Under the Influence

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Enquanto, para irritação certa daqueles que em Portugal se tomam como o centro da atenção, a Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa se abria ao mundo (aqui, ali e acolá) , eu fui antes convidado para passar pela Triennale de Milão, onde o hardcore da arquitectura portoguesa se mostra mais uma vez aos (seus) pares.

Image via Bea Spoli.

Após silêncio tão prolongado deste blogue, e os inevitáveis boatos de extinção daí advindos, pensei que seria justo brindar os “meus leitores” (essa minoria insondável, entre os fiéis indefectíveis e os google translate new-comers) com o meu contributo para essa exposição que agora se abriu por terras de Itália.

Como, para minha grande desdita, a disponibilidade para o deleite da escrita se tem revelado cada vez mais escassa, também aos organizadores da exposição tive que propor uma revisita a um texto que havia escrito há precisamente quatro anos – e que aqui também deixo à mão de semear.

Felizmente, e como por sorte me sucede acontecer, a revisita não resvalou necessariamente para o plágio em casa própria, ou, em termos mais pós-modernos e legitimantes, para a mera (auto)-apropriação, mas resultou antes numa curiosa actualização da estória e dos personagens que antes inventara.

Assim, mais linkado* aqui do que o papel ou o painel permitirão, aqui fica o meu pequeno texto para a exposição Porto Poetic, para que um dia os exegetas tenham a tarefa facilitada, pelo menos no que diz respeito a descobrir conexões, referências e outras ligações obscuras que, por alguma razão misteriosa, fazem sempre parte do prazer do texto.

Regeneração Debaixo do Vulcão

Quando se fala de cultura, as figuras de referência são o que se pode chamar um benefício contraditório. Essas figuras raras – génios, talentos incontornáveis, personalidades brilhantes – dão lugar a um paradoxo que apelidarei de “debaixo do vulcão.” Quando existem figuras de reconhecimento e prestígio excepcional num determinado campo de actuação cultural, é mais que certo que o valor que se introduz nesse campo é positivo. O capital cultural, como lhe chamaria Pierre Bourdieu, eleva-se às alturas. O campo torna-se mais rico. Sob a famosa “ansiedade da influência,” cresce a exigência e, logo, a qualidade.

No entanto, a situação não é desprovida de riscos. O campo pode “paralisar” devido a um excesso de carga positiva – o que se pode evocar como o “efeito Glenn Gould.” Perante a impossibilidade de superar as mencionadas figuras de referência, o campo cede à lógica da “terra queimada,” à criação de um no man’s land onde nada cresce durante gerações. No campo da arquitectura, este efeito é deveras conhecido, associado a personagens maiores como Le Corbusier, ou Óscar Niemeyer. Após o fulgor destas figuras maiores, parece apagar-se o brilho das gerações que se lhe sucedem.

Entre estas duas vertentes pode surgir também o estado “debaixo do vulcão” – que no passado tive oportunidade de descrever a propósito da arquitectura portuguesa. Como a presença de um vulcão no horizonte próximo, escrevia, personagens como Siza Vieira ou Souto Moura originam um território fértil. No entanto, “perante a eminência permanente da devastação,” podem também gerar um estado de suspensão hipnótica. Assim, a arquitectura portuguesa contemporânea, como o vice-cônsul do famoso romance “Under the Volcano” de Malcolm Lowry, viveria “simultaneamente inebriada e deprimida.”

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Perante a dificuldade de copiar Siza, ou a facilidade de copiar Souto Moura, perante a evidência da fertilidade ou a eminência do vazio, as gerações pós-Pritzkers encararam um falso dilema: continuidade ou ruptura? Essa era, pelo menos, a tónica do discurso critico que também crescera à sombra do vulcão. Contribuí para a agitação das almas, propondo que, entre esses dois pólos, duas gerações emergiriam em Portugal num curto espaço de tempo. Essas gerações não eram assim tão diferentes. Mas, como mostrado na Bienal de Veneza de 2004, manifestavam diferentes apreciações das cinzas onde prosperavam.

A geração que levava a “continuidade” para novos territórios – e que é agora re-apresentada em Porto Poetic – fez-se herdeira legítima dos mestres, permitindo-se introduzir novas influências e perspectivas no seu legado. Usufruindo da proximidade geográfica e emocional ao vulcão, pelo menos enquanto aí havia espaço, cultivaram diligentemente o  terreno fecundo deixado pelas magnas erupções do passado.       Trouxeram novos instrumentos e técnicas, importaram referências do estrangeiro ou dos campos adjacentes da arte, e garantiram que a fertilidade dava os seus frutos.

A geração que era acusada do pecado da “ruptura,” não era menos dada a gerir a fertilidade que encontrara no chão onde crescera. Porventura mais volátil e inconstante, como costuma ser apanágio da juventude que pode sê-lo, apenas precisava de mais tempo para dar uso aos talentos que lhe foram confiados. Viajaram para longe do vulcão, pensaram eventualmente em estabelecer-se noutros territórios convenientemente distantes. Voltando ou não voltando, usufruiriam, também elas, do caldo genético que o vulcão deixara nas suas terras de origem.

Revisitada esta estória, é justo dizer que o trocadilho contido no termo “re-generation” é apropriado à descrição das novas gerações de arquitectos portugueses, quer estes sejam aclamados pela “continuidade” ou pela “ruptura.” Entre vulcões e pools genéticas, a importância da herança da arquitectura portuguesa, e de Siza Vieira em particular, é mostrar que a arquitectura se faz por regeneração, miscigenação, renovação.  Como dizia o outro, parar é morrer. Portanto é preciso que cada geração construa algo novo sobre aquilo que lhe é deixado. Uma vez que se compreenda isto, tudo o mais é relativo.

Nova Iorque, Agosto 2013

Turista Acidental (Dose Dupla)

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Não sei bem se por preguiça (de deixar as imagens falar) ou por necessidade (de deixar o registo ficar), sempre desejei começar aqui uma espécie de travelogue que me permitisse deixar instantâneos e impressões das inúmeras viagens que tenho vindo a fazer por “obrigação profissional.”

