Péter Janesch
Born in 1953, Budapest. Exported as an “architect”.
Manifesto ↓
We should be back at spontaneous beauty again, at non-design. Which by far doesn’t stand for ‘anything goes’, but for solving one thing after the other. To the highest standard available then and there, in the most plausible manner. What is plausible then and there can’t be determined in advance. It hovers in a matrix of innumerable questions and possibilities until the last moment. The most in the smallest space. And representation – as intention and idea – never even comes up.
I would like to briefly call your attention to two issues. One is not professional, but increasingly important: be brave and learn to distinguish between true and false news! For your own balanced safety. It is a terribly difficult, tedious and lonely task. Because it’s neither a matter of faith, nor of alignment, it is, unfortunately, something you can only do alone. In this respect, it is similar to creative work. You’re groping in the dark, trying to piece together the extraneous details of different scales, in doubt, until you feel yes, this is probably possible, it’s continuous, whole, it looks back, etc. – things are in place. I found the perfect analogy for the situation. In the well-known (perhaps just superficially known) allegory of the cave in his Republic, Plato compares the truth of philosophical cognition with the captivity of ordinary consciousness. This is also a fascinating spatial situation – especially for architects with good orientation skills. Look into it, don’t watch the projection chained down! And in the end: “And if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. No question.” Crazy, isn’t it? The other topical subject is AI, Synthelligence, the assistant or rather: AssIstant. This too is a forking path: either a zero-sum game, where gains are made at each other’s expense, or a win-win scenario. Choose intelligent cooperation! Power to open source algorithms! This mathematical language is the first to actually do what it says. The level of versatility and detail is up to you too. Teach them as if they were gifted children! They will outshine you eventually, which is very exciting, but they will also accomplish what is by now an inhuman amount of work. What remains, which is again something you can only do alone, is the unrepeatable poetry of it all. And that (haha!) is more than anything. – Péter Janesch
Career path ↓
Although Péter Janesch comes from a family of architects, he says he is the most surprised that he ended up in this career. He started his studies in interior design at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1973, where he graduated under the tutelage of architect Péter Reimholz. He has designed single-family homes and public buildings, he has entered numerous competitions, so why he would be considered a career-changing architect is a legitimate question. A key milestone in Péter’s non-architectural career was his curatorial position for the Hungarian pavilion of the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In his exhibition From Beauty to Beauty and Back Again he focused on three forms of architectural beauty – spontaneous, intentional and invisible beauty. He wanted to create a form of therapy. “To show, to make it clear: just as there is a functional cosmos behind involuntary beauty, so is there one behind the failure of intentional beauty, only you have to look at it from a distance.” According to Péter, the highest level of architecture is conceived in a system that is not made possible by the current state of the profession. As he phrased in his inaugural lecture Escaping the Facade. System-island at the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in 2017: “Architecture, too, is a language. Architecture is a language just like fine art, music and literature. And these languages have their limitations. The fact that everyone has to do creative work under the constant pressure to innovate guarantees that this language will eventually be exhausted. I have a feeling that we are now in a period when architecture has exhausted the possibilities that are rationally, or even beyond rationally, at its disposal. However, we find that we are living in malfunctioning or entirely dysfunctional systems, which are, in fact, increasingly interconnected. Addressing these neighbourhood-city-region scale clusters may be the new direction of architecture.” In 2011, Peter formally relinquished his license as an architectural planner to leave the language of architecture behind in order to use other means to interpret and describe systems that not only affect architecture directly, but have implications beyond it. His work, character and presence are a reference point for his masters, students and contemporaries alike.
Péter Janesch
Born in 1953, Budapest. Exported as an “architect”.
Manifesto ↓
We should be back at spontaneous beauty again, at non-design. Which by far doesn’t stand for ‘anything goes’, but for solving one thing after the other. To the highest standard available then and there, in the most plausible manner. What is plausible then and there can’t be determined in advance. It hovers in a matrix of innumerable questions and possibilities until the last moment. The most in the smallest space. And representation – as intention and idea – never even comes up.
