I think it is more than time to clear my desk of a pile of magazines that has been waiting for some kind of mention, some kind of memory, before entering an archive where they will lay buried under a growing layer of micro-dust for many years, before they will eventually be again discovered by some visual archeologist from the future…

With distribution systems being what they are, one absurd goal of my traveling is to dig for new publications to incorporate into my by now impossible-to-catalogue magazine collection – alas, one of the reasons why moving to a new place would be considerably painful…

So what did I gullibly gathered this time?

First, there is New Geographies, the new Harvard-based journal, the collectible issue 00 of which I traded for Beyond #01. Since we are here and there touching on the same themes – and sometimes sharing the same authors – this was fair trade and the beginning of an hopefuly fulfilling exchange…

In New York I grabbed Evolo and The Play Ground.

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Evolo is another architectural magazine somehow coming from the American Ivy League. That is, it is created by a group of ex-students from Columbia that suddenly discovered that there was a crisis out there and thus what the world needed now was yet another architectural magazine.

The curious thing is that, while the “famous architects” housing projects that make the supposed appeal of the publication seem like more of the same, and thus dull and unrevealing, some of the contributions and smaller stories do uncover that there’s something coming off from this growing presence of South American students in major architectural schools around the world. A hint of what I’ve been calling post-colonial trans-geographical knowledge exchanges… But I’ll keep that question for a future post.

The Play Ground is another matter altogether. A “celebration of family”(!) in times of “separatism and isolation,” as the editorial has it. While coming from London, it is wildly amazing that such a familiar endeavor finds its way into a cornershop in Soho… But then again you open it and you come across the amazing work of Terunobu Fujimori and all of it suddenly kind of makes sense.…

Also the Freestyle Magazine has quite an unbelievable theme, considering that it too is making it to the world’s mag circuit. Yes, it is dedicated to Frisbies and it even comes in the form of one. Plus, you get the real thing as a gift, that is, the mag comes in a real frisbee ready to take to the beach.

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After Karen, and other magazines dedicated to nothing in special (just like Seinfeld), imaginations will have to be stretched to come out with yet another fresh perspective for a new publication.

Back to London, the zinorama city, the Publish and Be Damned event proved to be a small paradise to a premiere issue collector. It was indeed one of those moments in which the fiercest gatherer had to refrain from an engulfing zinappetite… Typically stressed by the so-called syndrome of overabundance, …. I kept to only four #01 titles.

Proximity, is an art magazine from Chicago that apart from graphically impeccable seems to reflect a certain conditions of our times. Most of the articles in the publication are more concerned with the art world – its context and its phenomena, the episodes from the everyday life of artists and the anecdotes of collectors and artophiles – than with artistic objects themselves.

And this detail, being somewhat more disguised or subdued in other publications, seems to make a lot of sense in an increasingly reflexive world. It is only logical that today you should go to art or design or architecture school not truly to understand how art or architecture are made but more so to learn how their respective worlds function. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was never so up-to-date as today.

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Other art premières present at the event were Monika, a small-sized arts journal from London with a first issue that focuses on anonymity; Corridor 8, a big-sized art journal from Manchester with a first issue featuring artist and writer’s takes on the idea of supercity; and Garageland, a medium-sized arts journal also from London which started in 2006 with a take on machismo.    ………………………………………………..

Finally, in Amsterdam, I still had the courage to fill my overweighed bag with yet another first issue: on this occasion, a novelty from a Parisian “brand” that has already come up with four or five different titles.       Now it is time to welcome the again stylish and exquisite Les Cahiers Purple – a new yearly edition, which for its 2010 première, puts together stories and artwork that are more than enough to make you go through the whole winter.

Who said there was a publishing crisis going on? aasss ffffff ssssoosod sslssms. And with so much stuff out there, how can one ever get bored?

…

Léopold Lambert, from the excellent boiteaoutils, kindly invited me to contribute to his one month of architectural manifestos and this was the best little darned thing I could come up with…

It is exactly 200 words – as asked. Should I say more?

…

A personal manifesto must start with a personal statement. ………………………… Mine is this: I’ve become addicted to hypertext. And this is the magnifying lens through which I look at architecture’s augmented reality. With architecture being a cultural toolkit for permanently re-dressing the builtscape that.. surround us, today’s architecture can only go beyond itself.

