The architect Francisco Javier Seguí de la Riva graduated from Madrid’s Technical School of Architecture (ETSAM) in 1964, and has been a Doctor of Architecture since 1966. Since 1974 he has been a Professor of architectural forms analysis at the school. He received a special mention of teaching excellence at the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 2010. The architect develops a practice of architectonic space design founded on the creative imagination. Liberated from its technical function, design dovetails into a kind of graphic research that is close to geometric abstraction. His work has been presented in various venues including at the ZKM | Media Museum of Karlsruhe (2008- 2009), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid (2009-2010) and the MACBA in Barcelona (2012).
"We started in 1968. We were very much interested in Situationism but we were fascinated by the algorithmic structure that brought computers to life. After accepting that graphical representation could be understood as a set of restrictions on a strictly defined generating system, we became interested in procedures that could produce low-probability configurations.
Scenes functioning as cancellations, as alterations of a general law.
Some of us explored this environment whilst our companions degraded initial images (such as G. Searle's works), traced figures using different computers (JM Yturralde), or invented altering functions that they blocked randomly (serendipity).
The use of computers reinforced the formative meaning of our work and led us to understand that all graphic and fine art was a more or less regulated process of filling in a chain that was then partly deleted. Following precise patterns or unexpected impulses.
We pursued the two active moments – in one and the same learning process.
A theory, a law, a chain that thickens until all is black. A chain that fills with units that, as they grow, become shapeless until the entire plane becomes denser. And in the midst of this process, an interference that empties a part of the chain (randomly or using a geometric form) and stops the process of unit growth. This mode of operation (formative art) was related to the proposals of active dis-occupancy of space (J. Oteiza, 1957) and to the understanding of the work as a progressive deployment of "figurality” (Formativity by L. Pareyson, 1960).
Looking back, this adventure we experienced between 1968 and 1974, may have given light to no spectacular discovery, but it taught us that the working artist is immersed in a partially planned process that leads him to an environment of infinite attempts at adding and suppressing, scheduling and alterating, that only culminates in the abandonment of the work, in order to commence a new experience that is similar to the fortuitous, the arbitrary, a void open to all action."
Francisco Javier Seguí de la Riva
