Locura. The Architect of Madness Part 1 Dissertation 2003 Francisco De Asis Checa Romero University of Greenwich | UK "Locura: the architect of madness is a piece both philosophically and politically phisical. The text reasonates within the reader in a multivoiced manner, as the various perspectives of seeing and being are exposed. The cryptic progressions of style; formal, poetic, personal, enlightened, all take the reader through the rises and faals of coincidence.the work consciously stands for its own kind of poetry; an architectural structure where words also form a building block of their own. i explored the text as a body idea with a scientific flavour in mind. we are intuitively aware of the notion that not even science can lead to certainly, and yet that its craving for truth is the best humanity has got. Architecture thus emerges as a concept, not just a solid mass, but an always wavering line, blurring between the microcosmic and macrocosmic experience" Phenomenological wanderings and happenings open up a rich seam for "Curro" which intertwined with his design project. Francisco created a wall that was a boundary between madness and sanity. The institution that travelled through became for Francisco a place to dwell. His analytical programme for examining the genetics of madness culminating in his repeating machine. Francisco’s examined the journey inside and outside a psychiatric institution in Madrid and questions his identity with the help of analysis. The analysis: material, institutional and phenomenological, was applied to Francisco’s home city Melilla a Spanish fortified city on a rocky pennsula on the North African coast. In his home city the institutional sites of hospital, library, and lighthouse are situated over the key access points to the labyrinthine caves inhabited by Francisco’s world of architectures of rock, steel, plaster, mirror and water. With time clicking away, mechanical staircases were inhabited by the minds of patients and vice-versa. His drawings and suitcase reveal his new identity inserted under the fortified rock peninsula, a shelter from the world.Ed Frith - design tutor.