De regresso de Zurique, acresce, senti-me inundado por uma sensação que seria arrogante, se não fosse também sinceramente humilde: reconhecer um enorme privilégio por, entre outras solicitações, poder continuar a fazer um circuito intenso e variado de conferências um pouco por todo o mundo.

Raramente vejo as conferências como um fim em si. É certo que é bom contribuir com o conhecimento que, por alguma razão, se acumulou. Mas a secreta atração das conferências sempre foi, para mim, a possibilidade de conhecer lugares, instituições e pessoas interessantes: criar redes e acolher novas perspectivas.

Zurique em versão postal ilustrado.

Na ETH de Zurique, para além de estreitar laços com uma network de Arte e Arquitectura do MIT agora espalhada pelo mundo, gratificou-me poder dialogar em palco com a fabulosa Ute Meta Bauer, alguém que apenas se pode descrever como uma referência incontornável da curadoria contemporânea.

Comentámos que, curiosamente, já nos tínhamos cruzado quando há 12 anos atrás organizámos exposições que se sucederam na agora sub-utilizada galeria da Biblioteca Almeida Garrett, no Porto – obviamente por ocasião da swan’s song da cidade que foi a Capital Europeia da Cultura de 2001.

Post-Rotterdam, uma estreia curatorial há 12 anos atrás.

(A Ute Meta Bauer no Porto, em 2001, como outros ao longo dos anos, diz algo do talento português para identificar e trazer a casa quem está prestes a explodir na cena internacional. É de relembrar que, depois do convite de um dos nossos primeiros cultural exilées, Miguel von Haffe Perez, a Ute prosseguiu para dirigir a Documenta e a Bienal de Berlim, antes de, como tantos europeus hoje em dia, ser ela própria cativada por uma instituição americana).

Em Zurique tive a oportunidade de observar como, na última verdadeira bolha de bem-estar do território europeu, a qualidade de vida continua acima de qualquer média. E as instituições como a ETH renovam-se virando-se para fora, para esse mundo em convulsão que verdadeiramente pode beneficiar da enorme acumulação de conhecimento da Europa.

Depois de conversar com Marc Angélil, o director do Master de Urban Design da ETH, e Hubert Klumpner, dos Urban Think Tank – que após o sucesso de Veneza são agora também “residentes” na Suiça – concluí que a minha intuição estava correcta quando pensei incluir a ETH no meu próximo projecto curatorial.

Com os labs de Columbia e MIT (justamente), a ETH é a outra instituição académica que, ao lado de colectivos emergentes e ateliers locais, deverá fazer parte do grupo de participantes de Uneven Growth, Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, a exposição que, desvele-se, está prometida para suceder a Rising Currents e Foreclosed no MoMA…

Adiante, porém, ou para trás, de Zurique para Kuwait City – que, em rigor, deveria ter correspondido ao meu falhado travelogue de Março. Eis pois outra cidade imensamente afluente que me vejo revisitar amiúde, pelo menos em memória,  quando conto a quem me quer ouvir que este foi um dos mais estranhos sítios que já se me deu conhecer.

Room With a View #35, 2013. 

A primeira imagem que tive do Kuwait quando acordei no meu hotel foi talvez sintomática: uma paisagem lunar e desértica, que só mais tarde compreendi ser um cemitério. Decepcionado com a ausência de urbanização galopante, pedi que me mudassem de quarto.

O Kuwait é diferente do mais mediatizado Dubai por uma razão essencial: o petróleo foi descoberto mais cedo, nos anos 30. Portanto os naturais do Kuwait consideram-se naturalmente um povo à parte, obviamente muito menos nouveau riche que os seus companheiros do Golfo.

Room With a View #36, 2013

Convidado por Zahra Ali Baba, do National Council of Culture, Art and Letters, para falar sobre plataformas de divulgação e reflexão de arquitectura, esta foi uma oportunidade para conhecer um quadrante da geopolítica política totalmente novo para mim. (Como nos livros do Tintin, não deixaria porém de deparar com mais um português “na diáspora,” um jovem arquitecto com quem, por sinal, já tinha colaborado há não muito tempo.)

Num país onde a primeira Faculdade Arquitectura surgiu há pouco mais de 10 anos, a minha lecture inclinou-se a contrapor as diferenças e semelhanças entre as possibilidades de uma prática crítica da curadoria – algo sobre o qual já é tempo de partilhar aqui um velho ensaio  – quer essa seja feita em regime free-lance, quer num âmbito mais institucional.

No entanto, a conferência – e as escassas 36 horas que passei em Kuwait City –serviram também para anotar algumas impressões sobre um mundo à parte, pelo menos enquanto o petróleo durar pelos próximos 30 anos.

As poucas décadas de avanço que o Kuwait levou sobre os seus vizinhos significaram apenas que este pequeno Emirado abraçou um modelo de re-urbanização um pouco diferente das opções mais recentes. Um modelo que, no entanto, quando olhado em retrospectiva, não parece menos duvidoso.

Até aos anos 30, Kuwait City não era mais que uma aldeia piscatória adaptada às duras condições locais – i.e., a temperaturas frequentes acima de 60^o centígrados. Após a passagem da II Guerra Mundial sob protectorado inglês, porém, o Kuwait decidiu-se a comprar a receita urbanística da época e dedicou-se diligentemente a erradicar o seu próprio passado.

Perseguidos os ideais modernistas de um zonamento funcional estrito,  a cidade destruída pela opção urbanística de proceder a uma rigorosa segregação social e espacial, Kuwait City parece ter sofrido mais com as suas opções urbanísticas de então do que com a destruição proveniente da invasão pelo Iraque nos anos 90. Os edifícios reconstroem-se, as comunidades não.