Architecture is like the man whose head expanded. Architecture is not only dependent, nor otherwise oriented. As it asks for its own expanded field, architecture rejects the idea of its own autonomy. I claimed for the interdisciplinary before it became mainstream; I advocated diversity when it wasn’t yet such a daily fix; I’ve investigated architecture as urban practice, ……… as open-source, and as performance… With ideology gone I reflected upon resistance and the ultimate incarnation of Marxism. But after all that jazz how can one devise a non-retroactive manifesto?

Architecture will no longer be about form making. Fuck parametrics. Architecture is and will be about conceptual groundbreaking. And architecture intelligence will no longer be provided by a declining star-system, but rather by emergent networks of alternative practices, community projects and architecture NGOs. For many, only now the language of architecture starts to be a benign virus from outer space.

Postmodernism’s predicaments were to bloom beyond the imagination of their most daring thinkers.

Today, the worlds of architecture and urbanism are ruled by the logic of everything goes and they move forward according to the whims of creative practitioners in search of the yet undiscovered original flavour or form.             And there’s basically nothing wrong with this.

Via Miguel Santos on FaceBook

One may say that randomness is as good a leitmotif as any other to plan our urban future. After all, both historically and biologically that has been the main factor through which most cities have grown. As more than one story will tell you in the next issue of Beyond, Feng Shui is still highly regarded as a design tool…

As such, the Re-Imagining Chinatown experiment by urbanist(-cum-artist?) James Rojas is as good as any other to come up with city form – or it is even better since it bears the extra advantages of being a “participatory” process     and of giving everybody its share of the action.

Image via Common People (just because), via Fifth Floor Gallery.

If the exhibition was well-promoted and had good mass-appeal, and if plan would get addressed beyond the mere wish to cause a deemed critical reflection, nobody would be able to complain after the fact since (1) they got their bit in and enjoyed it, and (2) if they didn’t, they did have the chance to participate in the design.

It is democracy as usual – and democracy as it increasingly affects judgements of taste in the architectural field.

I had said it before, but I felt I needed to stress this notion conveniently: as IABR’s Open City makes clear, emergence and informality are definitely around (and around) – certainly making me want to push forward once again on the Emergent Megalopolis film series…

And so the consequences of thousands of architects in the West fleeing from the “crisis” in the West towards an increasingly challenging Third World are also starting to make its appearance in the field of architecture…

From the look of things, the architectural star-system is soon going to be substituted for NGOs and humanitarian organizations as the most interesting providers of food for thought in the field of architectural intelligence.

Young architects are systematically dumped and trashed at your doorstep? Yes! But, fortunately, they are also finally realizing that they can stop complaining and just export themselves to places where the need for architectural skills is much more crucial than back home.

As we repeatedly hear that in 2050 75% of the world’s population will be living in cities –with most of these being totally deprived of minimum conditions for living– it is certainly good for the whole of the human race that this shift is happening and architects are not only looking for just being the new cool ass.

The Open City exhibition was quite effectively driven to embrace both of these emergent realities: that of the old-new urban realities and that of the shift of the profession towards an architecture destined to deal with radical needs and a profound scarcity of resources.

Like someone was saying, if economical stagnation is here to stay, maybe this is only a testing ground for our own future urban reality – as Bruce Sterling magnificently describes it in White Fungus, his contribution to Beyond #01.

I think it’s about time to say something more about the notion of Performance Architecture… Alas, this is the title of another of those curatorial projects that I was keeping on hold and that I’ve now decided to deliver “open-source”…

Perhaps this is another of those pedagogical stories about free-lance curating. The idea, originated during a discussion in Basel, was initially proposed to the then recently appointed direktorin of an Hamburg Triennale that I guess has itself disappeared.

The project was discussed with the CCA’s Mirko Zardini, but there the recession put a halt to it. Then it got entangled into the internal politics of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and also there it was denied its coming into being…

Lately, it was also proposed for the Asturias’ Laboral, which seemed like quite an adequate venue for it, but after a warm welcome by Rosina Gómez-Baeza, silence from the institution became quite “deafening” (as we say in Portuguese politics).

As I believe there is a proper time for projects to make their impact, particularly in a world regulated by ever tighter trends & fads, I think it’s time for the idea to be exposed. Moreover, the term is coming up already in very diverse contexts, possibly making it dejá vu by the time anyone will accomplish a show on it… (Although, at some point, I am sure someone  will make an exhibition about it.)

