“Io ho presente ora il Palazzo della Ragione di Padova. Quando si visita un monumento di questo tipo si resta sorpresi da una serie di questioni che ad esso sono intimamente legate; e soprattutto si resta colpiti dalla pluralità di funzioni che un palazzo di questo tipo può contenere e come queste funzioni siano per così dire del tutto indipendenti dalla sua forma e che però è proprio questa forma che ci resta impressa, che viviamo e percorriamo e che a sua volta struttura la città.”
—Aldo Rossi, L’Architettura della Città.

According to Aldo Rossi, the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua is a paradigmatic example of the impossibility of circumscribing function to form and the extreme fragility of the bonds that connect the two. Rossi uses this example to cast doubt over the existence of a direct correlate between buildings and the way they are used and transformed over the course of time.

But if we follow Rossi and agree that function is not reducible to form (nor vice versa), then we must conclude that neither can form, a priori, be political but that, in fact, it can only be re-politicised again and again, over the course of time, in a never-ending, recurring cycle. He reaches this conclusion in L’architettura della città when he separates the main component of the polis – politics – from its construction: politics as choice.

However, we cannot avoid thinking about how some of the most primordial acts in architecture cannot be separated from the political, nor the political separated from form in its most primitive phase. A first layout, the Cardo and the Decumanus – the mark on as yet uncolonised ground – or the construction of a wall – undoubtedly one of the most elementary forms of architecture – may be purely political acts to the extent that they mark out an inside and an outside, a way of denoting ownership.

At this moment in time, architecture is presented in all its nakedness as a political act, not exempt of violence, and the question then transfers its focus not so much to the future of architecture or the political capacity of form as to its prior state, to all that precedes it: who decides what building is sited in a certain place in the city? Who decides on the urban laws that precede and predetermine a universe of forms still to be unravelled?

If, as Rossi affirms, the image of the city is always chosen through its political institutions, the question must then fall to them, especially at a time when new forms of government are being demanded.

Any of the numerous social movements that have arisen in recent times, from 15M in Spain to Occupy Wall Street in New York and including Taksim Gezi or Tahrir Square, despite their different natures and motivations, have all revealed not only a sea change in the very idea of public space and the way in which it has been expanded through technology, but a common demand of new forms of governance that are more democratic and transparent. Precisely, the pacification and systematic homogenisation of these public spaces are evidence showing to what point the physical space continues to be the last step on the ladder where any form of renewal of all reigning hegemony can be represented and begun. Beyond new technologies, the functions originally inherent to the public space, such as representation or meeting – celebration, partying – have been maintained unaltered. The public space can undoubtedly be considered as the legitimate space for celebration of the political.

***

This issue of Quaderns explores some of the questions raised in the previous one, House and Contradiction. While that issue focused on the relationships between domesticity and politics, this one aims to analyse the relationship between domesticity and the public space. This is a logical continuation if we take into account to what extent the very definition of the domestic often blurs the boundary that exists between the urban sphere and the home, between the public and the private. It is impossible to understand the domestic without understanding its indissociable bond with the public space, their complementary nature.

What should the architect’s role be with regard to public space and architecture in the midst of the new desire for regeneration? What are the boundaries – political, factual and legal – of the architectural discipline itself and how can the game rules be redefined? Ultimately, what is the real political capacity of architecture?

Despite the topical nature of these questions – their belonging to the world of clichés – the continual formulation of these recurring themes remains necessary insofar as they act as a talisman, as a spur capable of endowing architecture with meaning if we want to understand it exactly as it should be: a form of commitment.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, Guillermo López, Anna Puigjaner, José Zabala. Editors

/// For this double issue we have contributions by several practitioners and theorist, including among others: Núria Alabao, Pier Vittorio Aureli, David Bestué, Josep Bohigas, Craig Bucley, Joan Busquets, Matilde Cassani, Curro Claret, Núria Colomé, Beatriz Colomina, Cristina Gamboa, Ignacio González Galán, Boris Groys, Owen Hatherley, Evangelos Kotsioris, Moritz Küng, David Martínez, Rubén Martínez, Anna-Maria Meister, Zaida Muxí, Marina Otero, Ugo La Pietra, Dafne Saldaña, Manel Sangenís, Saskia Sassen, Malkit Shoshan, Pelin Tan and Oriol Vilanova.