A segregação espacial proposto pelas corporações arquitectónicas inglesas tiveram efeitos estapafúrdios. O centro da cidade, esvaziado de habitação, esvaziou-se também de pessoas. Encheu-se, no entanto, de automóveis que – como na Islândia, mas por razões climáticas inversas – funcionam perfeitamente como uma extensão MacLuhaniana do corpo e da roupa.

Quando a minoria da população natural do Kuwait não se encontra no ambiente climatizado do seu automóvel topo-de-marca ou do seu escritório 8-to-1, é mais que certo que se encontra num centro comercial. Parte do roteiro turístico obrigatório, em particular quando nos encontramos no paraíso da cultura franchise, os grandes shoppings de Kuwait City constituem obviamente o tipo de espaços que fazem o Colombo empalidecer para a escala das Amoreiras.

Se o centro comercial que visitei me impressionou pela escala de cidade, logo viria a descobrir que os focos de inovação urbana de Kuwait City estavam, como seria de esperar, elsewhere. Depois de comprovado que as leis secas levam sempre ao seu oposto, seria apenas a altas horas da noite que, graças ao olhar informado do Ricardo, viria a desvendar o ‘outro lado’ do Kuwait.

Como sucede quase sempre, seria no lado mais informal da cidade, neste caso no anel urbano destinado aos imigrantes e aos expatriados, que surgiriam as mais inéditas tipologias urbanas. Num lugar onde o dia é insuportável a partir da Primavera, não deveria afinal constituir surpresa que fosse do lado da noite que surgisse a realidade urbana mais exuberante.

Por entre a necessidade, o empreendedorismo e as típicas subversões da lei – numa cidade em que, como em Zurique, o controlo parece absoluto – a ocupação dos interstícios entre edifícios levaria a uma proliferação de pequenas unidades comerciais que, com as suas variações festivas e a distância à cultura climatizada do franchise, parecem ser a única coisa que devolve a vida a Kuwait City.

Arquivo de Ficção

Enquanto descubro por acaso que um dos meus últimos artigos, Pimp Up Your Cart – Notes and Fictions on Instant Vendor Urbanism, já está parcialmente online – mesmo antes de sair o livro ao qual se destinava – penso que talvez seja tempo de actualizar o arquivo dos textos que vou guardando e expondo por aqui.

Quando o presente nos ocupa excessivamente com as praticalidades do management, nada como esquadrinhar no passado para redescobrir umas pérolas de pensamento (em roda) livre. Como se dizia num dos fracturantes títulos já aqui arquivados, Cada Escavadela uma Minhoca.

Averso aos circuitos insidiosos da legitimação académica cada vez mais boring e tecnocrata, sempre gostei de contribuir para revistas mais ou menos obscuras, fanzines, publicações de estudantes ou até magazines de life-style.

Mais que para as ditas revistas sérias, com os seus monótonos resultados de pesquisa pseudo-científica, a sua crítica enjoada* e os seus encenados peer-reviews, sempre preferi ensaiar o gospel experimental e despreocupado que mais se adequava a revistas não propriamente arquitectónicas.

Assim, já depois de passada a torrente de elegias fúnebres dedicadas a Oscar Niemeyer, ocorre-me recuperar um desses artigos de revista leves e espirituosos, que possivelmente constitui a celebração crítica mais justa da energia subversiva que emanava dos inimitáveis gestos arquitectónicos do arquitecto brasileiro.

De resto, regresso a Niemeyer depois de ter visto as imagens de Todd Eberle aquando do lançamento do último número da revista Wallpaper* aqui em Nova Iorque. Um desses momentos socialite que, em jeito de festa de aniversário da minha mulher, me vai fazendo lembrar de morder a Big Apple…  pelo menos de vez em quando.

Em jeito de presente de São Valentim…. Imagem via Todd Eberle.

A minha elegia ao OVNI de Niemeyer foi publicada na LAMag, uma revista que desapareceu sem rasto, inclusive dessa internet que erradamente tomamos como duradoura. É uma peça que vejo como um exemplo possível de crítica arquitectónica explicada às crianças – ou aos não-iniciados, o que resulta precisamente na mesma coisa.

Como tenho dito em conferências, apesar de admirar a enorme herança intelectual de Manfredo Tafuri – e a sua capacidade de praticamente sozinho ter criado um magnífico impasse da crítica arquitectónica, particularmente deste lado do Atlântico – sou cada vez sou mais um fan confesso de Reyner Banham.

Como se pode descortinar em Pimp Up Your Cart, nos escritos de Banham, como nos seus contributos mais extravagantes noutros media, gosto do modo como, com uma verve exuberante e imparável, o crítico submerge os temas arquitectónicos na comemoração irónica e selvagem do quotidiano mais banal.

Nesta era de capitalismo tardio e neo-liberalismo assanhado, onde parecem desmoronar as esperanças de a seriedade intelectual se oferecer como uma alternativa viável, a sátira total é, mais uma vez, uma das possibilidades honestas de assumir esse dark optimism de que ouvirão falar em breve.

Esta atitude irónica – que, apesar de tudo, recusa o cinismo – é, de resto, uma das formas mais habituais como, apesar da eventual estranheza, a ficção se infiltra e entranha na realidade como uma espécie de reduto político.

Como se diz no início de Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles sobre a extraordinária antecipação do GPS em versão guia turístico, há ficções que são úteis. Algo de tão mais verdadeiro quando se quer pensar sobre o futuro a partir da reflexão do presente.

Ideias a revisitar à medida que a ficção vai invadindo o campo arquitectónico…

Short-Circuit

With the New Year always come new – often old – resolutions. I’m going to eat less, I’m going to love my dear ones even more, I’m going back to reading a book, I’m going to seize the day again. Even if we know structural change at a personal level does not come easy, we still believe we are going to change for the better.

As I woke up too early in a non-descript hotel in Houston with yet no clear image of the city, and as my early morning brain activity slowly drifted from the lecture I’m going to deliver today to all the things I ought to be writing and I am not, I decided to take action.