I would like to briefly call your attention to two issues. One is not professional, but increasingly important: be brave and learn to distinguish between true and false news! For your own balanced safety. It is a terribly difficult, tedious and lonely task. Because it’s neither a matter of faith, nor of alignment, it is, unfortunately, something you can only do alone. In this respect, it is similar to creative work. You’re groping in the dark, trying to piece together the extraneous details of different scales, in doubt, until you feel yes, this is probably possible, it’s continuous, whole, it looks back, etc. – things are in place. I found the perfect analogy for the situation. In the well-known (perhaps just superficially known) allegory of the cave in his Republic, Plato compares the truth of philosophical cognition with the captivity of ordinary consciousness. This is also a fascinating spatial situation – especially for architects with good orientation skills. Look into it, don’t watch the projection chained down! And in the end: “And if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. No question.” Crazy, isn’t it? The other topical subject is AI, Synthelligence, the assistant or rather: AssIstant. This too is a forking path: either a zero-sum game, where gains are made at each other’s expense, or a win-win scenario. Choose intelligent cooperation! Power to open source algorithms! This mathematical language is the first to actually do what it says. The level of versatility and detail is up to you too. Teach them as if they were gifted children! They will outshine you eventually, which is very exciting, but they will also accomplish what is by now an inhuman amount of work. What remains, which is again something you can only do alone, is the unrepeatable poetry of it all. And that (haha!) is more than anything. – Péter Janesch
Career path ↓
Although Péter Janesch comes from a family of architects, he says he is the most surprised that he ended up in this career. He started his studies in interior design at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1973, where he graduated under the tutelage of architect Péter Reimholz. He has designed single-family homes and public buildings, he has entered numerous competitions, so why he would be considered a career-changing architect is a legitimate question. A key milestone in Péter’s non-architectural career was his curatorial position for the Hungarian pavilion of the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In his exhibition From Beauty to Beauty and Back Again he focused on three forms of architectural beauty – spontaneous, intentional and invisible beauty. He wanted to create a form of therapy. “To show, to make it clear: just as there is a functional cosmos behind involuntary beauty, so is there one behind the failure of intentional beauty, only you have to look at it from a distance.” According to Péter, the highest level of architecture is conceived in a system that is not made possible by the current state of the profession. As he phrased in his inaugural lecture Escaping the Facade. System-island at the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in 2017: “Architecture, too, is a language. Architecture is a language just like fine art, music and literature. And these languages have their limitations. The fact that everyone has to do creative work under the constant pressure to innovate guarantees that this language will eventually be exhausted. I have a feeling that we are now in a period when architecture has exhausted the possibilities that are rationally, or even beyond rationally, at its disposal. However, we find that we are living in malfunctioning or entirely dysfunctional systems, which are, in fact, increasingly interconnected. Addressing these neighbourhood-city-region scale clusters may be the new direction of architecture.” In 2011, Peter formally relinquished his license as an architectural planner to leave the language of architecture behind in order to use other means to interpret and describe systems that not only affect architecture directly, but have implications beyond it. His work, character and presence are a reference point for his masters, students and contemporaries alike.
Péter Janesch
Born in 1953, Budapest. Exported as an “architect”.
Manifesto ↓
We should be back at spontaneous beauty again, at non-design. Which by far doesn’t stand for ‘anything goes’, but for solving one thing after the other. To the highest standard available then and there, in the most plausible manner. What is plausible then and there can’t be determined in advance. It hovers in a matrix of innumerable questions and possibilities until the last moment. The most in the smallest space. And representation – as intention and idea – never even comes up.
I would like to briefly call your attention to two issues. One is not professional, but increasingly important: be brave and learn to distinguish between true and false news! For your own balanced safety. It is a terribly difficult, tedious and lonely task. Because it’s neither a matter of faith, nor of alignment, it is, unfortunately, something you can only do alone. In this respect, it is similar to creative work. You’re groping in the dark, trying to piece together the extraneous details of different scales, in doubt, until you feel yes, this is probably possible, it’s continuous, whole, it looks back, etc. – things are in place. I found the perfect analogy for the situation. In the well-known (perhaps just superficially known) allegory of the cave in his Republic, Plato compares the truth of philosophical cognition with the captivity of ordinary consciousness. This is also a fascinating spatial situation – especially for architects with good orientation skills. Look into it, don’t watch the projection chained down! And in the end: “And if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. No question.” Crazy, isn’t it? The other topical subject is AI, Synthelligence, the assistant or rather: AssIstant. This too is a forking path: either a zero-sum game, where gains are made at each other’s expense, or a win-win scenario. Choose intelligent cooperation! Power to open source algorithms! This mathematical language is the first to actually do what it says. The level of versatility and detail is up to you too. Teach them as if they were gifted children! They will outshine you eventually, which is very exciting, but they will also accomplish what is by now an inhuman amount of work. What remains, which is again something you can only do alone, is the unrepeatable poetry of it all. And that (haha!) is more than anything. – Péter Janesch
Career path ↓
