On Monuments
§1.	Unlike a circle, the main characteristic of a cycle is its repetition. A cycle does not become one the moment it goes back to its starting point, but when it repeats itself. In this sense, we can accurately say that here is never such thing as an 'original' cycle. Every cycle is a repetition of itself. However, in order for us to recognize it as such, a cycle has to leave a mark of its repetition. The cyclical leaving its mark on the linear is time leaving its trace on space. Nature has many ways of leaving the mark of each of its cycles, but Culture has only one: Architecture. That is what ancient cultures meant when they called Architecture the art of hierarchy and, furthermore, why they could not think of architecture but in terms of the leaving (and notice that I am talking about leaving monuments, instead of constructing them) of monuments. In this sense, any art which builds monuments is, therefore, ultimately architectural.
§2.	Monuments are the traces of the cycles passed. On the one hand, we recognize the cycles, because of the marks they have left, which in the realm of human existence means the monuments they left behind. On the other, we recognize monuments because we are still in (another repetition of) the same cycle they were built. Furthermore, recognizing a monument (as such) is nothing else but to recognize oneself being in the same cycle of those who left it. In other words, we understand monuments because we can relate our time to the time they were built. Because we can recognize both as the same. Because we can recognize our present events in themselves, and realize that they are not present nor past but belonging to another regime of events: not the linear but the cyclical. Not the linear time we 'construct' in our stories and 'reconstruct' in our Histories, but the 'vital' time we live in. We construct History out of monuments, because they both belong to the realm of the linear: the realm not of 'lived' events but of 'dated' events.
§3.	To build a monument is to leave a mark of the 'unoriginality' of our times. We build monuments to date events, to tell (people in another presumely future- time) that what is happening to us is happening (also, once again) now. Architecture lays at the beginning and the end of cycles, because it joins both regimes of time: cyclical and linear. To build a monument is a human event which, as such, belongs to the cycle in which it takes place. The built monument, on the other hand, in order to date the event of its construction, detaches itself from it and falls into the linear as a mark of the difference between one and the other.
		Spring 1996. Bloomington, Indiana. Axel A. Barceló A.