After all, as I still remember it, there was a time, before children, in which early morning insomnia proved to be quite productive, as opposed to clinging on to a mirage of a little more sleep.

As a late New Year’s resolution I decided I should find a way to keep this blog awake. I should write at least once a month. It would be a pity* not to do so.

Actually, as a reader, I’ve always hated those moments in which, just after writers had built up an audience out of an apparent, committed generosity, suddenly they would abandon their personal-public forum like some unwanted pet.

The death of personal blogs normally comes with a sudden professional change, such change most surely having being produced by the public success of the writer’s own writing. This is an understandable short-circuit that normally comes with lame apologies for not keeping one’s blog up-to-date, and so on.

On top of it, if you want to keep your new professional life apart from your personal views of the world, and if your new professional life is not only overwhelming, but also feeds on your personal views of the world, then you have a hard time finding an appropriate context for writing – even if you already had the ideal medium for it.

The difficulty to find a time and a space to continue an activity that you’ve always cherished as structural to your mental wellbeing is obviously problematic. And when a professional 9 to 5 takes over, this is particularly notorious.

Even if you consider yourself privileged because your 9 to 5 is dynamic and intellectually challenging, there is still something about constantly answering emails – or to be expected to do so – that arrests your capacity to embrace the kind of free association, and associated creative drive, that comes with writing.

Writing, as we know, requires not only time to produce the actual writing, but also a certain disposition to produce the thinking. You may find a way to accumulate or annotate fragments of thoughts in between meetings, airports or subway rides, but you also need a moment in which you have time to waste in an almost scandalous fashion: time to wander, time to wonder, time to wait for ideas to come together.

When you move from a free range of freelance activities that still leave you time to waste, to become focused on one specific, overwhelming professional endeavor, you risk loosing the creative edge that comes with writing and thinking. One always thinks there will be ‘creative retreats,’ or moments in which you will simply disconnect, but that tends simply not to be true, at least within the productivity-driven realm of the bureau-sphere.

Traveling, especially when it involves long distances, does provide an escape. Not only because of the disruption of routines, and the abrupt change of context, but also because it creates these moments of inevitable disconnection. A long plane ride provides the space for writing, or for catching up on something, precisely because, for a few hours, you are not obsessively connected.

Of course, writing is still a strong part of my activity as a curator on a top museum institution. This writing, however, tends to be confined to strict professional goals: project proposals, briefs, press comments, interviews, exhibition texts.

Furthermore, for objective, or sometimes pedagogic purposes, such pieces of writing tend to undergo a process of de-subjectification that, for me, excludes them from what I consider to be a practice of writing. (Try out podcast #4).

I will be already totally happy if a set of ideas I’m proposing for a small exhibition text does survive and gets transmitted to the audience – after a process in which at least three of my colleagues roam about, question, edit, and profoundly rewrite any text I submit. In any case, I’ve definitely buried the illusion, or the misconception that you can produce a subjective text in a museum context.

Curiously, when François Roche was walking through 9+1 Ways of Being Political the other day, he did identify that the graphic device through which the exhibition texts were presented involved some kind of self-sabotage, which might relate or not to the issues I’m raising here.

Although I was thriving to communicate ideas with a certain clarity – as I’ve always aspired to, but have not necessarily always achieved – in his opinion I had purportedly welcomed an ‘unfriendly’ graphic layout…

I would say that this iconoclasm, or logoclasm (‘not a valid Scrabble word’), unconscious as it may have been, was not however related to my own struggles with going back to writing. It would rather relate to the notion that, although I have as primary goal to communicate ideas to an audience, I don’t necessarily want to consider that audience passive.

I believe there is a certain amount of thinking the viewer should be doing. You don’t want things to be too easy. For that you have television. So, having people getting across a layer of dynamic, ‘unfriendly’ graphics – or across unexpected juxtapositions of art and architecture works, or even across untypical ideas in a museum context – hopefully means that I have an engaged reader. Which makes sense when we’re talking about a political show.

In any case, these notions of short-circuit or self-sabotage are interesting in themselves. Just as they are an interesting means to contradict or implode an inevitable, embracing bureaucracy in practically every realm of contemporary human activity, they may also represent a productive tool in order to overcome the most personal of impasses.

Just as they were at the core of the never published 4^th issue of Beyond, on Failures and Accidents, these notions of short-circuit and self-sabotage actually make me go back to an idea I’ve briefly played with in the past, when writing in this same blog.

This was the perverse idea that once this writing forum had fulfilled its initial purpose – i.e. to establish a connection to a world beyond the confines of my own native language – I could simply, one day, and right in the middle of a sentence, switch back to português. Precisamente. Assim mesmo. A meio de uma frase.

Agora que me encontro numa espécie de exílio dourado – ainda que de refulgência  mate – parece apropriado, e particularmente devedor da audiência portuguesa que ajudou a suster este blog, que a língua-mãe se torne de novo no meu refúgio e escape.

Embora o português escrito não seja tão impenetrável como o português falado – criando essa estranha impressão de que, quando se fala em português na maior parte do mundo, e por vezes até no mundo de língua portuguesa, se faz parte de uma seita secreta –, a sua adopção neste contexto pode permitir resolver essa distância que quero guardar entre o mundo professional que agora vivo e esses outros mundos que posso revisitar através destes estilhaços de escrita ocasional.

Esperemos que esta seja uma resolução de novo ano que está aqui para ficar.

Black Friday (Confidências do Exílio)

So, I’ve enjoyed my first (discrete) Thanksgiving in New York, and today people out there are having another consumeristic frenzy – while retailers respond accordingly, namely extending shopping times and dragging underpayed labor to work on what used to be the most sacred American holiday.

Where this sacred and blind belief in consumerism will drag the U.S., I don’t know. But it does sound unpromising, specially when one knows that around 2030 we will need 2,5 planets to feed the population on Earth. In this age of interconnected global disaster, believing that one’s backyard empire will remain unaffected by such a lack of resources sounds silly and irresponsible.