Although Péter Janesch comes from a family of architects, he says he is the most surprised that he ended up in this career. He started his studies in interior design at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1973, where he graduated under the tutelage of architect Péter Reimholz. He has designed single-family homes and public buildings, he has entered numerous competitions, so why he would be considered a career-changing architect is a legitimate question. A key milestone in Péter’s non-architectural career was his curatorial position for the Hungarian pavilion of the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In his exhibition From Beauty to Beauty and Back Again he focused on three forms of architectural beauty – spontaneous, intentional and invisible beauty. He wanted to create a form of therapy. “To show, to make it clear: just as there is a functional cosmos behind involuntary beauty, so is there one behind the failure of intentional beauty, only you have to look at it from a distance.” According to Péter, the highest level of architecture is conceived in a system that is not made possible by the current state of the profession. As he phrased in his inaugural lecture Escaping the Facade. System-island at the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in 2017: “Architecture, too, is a language. Architecture is a language just like fine art, music and literature. And these languages have their limitations. The fact that everyone has to do creative work under the constant pressure to innovate guarantees that this language will eventually be exhausted. I have a feeling that we are now in a period when architecture has exhausted the possibilities that are rationally, or even beyond rationally, at its disposal. However, we find that we are living in malfunctioning or entirely dysfunctional systems, which are, in fact, increasingly interconnected. Addressing these neighbourhood-city-region scale clusters may be the new direction of architecture.” In 2011, Peter formally relinquished his license as an architectural planner to leave the language of architecture behind in order to use other means to interpret and describe systems that not only affect architecture directly, but have implications beyond it. His work, character and presence are a reference point for his masters, students and contemporaries alike.
Péter Janesch
Born in 1953, Budapest. Exported as an “architect”.
Manifesto ↓
We should be back at spontaneous beauty again, at non-design. Which by far doesn’t stand for ‘anything goes’, but for solving one thing after the other. To the highest standard available then and there, in the most plausible manner. What is plausible then and there can’t be determined in advance. It hovers in a matrix of innumerable questions and possibilities until the last moment. The most in the smallest space. And representation – as intention and idea – never even comes up.
I would like to briefly call your attention to two issues. One is not professional, but increasingly important: be brave and learn to distinguish between true and false news! For your own balanced safety. It is a terribly difficult, tedious and lonely task. Because it’s neither a matter of faith, nor of alignment, it is, unfortunately, something you can only do alone. In this respect, it is similar to creative work. You’re groping in the dark, trying to piece together the extraneous details of different scales, in doubt, until you feel yes, this is probably possible, it’s continuous, whole, it looks back, etc. – things are in place. I found the perfect analogy for the situation. In the well-known (perhaps just superficially known) allegory of the cave in his Republic, Plato compares the truth of philosophical cognition with the captivity of ordinary consciousness. This is also a fascinating spatial situation – especially for architects with good orientation skills. Look into it, don’t watch the projection chained down! And in the end: “And if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. No question.” Crazy, isn’t it? The other topical subject is AI, Synthelligence, the assistant or rather: AssIstant. This too is a forking path: either a zero-sum game, where gains are made at each other’s expense, or a win-win scenario. Choose intelligent cooperation! Power to open source algorithms! This mathematical language is the first to actually do what it says. The level of versatility and detail is up to you too. Teach them as if they were gifted children! They will outshine you eventually, which is very exciting, but they will also accomplish what is by now an inhuman amount of work. What remains, which is again something you can only do alone, is the unrepeatable poetry of it all. And that (haha!) is more than anything. – Péter Janesch
Career path ↓
Although Péter Janesch comes from a family of architects, he says he is the most surprised that he ended up in this career. He started his studies in interior design at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1973, where he graduated under the tutelage of architect Péter Reimholz. He has designed single-family homes and public buildings, he has entered numerous competitions, so why he would be considered a career-changing architect is a legitimate question. A key milestone in Péter’s non-architectural career was his curatorial position for the Hungarian pavilion of the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In his exhibition From Beauty to Beauty and Back Again he focused on three forms of architectural beauty – spontaneous, intentional and invisible beauty. He wanted to create a form of therapy. “To show, to make it clear: just as there is a functional cosmos behind involuntary beauty, so is there one behind the failure of intentional beauty, only you have to look at it from a distance.” According to Péter, the highest level of architecture is conceived in a system that is not made possible by the current state of the profession. As he phrased in his inaugural lecture Escaping the Facade. System-island at the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in 2017: “Architecture, too, is a language. Architecture is a language just like fine art, music and literature. And these languages have their limitations. The fact that everyone has to do creative work under the constant pressure to innovate guarantees that this language will eventually be exhausted. I have a feeling that we are now in a period when architecture has exhausted the possibilities that are rationally, or even beyond rationally, at its disposal. However, we find that we are living in malfunctioning or entirely dysfunctional systems, which are, in fact, increasingly interconnected. Addressing these neighbourhood-city-region scale clusters may be the new direction of architecture.” In 2011, Peter formally relinquished his license as an architectural planner to leave the language of architecture behind in order to use other means to interpret and describe systems that not only affect architecture directly, but have implications beyond it. His work, character and presence are a reference point for his masters, students and contemporaries alike.