The fact is, anyway, that one of the people who was present at the Basel discussion made it for herself and has managed to already create an event on the subject. And I’m glad she did. This was the Performing Architecture event last week at Madrid’s Matadero, as curated by Ariadna Cantis.

However, as you may read here at more length, this wasn’t exactly my idea of the notion of Performance Architecture…

Matadero’s event certainly addresses some of the protagonists I am looking at. But more than the performing arts, theatrical approach to enacting an architectural discourse within the city, I’m interested in the relationships between architecture and Performance Art.

Over the last two decades minimalism and pop art have influenced architecture with a delay of about 30 years. Now, it is the moment for the performance practices of the Seventies to make their comeback into the realm of architecture and urban intervention.

In its relation to art, architecture was quite in sync with the avant-gardes during the first decades of the XXth century, only to gain an increasing delay in regards to art’s progressive role after the Sixties. During the Sixties, even if marginally, there were still groups that were perfectly synchronized with the Pop movement, namely in the UK and Italy. Gordon Matta-Clarke, on the other hand, signals in the Seventies a definitive departure of the rebelling artist from architecture’s increasingly specialized and technicist realm.

When the Post-Modern movement explodes, architecture is certainly on the forefront… but as the leader of what Hal Foster called the movement’s reactionary side. Postmodernist architecture was regressive – and so were the immediate reactions to it. Decon is not much more than a return to Constructivism in philosopher’s garments, and even Rem Koolhaas is just cleverly –and retroactively– looking at the avant-gardes, from Melnikov right onto Superstudio.

Minimalism in architecture eventually carried out the same sort of retroactive move, and does it by looking back at the very last movement before the most progressive strain of Postmodern art appears in Rauschenberg and others.

Now, what I’m trying to get at here is the fact that, while Performance Architecture is also unconsciously looking back to art history, it does so onto an artistic movement that had a highly conscious political role. And this creates a difference.

While Minimalism in architecture was quickly devoid of its critical, perceptive overtones, the practice of Performance Architecture is actually retaining the social, political and “body” discourse that characterized the art movement.   Which is highly positive, and only possible because its protagonists are not yet totally immersed in the commercial drive of today’s architecture.

This phenomenon creates the other distinctive aspect of what I’m addressing here – specially when other notions of performance in architecture are coming up in recent discourse, albeit addressing the “performativity” of architecture while directing it to economical and disciplinary efficiency.

While I also refer to “performativity” in the text I am now releasing online, I do it to precisely keep that notion at bay. And that is one reason why what I’m saying here is quintessentially different from what is coming up in David Leatherbarrow’s “Architecture Oriented otherwise.”

The inaugurating book of the obviously welcomed “Writing Matters” collection –from that other Ivy League publisher a.k.a Princeton Architectural Press– delivers the concept of analyzing architecture as a performative device rather than objectual production.

But while Leatherbarrow’s proposition is interesting and reflects important shifts in the way we should regard architecture, it also shows the typical flaw of current American theory.

While the notions put forward there are supposedly progressive, they also contains in themselves the trigger for their own “happy consumption” within a market model and an architectural regime that remains unquestioned…

Talking about small cities and big cities, I can’t resist telling you about my flashtrip to the Big Apple, as I was going my way to Boston…

I spent one night and one morning in New York. I nested right down at a good friend’s place in Brooklyn, where a barbecue was being held to signal a brief Indian Summer. Carlos Roque is actually an artist whose work I quite enjoy: it has that definite urbanite feeling that you get only from American cities…

Carlos Roque, Ryder, 2008, Acrylic and markers on canvas, 110 x 154 cm

Last time I was in New York, the dust was still settling around Ground Zero, making it a rather ghostly town with shopwindows covered in white. There was a strange depressive feeling around. Projects were being stopped everywhere.

This time, it felt like Spring. And it should. Walking along the newly opened High Line certainly gives you a new perspective of the city. In fact, a woman nearing 60, a typical New Yorker, couldn’t stop herself from addressing me on the wooden deck just to share with someone how wonderful this place felt to her.

The traffic disappears, city noise from the nearby Meatpack district fades away (at least on a Sunday morning…) and walking through those powerfull monoliths at second-floor level can turn into a reminiscence of I Am Legend… As usual, one could say, reality mimicks fiction…

The other obligatory visit this time was Kazuo Seijima’s New Museum, which artist friends were discussing over dinner as a most disappointing and non-happening museum, specially after all the expectations that had been built up around it.