This Black Friday was also the dark occasion in which I received news that my old publishers in Amsterdam, Sun Architecture, are currently holding a massive sale of their architecture titles, thus confirming the end of a beautiful, but apparently untimely editorial project.

Those were the editors that welcomed Beyond and its Short Stories on the Post Contemporary. The good news is that, if you had an interest in Beyond and were put off by its pricey cover value, you may now order the bookazine series with unique fictions by up and coming European architectural writers for only 15€!

Yes, you have read correctly: fifteen euros for the three published volumes of Beyond at a distance of a click! A true Black Friday bargain!!!

This made me feel sad, of course. Ultimately, it’s just another episode of Europe’s anihilation of its best asset: cutting-edge cultural production.

With cultural cuts happily leading austerity measures even in the richest of countries –  and the private sector inevitably aligned with public policy – Europe takes care of its self-destruction by wiping out what could be its largest future export: intelligence, design culture, creative thinking.

Even if only for touristical purposes, production of culture in Europe was a powerful and profitable investment: beyond German engineering, European culture, as its welfare State, produced the profile and richness for which Europe was recognized, visited and looked at as a desirable model.

However, when austerity measures are the rule, culture is considered superfluous. Along the same line of thinking, Europe’s investment in higher education too is to be trashed and emulate the production of inequality and profit that is typical of the anglo-saxon education model – until that bubble also bursts, and perhaps demonstrates that there is nothing really interesting to emulate in such a model.

One wonders if the desinvestment in a democratic access to education is part of an invisible class war, or if it is solely a pragmatic response to the fact that, after all, higher education in Europe only contributed to produce its most cultured ‘lost generation’ ever…

It’s not only in the South European countries, and not only amongst its young, however, that Europenas are faced with the dilemma of either unemployment or self-imposed exile, i.e, choosing emigration as a way of escaping recession (and its silent partner depression).

I’ve landed in MoMA because I felt I had to look for alternatives – thus enjoying the privilege of spending a terrible period for Portugal in a golden exile. Recently, though, previous directors of publishing ventures such as Actar in Barcelona, or, alas, Sun Architecture in Amsterdam, were also welcomed by Montreal’s Canadian Center for Architecture.

Many others are probably looking for similar opportunities, and, like in other historical periods, the New World gladly takes in the European talent. In other historical periods, nonetheless, there were profoundly serious reasons for the exodus of European creative minds: racial prosecution and a World War.

Now, however, while we hear that if the European Union was one nation its achievements in the Olympics would have tripled the U.S. – and as if announcing Europe’s unfortunate and miserable decline –  the only reason for the new exodus seems to be stupidity, and a definitive lack of political vision.

A Few Months Later

LA Block © Pedro Gadanho. From an upcoming travelogue series.

“A few months later I was living in Taos, New Mexico, on another mesa, this time in an earthship with a stonemason friend I picked up along the way. People say that earthships are the most ecologically sustainable housing thus far created – built halfway into a hill so the earth does the heating and cooling and the temperature stays around 70 all year, with big south-facing greenhouse windows and raised garden beds inside, a grey water recycling system, and windows on either side of the long corridor so the wind blows through. And somehow, when you’re inside, looking up at the big blue sky and the castle-like clouds drifting by, you actually feel like you are in a ship, moving like a giant worm across the desert. New Mexico’s rotten nepotistic bureaucracy inspires complete distrust, and therefore people are more motivated to create local community and generally do as they please. It’s liberating, actually. Such places are known by earthship-builders as “pockets of freedom” – areas where building codes are not enforced, and therefore people are free to experiment and evolve with their houses and their lives, instead of being told what to do by the government. Code housing is expensive and it’s not necessarily what people want or need. Why not let them choose? My neighborhood had a pyramid, a castle made of tin cans, more earthships, yurts, teepees, domes, windmills, Star Wars-like pods, chickens, goats, llamas, and packs of dogs.”

    Samara Reigh, in Earthship New Mexico,         ……….The Brooklyin Rail, June 2012

The Stone Raft

Incognito in Lisbon, I happened to pick a strange day to again visit the streets that, no more than six months ago, I used to walk two or three times a week. As it was, I soon realized that Lisbon’s downtown was unexpectedly packed due to a bizarre event in the city’s most prized praça.

Praça do Comércio, a.k.a. Terreiro do Paço, is like a Spanish plaza mayor but with a twist: one side opened onto a wide, sumptuous river.

This is the kind of small, but generous spatial detail that has always made the difference between nuestros hermanos’ obstinate colonial urbanism – which led to grid-locked cities like México City – and the sensous, easy-going Portuguese city-making, which gave the world its most beautiful city: Rio de Janeiro.

During some of its many lives, Terreiro do Paço was a carpark during the Seventies and got polemically redesigned two years ago – when it also received alternative visions such as the one below, by this humble servant of yours.

Nonetheless, as a part of the larger Enlightnment plan that allowed for the reconstruction of Lisbon after the infamous 1755 earthquake, this truly royal amphiteater was conceived as a welcome space for incoming imbarcations – a maritime entrance to the city at the vaguely fabulous time when airports had not yet transformed traveling into a sucession of non-places.

This peculiar weekend, however, the magnificent Baroque setting where once the King had offered river fireworks* to the people – became the rental venue for a populist mega-picnic. In essence, as Lampedusa would say, nothing changed.

Terreiro do Paço, 1650, Dirk Stoop, via Wikipedia.

At this time, one of the richest men in Portugal, a supergrocer, offered the people cattle in corrals, pimba singers and five tons of food (being that the latter was, at least, providentially channeled to increasingly demanded-upon charities.)

This was not a case of pearls (or brioches) to pigs – which sounds too much like the kind of elitist afterthought that the politically-correct elites have learned to avoid – but one of pigs to peasants, which, carefully considered, is also somewhat of a less cynical statement.