Péter Janesch
Born in 1953, Budapest. Exported as an “architect”.
Manifesto ↓
We should be back at spontaneous beauty again, at non-design. Which by far doesn’t stand for ‘anything goes’, but for solving one thing after the other. To the highest standard available then and there, in the most plausible manner. What is plausible then and there can’t be determined in advance. It hovers in a matrix of innumerable questions and possibilities until the last moment. The most in the smallest space. And representation – as intention and idea – never even comes up.
I would like to briefly call your attention to two issues. One is not professional, but increasingly important: be brave and learn to distinguish between true and false news! For your own balanced safety. It is a terribly difficult, tedious and lonely task. Because it’s neither a matter of faith, nor of alignment, it is, unfortunately, something you can only do alone. In this respect, it is similar to creative work. You’re groping in the dark, trying to piece together the extraneous details of different scales, in doubt, until you feel yes, this is probably possible, it’s continuous, whole, it looks back, etc. – things are in place. I found the perfect analogy for the situation. In the well-known (perhaps just superficially known) allegory of the cave in his Republic, Plato compares the truth of philosophical cognition with the captivity of ordinary consciousness. This is also a fascinating spatial situation – especially for architects with good orientation skills. Look into it, don’t watch the projection chained down! And in the end: “And if any one tried to loose another and lead him up to the light, let them only catch the offender, and they would put him to death. No question.” Crazy, isn’t it? The other topical subject is AI, Synthelligence, the assistant or rather: AssIstant. This too is a forking path: either a zero-sum game, where gains are made at each other’s expense, or a win-win scenario. Choose intelligent cooperation! Power to open source algorithms! This mathematical language is the first to actually do what it says. The level of versatility and detail is up to you too. Teach them as if they were gifted children! They will outshine you eventually, which is very exciting, but they will also accomplish what is by now an inhuman amount of work. What remains, which is again something you can only do alone, is the unrepeatable poetry of it all. And that (haha!) is more than anything. – Péter Janesch
Career path ↓
Although Péter Janesch comes from a family of architects, he says he is the most surprised that he ended up in this career. He started his studies in interior design at the Hungarian Academy of Applied Arts in 1973, where he graduated under the tutelage of architect Péter Reimholz. He has designed single-family homes and public buildings, he has entered numerous competitions, so why he would be considered a career-changing architect is a legitimate question. A key milestone in Péter’s non-architectural career was his curatorial position for the Hungarian pavilion of the 2004 Venice Biennale of Architecture. In his exhibition From Beauty to Beauty and Back Again he focused on three forms of architectural beauty – spontaneous, intentional and invisible beauty. He wanted to create a form of therapy. “To show, to make it clear: just as there is a functional cosmos behind involuntary beauty, so is there one behind the failure of intentional beauty, only you have to look at it from a distance.” According to Péter, the highest level of architecture is conceived in a system that is not made possible by the current state of the profession. As he phrased in his inaugural lecture Escaping the Facade. System-island at the Széchenyi Academy of Letters and Arts in 2017: “Architecture, too, is a language. Architecture is a language just like fine art, music and literature. And these languages have their limitations. The fact that everyone has to do creative work under the constant pressure to innovate guarantees that this language will eventually be exhausted. I have a feeling that we are now in a period when architecture has exhausted the possibilities that are rationally, or even beyond rationally, at its disposal. However, we find that we are living in malfunctioning or entirely dysfunctional systems, which are, in fact, increasingly interconnected. Addressing these neighbourhood-city-region scale clusters may be the new direction of architecture.” In 2011, Peter formally relinquished his license as an architectural planner to leave the language of architecture behind in order to use other means to interpret and describe systems that not only affect architecture directly, but have implications beyond it. His work, character and presence are a reference point for his masters, students and contemporaries alike.