This issue: After the Party—Glòries—1993
Quaderns #261
“J’allais de fête en fête. Il m’arrivait de danser pendant des nuits, de plus en plus fou des êtres et de la vie. Parfois, tard dans ces nuits où la danse, l’alcool léger, mon déchaînement, le violent abandon de chacun, me jetaient dans un ravissement à la fois las et comblé, il me semblait, à l’extrémité de la fatigue, et l’espace d’une seconde, que je comprenais enfin le secret des êtres et du monde. Mais la fatigue disparaissait le lendemain et, avec elle, le secret”
A. Camus La chute. Paris: Ed. Gallimard, 1986 p.42
This first issue addresses possibilities for architecture after an era of productive boom and ensuing recession. It includes projects, working philosophies, and reflections attuned to the opportunities for an architecture that is not produced ex novo: focusing on issues such as recovery, reinterpretation, reuse, refurbishment and renovation as well as projects that join and superpose different
temporal strata.
“After the Party” references an instant suspended between two eras and ways of addressing architectural production and thought, each marked by its distinct logic. What is characteristic of these times and ways of doing has to do with the rules of the game, with the conditions and constraints of architecture in different social or economic contexts. The deadlock we find ourselves in does not belong to any of these eras and, precisely because of this, demands a response on our part: taking one side or the other, the formation and the acceptance of its specific rules.
Nonetheless, we do not intend to cast a melancholic or moralizing gaze on the immediate past, but to update the critical demands that will allow us to confront current conditions impose. In this sense, 1993 and the Plaça de les Glòries revisited from the present are, in more than one way, a time and a place of opportunity.