A huge marketing operation for Portugal’s biggest chain of hypermarkets (and their anchored jumbo shopping centres), the event certainly deserves a short description beyond the praise offered on national TV by a former representative of the Portuguese gauche-caviar, now a most active representative of the city.

Imagine an historical, symbolically charged public space taken over by a highly-organized guerrilla urban farming, and you’ll start to get the picture.

The corrals were actually well designed, a cornfield surrounded the statue of King José I, and the smell of coriander was in the air. And, cast against a giant stage for the endless procession of local kitsch, there it was: a megashow of the glorious produce sold by Portugal’s most beloved entrepeneurial empire.

For the first time in their suburban lives, children marveled at cows in their natural habitat – i.e. piles of hay –, while flocks of seventy year olds were dragged in from the countryside in Toyota coaches and acted as self-appointed tour-guides of a rural world made utterly obsolete by European bureaucrats.

I couldn’t but smile in a stupedified state of candor when I realized why the crowds gathered around one of the impromptu pavilions from which techno-folk emanated. If this had been Northern Europe, in similar context I would expect sculptural Russian whores dancing atop the sound-system. Here, it was only an old guy in checquered swim trunks who danced his spirits away behind the beer barrels, drawing a sort of neo-realist laughter from the exurban mob.

The most interesting outcome of the mega-event was, however, how its mega-audience quickly spilled to the nearby city centre. Hundreds of thousands of people – what the absentee Lisboetas would poetically call the ‘país real’ – rummaged through the last remnants of an ultimately sold-out city centre. Some of them would half-proudly, half-ashamedly, proclaim aloud how they had not set foot in Lisbon’s downtown in the previous two decades.

They cheerfully joined the hordes of tourists who had already realized that, in the midst of accelerated impoverishment, Lisbon quickly became the cheapest capital city in Europe. Besides beach and good food, one can buy exquisite antiques, fine leather shoes, top clothing and whatever else for a tiny fraction of their price anywhere else. And all of this without the annoying street riots of Athens, of course.

Rather, as I walked around, I noticed there were no signs of anarchy or unrest in sight; everybody was orderly and happy. Even if the masses carried with them the usual riff-raff of petty criminals, fake pot gypsy sellers, and the odd surviving heroin addict, all of these seemed to content themselves with only intensely eying the beef chicks (or, as the local slang goes, the bifas.)

Only as one would flow away from the epicenter of the megapop picnic, would Lisbon reveal more of itself, like in that lively corner of Rossio in which ginginha-drinking backpackers and black immigrants get together by the Wall of Tolerance and the bankrupt National Theatre.

This corner suddenly felt like an island of cosmopolitanism. There is definitely a sort of lost elegance in meeting in the streets to just talk. Not to smoke like an outcast, nor to binge-drink like an idiot, but just to talk. Small groups of Africans debated European politics, as if to better report back home.

As I myself made my way back home, I still had the chance to see a band of Spanish cokehead pijos laughing and shouting hysterically at the bewildered peasants in an open mini van. Like so many of their Portuguese counterparts, they looked and dressed like advertising people out of the Nineties.

They had rented a tour minibus and were being loud around town, possibly commemorating the eminent bailout of Spain – or, as one could put it in literary gist, rejoicing the very last acts of the Iberian empire.

After weeks of paradoxically uninspiring travels to so many challenging cities – from startling Medellín to unreal Los Angeles, from puzzling Santiago de Chile to spooky Philadelphia – those guys’ shouts in my old neighborhood seemed to have woken me up from a prolonged dormant state.

Aspleep in Niagara, © P. Gadanho. From an upcoming travelogue series.

The fleeting and noisy impression of that rattling minibus in the middle of the overheated, overpopulated Lisbon downtown finally instigated me to write again. And it also gave me the title for this post, after a great novel by the Portuguese Nobel prize, José Saramago.

As for that particular old favorite, The Stone Raft tells the wonderful and frightening story of how, most suddenly, the Iberian landmass gets severed from Europe and becomes a wandering jutland. If you are truly following European events you will know how this has again become a suitable metaphor for more than one of the Old Continent’s southern peninsulas.

Beam me up, Scotty! (Os Idos de Março)

This was a banal industrial corner under Williamsburg Bridge. Many would be disencouraged to walk the lesser-seen parts of Brooklyn’s hippest hood to reach the place from the nearest subway station. Particularly on a wet, gray afternoon like that of the last Saturday of March.*

© Pedro Gadanho, Untitled (Williamsburg), 2012.

We carried through, though. My friend’s iPhone GPS device eventually designated a low and anonymous building as our destiny. Across the stained translucent glass, one could already sense a bustle. A muffled, yet promising clamor leaked to the quiet, empty streets.

After we negotiated our entrance with the guardian of the door, we finally crossed the threshold onto a sweaty, noisy, vibrant atmosphere. And we faced it: an excerpt of Rio de Janeiro had made its way to New York. Complete with the samba band, the dancing crowd, and the hyperrealist slum-like ambiance.

By crossing that thin treshold, we had jumped through a loophole and were instantly teleported to a place that stands resolutely 8000km away. Which means that we were thrust farer than Scotty ever beamed up Captain Kirk…

Beam me Up, Scotty! Image hacked via Of Woods and Words.

Contrary to the huge efforts of scientists intent on achieving our teenage dreams – and only managing to teleport miniscule quantities of atoms across their lab – the fact is cosmopolitan cities like New York are already full of highly efficient, low-tech loophole teleporters.

What Michel Foucault called heterotopias – a concept I recently enjoyed revisiting in a text I’ve just added to this blog’s archive – is no longer only about top-down institutions and somber architectural typologies.

Bottom-up, pop-up space-time machines such as Williamsburg’s Miss Favela botequim – with their exquisitely shabby architectural interiors, their thriving imported props and their own immigrant micropopulations – are now much livelier and exhilarating heterotopias.