With the museum closed during the morning I could only appreciate its urban setting and its alien appearance in the typical New York street scene… And there it certainly worked for me as a cool, abstract version of yet again our current obsession for stacking.

Other than Hugh Maaskaant, New York was ultimately the inspiration for Rem Koolhaas’s take on program stacking, back when he wrote Delirious New York. Now, it is curious, if not ironic, that this concept should go all the way around the world of architecture, only to come back to its original hometown as a formal strategy for a single piece of program.

Across some streets, some little characters are still trying to figure out what this may really mean.

Two of the best outcomes of flying away from home for a short-period are the possibility to hunt for the information being transmitted through the air of cities, and then, of course, to update on those crucial personal networks of people who are creating stuff that somehow relates to your interests.

While Beyond presentations in Harvard GSD and at the Architectural Association, in London, originated very positive and challenging echoes, the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale and its Open City proposal provided fertile ground to both of the aforementioned activities.

Firstly, let’s say that the openings and parties provided abundant opportunities to get acquainted to interesting newcomers, but also to build on friendships that are actually nurtured across years of events and happenings. And this, let me tell you, is an essential aspect to any self-regarding Biennale. Secondly, there were new contents to be scrutinized – which is not always true of this kind of organizations, even in the case of the bigger and more established events.

With its stress on community and cooperation driven projects, the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale was a perfect counterpart to the eager commercial drive and dislocated self-amazement that the London Design Week still emanates… In fact, in superficially sniffing l’essence of the two events, one cannot but wonder which one is indeed talking about our effective future…

The relevant fact is perhaps that the Rotterdam event managed to be a multicultural event in a small but multicultural city, while the LDW was only the “reflection on a golden eye” of a creative world relatively happy with itself and its own small dealings – that is, a monocultural event in a multicultural megalopolis.

And this is why, in London, I definitely preferred the amazing liveliness of Brick Lane on a sunny Sunday morning or an independent event like Publish and Be Damned – an alternative self-publishing magazine fair pointed to me by Elias Redstone from the Architectural Foundation…

As I am about to leave to Harvard GSD, the London AA, and the Rotterdam Biennale for Beyond’s first mini mini world-tour, I must leave here a compliment to my own city… (My newborn baby is already making me homesick!)

Last week in Lisbon was one of those fantastic moments in which an event, namely ExperimentaDesign, really catered for an international audience and created a special atmosphere and buzz in the city…

Still being quite periphereal to the main centres of knowledge production, Lisbon certainly needs that buzz… Tourists may be roaming about the city at all times but one needs more food for thought than that.

My modest contribution for Lisbon’s debate on Terreiro do Paço…Via Público.

In the midst of hard work I just had to make time for EXD09’s opening week.     And instead of being behind the scenes, it was now an immense pleasure not only to be ocasionally in the scene – at the Open Talks, with Nuno Artur Silva and Filipe Homem Fonseca – but specially to enjoy the very tight schedule of presentations and openings as a privileged spectator…

I must say it is quite good to stop being a cultural producer for a while and just enjoy what others put up with much hard effort… So, thank you guys both for the invitation and the 4 days of endless activity…

And this is not only about the great quality of the exhibitons and conferences. When you put together the fantastic weather with a good crowd – including top designers and the best design journalists from around the world – you get the sense of how pleasurable a socializing and networking event should be.

Good thing one can exchange ideas with the likes of Alejandro Aravena, Peter Saville, Oron Catts, Michael Horsham or Joseph Grima. Or to see already old time friends like Emily Campbell, Hans Maier-Achen, Max Bruinsma, or James Auger and Jimmy Loiseau…

In moments like this not only does one introduce the secrets of the city to new friends (like it was the case of Justin McGuirk from Icon), but one can also enjoy the rare opportunity of seeing his or her place through the eyes of others, thus being able to rediscover the pleasure of a chosen city…

My last post unveiled a little something about the project that is keeping me from updating this blog. Now, here is the first public announcement of a book that is actually making me feel quite proud.

Nada’s graphic design of the HP 06/08 book is finishing today and I can now disclose a dummy of how this is going to look like when it comes out of the press in about three weeks.

