floor-plan drawings and cross-section ones are “brought together”, travelling within plans in search of references of cross sections, pursuing entrances and exits, bringing along partialities from plan to plan or reading footnotes on plans to interpret what takes place. Situations in which we are aware and others not, where a mental exercise of structural coupling of all the parts that have been read is put in motion, even though these are not really related to each other and yet full of errors. Taking advantage of the trust that is generated from this exchange of information, they sneak in and make their way to the end, preventing us from falling into them.
3: In Architecture one of the most common ways of dealing with a project is through the trial and error method where continuous drawings or models are made, over and over again. Each of them with modifications of the previous ones, with new possibilities and trials. Embarking in this process beyond the mere confrontation with an error encloses attitudes, intentions, potentialities and different postures between them. The way to address this is usually personal, therefore each trial and error action is unlikely to belong exclusively to a single level of functioning; there are factors beyond control or predictability. Although at first glance it may seem that the process of trial and error in architectural performance attempts to eliminate the error, there are times where this reveals new possibilities.
4: Pathology records of buildings in Architecture are often technical documents that refer to construction problems in a direct fashion; moisture, cracks, fissures, landslides. Constructive errors that erase what could have been "architectural errors". Furthermore, the construction process, spatiality, the program, the context or lighting can be mistakenly hindered wrongfully but not necessarily due to constructive mistakes. Architectural errors that are often not recognised as such. Errors integrated into architectural activity have ended up generating singular but not eccentric Architecture, unusual and hardly generic. Architectures created under a "life error," proving that equilibria can be attained outside the usual environment where reason prevails over activity.
5: Also common in Architecture, is the ability to project future through different fields of generated opportunity. Sometimes these opportunities are offered by regulations, but other times it is these errors they possess that allow gaps in order to build realities that are beyond their rigidness. Maximum height, neighbouring buildings, clearances, façade alignments, allowed program..., usually control laws imposed in the city, sometimes becoming a mechanism of domination. Rules, which previous to their operation, are believed to be closed, logical and impassable but once in service begin to fail. The results do not go as planned, and words are interpreted differently so the user starts to use these errors as an escape route from them.
After presenting these five regions related to architectural systems and that simultaneously somehow enclose the positive outlook that sometimes culture offers we should be more specific and pose the following question:
How has the error been and can be productive in Architecture?
To answer to these five contexts described and customary in the architectural task, five response “chapters” have been created. Answers, in which the results of this error do not bring shame to Architecture, but encourage and reinforce its use and experimentation with it. A way of organising information where time is not a mark of chronological linearity but the search, back and forth, for the maturity of a concept.