In New York, I’ve also found small Mexican groceries that may transport you to Oaxaca frozen in the mid-eighties, Chinese kitchens that set you in ever-present Shanghai, or even that Synagogue where on the very same Sabbath I attended my first Bat Mitzvah – one which, as I read familiar names in the walls, and listened to a choir that somehow reminded me of Ivan, the Terrible, inevitably teleported me to New Amsterdam in 1654.

Perhaps this is indeed what makes an exciting and desirable city – as indeed a good piece of architecture: its capacity to project us outside of itself by making us dive deep into its most hidden layers.

Salon des Refusés #02

Penguin Pool, Berthold Lubetkin, London Zoo, 1934. Via PostalesInventadas.

Park Life*

A final blow to the mythology of concrete as the ultimate, universal modern material took place in 2004, when the last remaining penguins in Berthold Lubetkins’ Penguin Pool at the London Zoo polemically left their celebrated shelter in search of a setting that would feel closer to their natural environment. After 70 years, Lubetkin’s architecture was still deemed organic, but not sufficiently so. Sympathetic to the penguin’s stand, a local zookeeper was reported to say that the pool was “an architect’s dream, not a penguin’s.”

 As the Armory Show is coming to town, and as yesterday I was hearing Michael Loverich of Bittertang describing the birdcage they had just fabricated, I couldn’t help remembering that Candide #5 is finally coming out – with the personal plus that it carries four micro-fables I much enjoyed fabricating myself last year.

The cautionary penguin tale above was one of five that were actually left out of the forthcoming issue of the magazine led by Susanne Schindler and Axel Sowa, which is to be released next week through Actar. In print you will find another four very-short stories featuring a coakroach, some cad-monkeys, the inescapable Orwellian pigs and, most naturally, a Venturian duck.

The Big Duck, New York, 1931. Via Wikipedia.

The fables were initially proposed for LOG #22, after Michael Meredith invited me to participate in his guest-edited issue on the absurd. I thought the best way to reflect on the absurd was obviously to produce something absurd. Thus, the predominantly post-apocalyptic Fables of the Reconstruction (after REM).

Nonetheless, the editors obviously preferred politically-correct theoretical takes on Bruno Taut. This being said, it is understated that I will never understand the editorial logic of architecture magazines around this side of the globe, except if for their odorous lust for an imprecise academic celebrity.

Conversely and ultimately, and as I was confiding to both the former Michael and Cristina Goberna of FakeIndustries, I do think one of the more delightful and obscure crazes recently unfurling in the para-architectural world is precisely that of a bizarre, wide-range excitement for animal architecture.

Daniel Arsham, Untitled (Kangaroo), 2009. Via Flavorwire.

In this case, the absurd is definitely not in the eye of the beholder. It really is lurking out there. And it certainly has something to say on architecture as a discipline today. Remotely, it may even provide for its critique.

As Gogol had it in The Nose, back in 1836: “Where aren’t there incongruities? — But all the same, when you think about it, there really is something in all this. Whatever anyone says, such things happen in this world; rarely, but they do.”

…

Postscript: finally, how would I resist adding an image of Tom Ford’s doghouse?

..Image courtesy of Todd Eberle.

The Performative Turn

In the world of art, as in literary studies or the social sciences, one has got used to successive turns* by which tendencies metamorphose into one another.

Over the last decades there were the linguistic turn, the cultural turn, and, of course, also the performative turn, by the likes of which the influence of performance over other artistic media was somehow extended and confirmed.

Now, apparently also architecture has its performative turn. The prevalence of diagram or program in recent design approaches to all things architectural, like once of the principle of autonomy or the spirit of place, now gives place to every possible aspect of the performative in architecture.

Beyond the activation of program’s abstractions, and behind such a turn lies, as it would be expected, one relevant paradigm shift. And here we may speak of a return of the user – not to say simply the return of the repressed – to the troubled horizon of current architectural concerns.

After the delusions of grandeur of the recent architectural self, the ever-cyclic return to the needs of the end-user of architecture now takes place by integrating use narratives into conceptual strategies of design, but also by introducing expressions of these concerns into the very shaping of built forms.

Didier Fiuza Faustino, Opus Incertum, 2008, shown at the 11th Venice Biennial.

Thus one discovers the very imprints of bodies blooming in recent projects – reconnecting architecture with traditions of performance art –, just as one recognizes the performatic aspects of participation and self-building as instrumental in reconnecting architecture’s profession of faith with local communities and broader urban audiences.

These and similar reflections are bound to kick off the discussion on the performative in architecture that will take place this Saturday at 3pm, at the newly open, Exyzt designed Curator’s Lab, within the Art & Architecture programme of the ongoing Guimarães European Capital of Culture.

The panel is also a crucial moment of the multi-stage event and urban intervention competition Performance Architecture, which I’m curating as a last remnant of my previous free-lance livelihood in Portugal.

While key-note speaker Isabel Carlos will present her views on Performance Art and its potencial re-enactings in the contemporary urban field,  jury members Didier Fiuza Faustino, Raumlabor, A77 and Office for Subversive Architecture will show their own takes and ideas on performative architecture and the city.

The talk promises insights into some potential futures and options of a wide-spreading mode of architectural practice – while also giving way to the announcement of the Performance Architecture competition winners, who will get to build their own proposals in the public space of Guimarães.

Other Little Magazines # 22 – Rainbow of Archizines

When Disegno arrived at my doorstep around the last days of December, I browsed through its tactile, lushious pages and decided that this was it.

With so many new things* piling up, I absolutely had to do a round up of some of the inaugural issues of ‘little’ magazines that, while lying in my office floor, also took part in the recent and continued revival of the archizine.

Intriguingly so, Dissegno itself spoke of how design magazines have been consciously pushing the borders of the architectural, not only into ever-new interdisciplinary connectivities or wide web platforms, but also ending up in territories that no longer pertain exclusively to architecture.