Why is this book leaving me proud? Because in its massive 384 pages (co-incidentally, the same number of built works submitted to the Mapei/Ordem dos Arquitectos “national selection,” from which 80 buildings of recent Portuguese architecture are here showcased) it also bears what I deem to be the first moment in a long time in which 8 critical essays offer a provocative balance of  what architects have been up to – or not – in Portugal.

The last time this sort of amount of critical perspectives on Portuguese architecture was put together was back in 2001, in Arquitectura Portuguesa Contemporânea 1991-2001. But at the time, I was amazed at how that volume was totally schizophrenic: the images were all about Portuguese architecture feeling good about itself, while the texts announced the doomsday of precisely the same reality.

Almost a decade after, what is the new balance?

You will have to wait for the book -to be published the 3rd of October on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name- but I may already advance that the critical views included here particularly address architecture’s presence in Portuguese society. And buildings and interventions of every kind are also shown as part of an unexpected diversity, specially when it regards to what we are used to talk about when we are talking about Portuguese architecture.

Although diversity is no longer unanimous and “identifiable”, it bears witness to a much more exhilarating scenario – one in which conservatism under the wing of the so-called “Portoguese school” is being left behind to open up this national production to a new, conceptually grounded, creolisation of architecture.

Now, reminding me of the classic Gillo Dorfles’ “Le Oscillazioni del Gusto“, this down here is what I would call a “breakthrough”… Like a neobaroque version of SANAA, but through the schizoid binoculars of a Swedish architect.

Housing Project by Wilhemson Arkitekter. Via Dezeen.

I think this says a lot of the new world creolisation… even when it comes dressed in polar coolness. And this is something I have been writing about for an upcoming book on recent portuguese architecture.

In the end, it is all about the “traffic of influence” – or what Harold Bloom has called The Anxiety of Influence – and around how the grip of starchitects and their contenders is today more and more crucial in defining the hybrid and diverse nature of contemporary architecture.

Nothing very new. This was always the case. Think of Michelangelo, Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier. But this is also something that, nowadays, definitely should deserve more critical attention than it does.

So, as a small contribution for the discussion, here is a preview excerpt of my forthcoming essay “Under the Influence: From Volcano to Gene Pool”…

…

All “regional architectures” that currently enjoy some international recognition possess one, and only one, common denominator.

What, for some time, has united Spanish, Dutch, Swiss, Portuguese, Mexican or Japanese architecture? And what has made these architectural practices stand out from those of neighbouring countries such as Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Norway, Argentina or Thailand?

Think about it.

Once it has been proven that the “resistance” of critical regionalism has been ground down for good, there must exist a deeper reason for creating a distinction between practices that, in geographical terms, could only be close to each other in their truths and consequences.

Have you guessed?

In each of these countries, personalities or architectural players have emerged who, whether a little earlier (like Luís Barragan, winner of the 1980 Pritzker Prize), or a little later (like Rem Koolhaas or Herzog & de Meuron, winners of the 2000 and 2001 Pritzker Prizes), have brought an overwhelming influence to bear on the contexts in which they acquired pre-eminence.

In many cases, we must not undervalue the fact that the reasons behind the emergence of these and other personalities (who have always been significant in turning the Modern Movement towards the current condition of architectural production) are located in a particularly rich historical context, as in the case of Spanish or Dutch architecture, and as in the (much earlier) case of American architecture.

However, this is not what concerns us here, just as it is only marginally relevant that these personalities formed part of the current starchitecture system from the start. The highly personalised and deterritorialized star system which currently regulates international architecture, and which is also subject to the principle that the times they are a-changin’, might have something to do with the arguments developed here, but only in the sense that these personalities generate a kind of enduring influence that marks the architectural production which is seen as representing a benchmark, whether on the regional or the international level.

Like the presence of a volcano on the near horizon, the influence of these personalities produces a particularly fertile terrain. However, in the presence of the permanent eminence of the devastation, it also generates an almost permanent state of anxiety.

A.Siza Vieira: influential and under the influence… Via FG+SG Photography.

Ultimately, with regard to the various interpretations provoked by the 80 works of Portuguese architecture in Habitar Portugal 06-08, it is worth examining briefly the anxiety surrounding the personalities that are considered to be unavoidable. After all, contemporary Portuguese architecture, like other architectures, is still living both intoxicated and sullen under the volcano.

Since, in this respect also, Portuguese architecture is the same as the “others”, the conclusions that can be drawn here may turn out to be more general than might first be imagined…

… More to come after October 3rd…