Introduction

Abstract

A deprofessionalized architect, a Mexican of Swiss origin, a generous teacher of many generations, an itinerant professor and a tireless walker, Jean Robert was a man who always imagined himself in dialogue with his neighbors and who always kept his feet rooted in the ground he walked on. He has been described as a shrewd thinker who traveled complex paths with simple words, with encyclopedic capacity and a humble, vernacular attitude. One could say that his humility somehow hindered his own renown, but at the same time it must be said that precisely this trait of his character gave his thought the concreteness, elasticity and openness it expresses. Humility—as a feeling and consequent behavior characterized by awareness of one’s own limits and by detachment from any form of excessive pride and self-assurance—allowed him to open himself to a radical critique of industrial and capitalist modernity, conceived as an ethical gesture grounded in a self-critique of one’s own behaviors and personal stances, within the collectivities with which one lives and on the concrete ground one walks on. It is a critique that we could describe as a practice of “critical self-critique” of the modern capitalist subjectivity that, whether we like it or not, we embody in our everyday actions.