There was a time around the beginning of the 20^th century in which design, in its acception of object creation, was still the bastard offspring of architectural mastery. Now, as it somewhat scandalously seems, it is architecture that more often than not is seen under the wide and prolific umbrella of design culture.

Thus, what once was for me the quintessential compel of an event such as ExperimentaDesign – the notion that activities as far apart as graphic design and urban planning are unified under the broad cultural inheritance of the progetto – is now also the implicit drive for the editorial mission of previous Icon editor and Disegno founder Johanna Agerman Ross.

This being said, I had the intention of reviewing in this post more or less every genre represented in my small but proud collection of number one editions, from the student zine lookalike full of star contributions, such as the 2010 Block, architecture etc., back to the academic-journal-refusing-to-be-academic also full of star contributions, such as the 2003 Log.

 

London’s Block, architecture etc. and…                 New York-based Log.

But alas, moving to another continent has a way of being hard on your luggage selection, and so I’ve decided to focus this update on two geographically bounded magazines that appeared during last summer, one in the unlikely – or not so – outskirts of Porto, the other in no longer so classical Rome.

The first of those, Peachvelvet International, or PI.MAG, belongs to a not unpredictable trend of publications catering locally to all the resilient lovers of an enduring, softly hued architectural minimalism.

This is all about the well-respected late modern tendeza that is still creating bridges and bonds for lone, misunderstood architects in disparate locations like the Iberian peninsula and relevant sections of the islands of Japan, United Kingdom or Switzerland.

PI.MAG’s opening manifesto is naturally and wikipedically about the color “white,” which as we know nowadays comes in manifold gradations right down to pitch black. Grey is thus welcome into the mag’s velvety, impeccable pages.

And while overall blinding white is still the domain of dodgy radicals – and being that the editors are “not obsessed with white or white buildings” – the delicate, tactile palette of this zine also welcomes the faint tinges of birch or even the manly rusty orange of Corten steel.

So as to complete its eulogy of descriptive, tint neutrality, PI.MAG rounds off with a piece of criticism – yes! amazing! – that dedicates yet another diatribe of fine ironical analysis to the color “green” and its many sustainable shades.

At this point we are finally allowed to uncover that “green” is not only the new black. “Green” has also become an ideological tool that conceals the lack of architectural quality of all the buildings that refuse to be simply and naturally… white. It really makes you wonder.

Boundaries speaks of entirely dissimilar colors. And that is suddenly warmingly welcome. As you flip through the magazine, you cannot avoid the color of dirt, and the color of people, and the color of naïve attempts at happiness. And this is good, and it feels right in a time in which a politics of radical aesthetics has to substitute again for the faint aestheticizations of the nice and cute.

As stated in its inaugural editorial, the borders in this magazine are not intended to be that of “the political frontier.” However, there is a bold desire to push some edges, namely in regards to what the stances of the architectural profession have been within a “new economy.”

As a peer-reviewed magazine that gets architects, researchers, urban planners, historians and geographers together, Boundaries is precisely about not being neutral, about joining forces, about enrichening the dialogue with differing positions. It does not acritically want to just caress the well established. And that is as promising as dedicating its first issue to Africa.

Opening up to Africa’s many realities, the project reviews in Boundaries reach from cooperation to tourist operations. In either case, they recall what to me emerges as still an essential problem: how to sustain the innovative qualities of architectural research when cultural and material resources are scarce.

And this question somehow relates to a worrisome impression which has often overcome me along the last couple of years. This is the possibility that, rather than the emergent economies we’re currently looking at, Africa might indeed be the future. For the better and the worse.

In that sense, it is only logical that we start paying some serious attention to this large, often forgotten continent.

Welcome to the New World

No. This post is not yet another tribute to Terence Mallick – although I did offer The New World* dvd to my brother over Christmas. Neither is it a sardonic bienvenue into the harshest year the Old World is about to see in a long time. (Nor is it a self-congratulatory note on my new appointment at MoMA.)

The New World. Image via satyamshot.wordpress.com.

Nope. This is only a small reminder about paradigm shifts, and changes and opportunities provided by ideological crises and stagnant realities, and the way in which architecture may these days be finally metamorphing into something completely different – as the Monty Python would surely put it.

So, this is also about the last article I’ve published in 2011, as it just came out in a great issue of MAJA, the Estonian Architectural Review. Facing the theme of architecture as event, this was ultimately a reflection on the idea of networks vs. affiliations, of which I want to give you a new year’s gift of an excerpt:

Is architecture a technical service or a cultural production? Is it both? Or is the profession actually splitting to accommodate potentially contrasting positions? Such questions illuminate how, within a heavily mediated context, social networking and cultural exchange acquire a renewed relevance. Pierre Bourdieu has classically written on how the fields of cultural production – what he, in fact, called the economic world reversed – always contain two opposed sub-fields. In contrast with a sort of extended, middlebrow production that engulfs the majority, one of these sub-fields is a restricted territory to which only a few can belong, but which actually determines the effective symbolic values at play in the whole field. Still, he considers that the two sub-fields are magnetically united by permanent transactions, including players who, by ascension or declassification, move from one sub-field to another. But what if these two sub-fields are actually splitting into two entirely different professions? What if a part of the architectural profession, namely its restricted sub-field, is detaching itself into an autonomous sphere that, although it might still inform and produce reflection on the world of construction, is no longer tied with the dimension of architecture as technical service? This would mean that a section of the profession would acquire independence as a purer form of cultural production. And would thus be ruled by the thorny, uncertain laws of culture making. Intrinsically, more than formally, this world would then be inevitably closer to the functioning of the art world – with its galleries and museums, and its biennales and events, and its collectors and markets, its media and formats, and its power games and exquisite social networks. It would be as if the Moon stopped orbiting around the Earth and turned instead to Mars. Well, beware. The Moon is already making its way to Mars.

 In Architecture, Networked Cultures and How to Make the Most of Them, MAJA #70, Tallin, December 2011