The man who places something real and material outside of himself effects the transition from an idea, or an inner reality, to a thing, or an external material reality.

In this process of materializing an idea or inner image into a thing, the architect responds not only to a need for usefulness, but also to an idea of beauty.

The relationship which the architect thus establishes with the preexistent or, more broadly, with the natural world takes the form of a dynamic whereby the proposition of adding something new to that which already exists implies a dimension of transformation which, as is well known, combines the destruction and the elimination of something with the introduction into the world of some other thing that did not exist before.

A conflict may arise as such beauty destroys that which is already, and which contains within itself elements of life. This might lead to a mellifluous compromise whereby man renounces the quest for beauty, determining his own death for the sake of that which already exists.

The courage of images insinuates the suspicion that human reality is created through the destruction of the outer world, which inevitably brings about its own destruction; to do nothing leads to a suicide in the attempt to avert an existence based on suicide.

The hang glider which supposedly could save us from plunging into a fragmentation of bodies is reason, which governs and controls us through its relentless hampering of the development of an energy which is the origin and source of death.

The drama of failing to see, in the act of constructing, the renewal of something that necessarily gets lost leads one to fear the beauty inherent in images on the grounds that such beauty incorporates the arrogance of the elimination of others.

Architecture, however, is not painting and sculpture, which are abstracted from one's relationship with others; houses are built for human beings, houses are built for living animals and for plants of the vegetable kingdom. Thus, the constraint to relate to the world and to others tempers the violence of the beautiful image. The beauty of a curved wall simply enslaves the inhabitants of the house; it compels them to adapt, to pay for beauty the price of an uncomfortable movement.

The architect's reason is fractured in his attempt to reconcile things that perhaps are incompatible: the realization of an identity as an artist who imagines things to make without regard for their usefulness, and as an artisan who has sold his craft to survive and - if he does not sell himself to other human beings who want and purchase his hands - who becomes, over and above an artist-architect who draws, an artisan-architect who creates images only when and in the very moment in which he makes things.

The architect thus constructs even before he imagines, in his direct and material relationship with his surroundings and with nature; unlike the artist, he does not imagine in a state of separation from others and nature.

He places the brick in the grass and the beam by the tree and, in composing and harmonizing things and elements which he chooses, he makes the image emerge from what he has composed manually, without having dreamt of beauty beforehand.

A more than courageous proposition of investing one's being in doing architecture to revindicate a freedom that animals and plants, which do not construct, do not possess. A freedom that tells us of a continuous risk of failure and defeat.

We do not know whether our hands may drop, losing their energy, whenever we set about making something; not having established a programme beforehand, not having sketched a drawing, we are left in the permanent risk of a sudden impotence, an unforseen void or an unexpected confusion.

The courage of images is perhaps nothing more than the challenge of proposing, without any experience or foundation whatsoever, the certainty of an image of one's own that might not even exist, or might turn out to perish soon after being born.