For the Observatory, ‘New Narratives’, we have: Brandlhuber + Emde, Burlon; Barceló, Guerra, Santomà; Productora; Goig – Pol Esteve and The Decorators.

Ada Louise Huxtable, ”The Joy of Architecture” (1978)

Character 1: Every age has a particular relationship with the architecture of the past. The distance between the age of what is built and the need to preserve it progressively diminishes.

Character 2: Intervening on existing architecture is an historical but also historiographic exercise. Not only because a document that captures and reflects an instant of the past is modified, but because the way in which it is modified operates directly on the way it will be understood in the future, the way it will be represented.

Character 1: To preserve, to act on what is past, is a way of retroactively building history, and thus calls for reflection on the limits of authenticity.  On the other hand, what are the limits of preservation? Often while speaking of preservation we forget that the essence of what was already there is something that History usually takes for granted, a smell, an experience without which that particular universe cannot be reproduced completely.

Character 2: Preservation has served political and ideological interests. Who decides what should be respected or destroyed and how? Is preserving inventing history? What are the limits of reproduction? Should something be reconstructed after it has already disappeared? How long should a building last? Are replications, copies or simulacra legitimate?

Character 1: Traditionally, preservation has been understood as the crystallization of what exists. We preserve. Still, how can we preserve what is constantly changing, what is happening inside what is built, the use, in other words, authentic architecture?

*(Extemporaneous dialogue between two characters, one from 1876 and the other from 2011.)

Image: Brodsky & Utkin
Columbarium Habitabile, 1989-90
from “Projects portfolio, 1981-90″
35 etchings, ed. of 30
43″ x 31-3/4 (F)
Photo: D. James Dee
Courtesy Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York / www.feldmangallery.com

As I leaned against the concrete balcony I became aware that an immense silence hung over the landscape around me. By a rare freak of flight control no aircraft were landing or taking off from the airport runways […] Looking closely at this silent terrain, I realized that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was now bounded by a continuous artificial horizon, formed by the raised parapets and embankments of the motorways and their access roads and interchanges. These encircled the vehicles below like the walls of a crater several miles in diameter. The silence continued.*

J.G. Ballard, Crash

Any infrastructure, as an element belonging to the social configuration of territory, is part of an invisible field, a realm beyond its immediate, tangible, physical context. Ports, terminals, and networks are vital supports for our economies. Yet the increasing speed and the breadth of change of our habits and forms of consumption has revealed the fragility of the links between the immaterial, shifting nature of infrastructures and their physical support, as well as the urgency of reflecting on the consequences that can be attributed to the different tempos of architecture and market fluctuations, the disjuncture between material and fleetingness.

Throughout the better part of the past century, architecture and urbanism continued to perpetuate the heroic representation of infrastructure. The cover of Space, Time & Architecture** features a highway roundabout instead of a building, and the Vegas strip was an emblem of the postmodern paradigm. This infrastructural conception was called into question in the 1960s and 1970s, as experimental practices reclaimed, not without a certain naïveté, the possibility of an instant architecture that would be capable of revealing the dysfunctional rifts between the useful life of infrastructures, their production, and their consumption.

We believe it is time to rethink an infrastructural model at risk of quickly becoming obsolete. This should be, particularly in our days, a vital task for architects: vindicating and domesticating a framework for action they have habitually been sidelined from.

Aware of our scarce resources, it is time to re-program the rigid models of the past, from the margins, designing flexible infrastructures free from rhetoric.

* J.G. Ballard, Crash, London, Vintage, 1995.
** Sigfried Gideon, Space, Time and Architecture, the Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University, 1941.

Photo: Coke Bartrina (Girona-Costa Brava Airport)

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.