Quaderns: If in the previous issue of Quaderns we related domesticity and politics, analysing how the small scale of the domestic is directly connected with macroeconomic factors, in this issue we are placing the focus on the urban scale. From your viewpoint, what role is played by the public space?

Saskia Sassen: When we talk about public space we do so about quite a formalised historical category, the very notion of public space is completely established in the very way in which we think. In this sense, the idea of public space in Europe means something very specific, it has very particular connotations. When we talk about the European public space, we think about a very important common asset, but at the same time we see how that space contains certain incrusted logics and codes that, as our cities become bigger and more heterogeneous, ultimately convert it, de facto, into a somewhat exclusionary element: the public space often makes reference to our customs, not to other customs. In that sense we need something more than that public space that is already recognised, respected, built and ideologically charged. Perhaps, the public space suffers from being overdetermined. We need other categories.

In this aspect I am extremely interested in the idea of indeterminate space. Everyone should be able to recognise themselves in it. Let’s focus, for example, on a critical subject: the powerless, the discriminated, or the importance of having indeterminate spaces available for social movements, such as 15-M. Speaking of the indeterminate, I believe that the word calle in Spanish does not hold that same meaning that somehow is contained within the English word street. The word calle in Spanish evokes a certain elegance; street, in contrast, evokes a certain idea of informality. It makes reference to something that is not totally finished, something that is still emerging. The idea of street, understood in this sense, is very important.

Q: Talking of street, you have often referred to the concept of “global street”.

S. S.: “Global street” refers to the complex space of the contemporary city. In the “global street” the connections are built between the major political and economic powers and the domestic sphere, households. A clear example of this is what occurred between the years 2000 and 2005, when access to mortgages was actively promoted, encouraging debt – we cannot forget that credit means debt –. Thus, the global financial system starts to enter the modest world of domesticity and debt is precisely the mechanism for achieving this.

The connection of the “global street” with the economic powers occurs through big capital, which gradually buys up bits of our cities, which it often does not even develop, so often the city becomes simply another form of capital accumulation.

However, it is also the space of those groups of people that we habitually call the invisible, the powerless. I always say that the city is the space in which those powerless people can make history. I would say that the street, in the English sense that I mentioned previously, is differentiated from the classical European notion of more ritualised spaces. Street and Square are different – even from the viewpoint of their political reading – to the piazza and the boulevard, perhaps two of the most emblematic elements of European public space.

The street, conceived in this way, more than a space in which to represent ritualised routines, is a place in which new forms of the social and the political can appear.

Q: You have just presented in Barcelona a book that is titled ‘Expulsions.’ Undoubtedly in many cases these expulsions were originated by that debt mechanism you referred to. What is the role played by the economic powers with respect to those kinds of situations of social expulsion?

S. S.: To talk about that we can take an example familiar to us all, the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos. The aim of these meetings between the major economic powers consists of constructing a cultural context so that the economic, political and media elites of the world alike, accept the neoliberal and privatisations model.

The Davos Forum meetings become dangerous, because they manage to present any issue under a new narrative, with the aim of deactivating it. For example, the theme of the last meeting was inequality. All the groups with economic power accept that it is an important issue to debate. And it is here that these meetings become dangerous, because they focus on the cultural generation of a new narrative – and a language – that make it acceptable. Inequality is no longer presented as such, but described in their own terms. Thus, situations of social expulsion are created while, conversely, the message is transmitted that work is being done to solve the problem.

We are living in extreme times in which the condition of “expulsion” is becoming invisible, because our categories – we are coming back here to Davos and the creation of a language – cannot take in these extreme times. We live surrounded by an entire series of invisibilities, conceptually speaking.

Q: The abuses of tourism, as in some cases that have arisen in Barcelona, have also produced small-scale expulsion logics. What is your diagnosis?

S. S.: To talk about the city one has to distance oneself until it is lost from view. The city is a complex but incomplete system, and therein lies its capacity to continue inventing itself over the course of the centuries, to capture momentary histories, outsurviving kingdoms, governments, or powerful companies. Nothing in our history has lasted as long as the city.

In this sense, the city cannot only be defined based on a factor such as density. For example, a megaproject may be very dense, but it does not construct city. That same logic can also be applied to tourism, mega-hotels and major infrastructures deriving from them: they do not necessarily construct city.

Q: When we reflect on the relationship of the public space with the political, we see how, in recent years, the focus has been placed on new technologies. However, it seems that it is the public space, and the fact of sharing a place, that has allowed people’s discontent and dissent to emerge – or at least to become more visible – as has occurred in many of the protest movements of recent years. What is your view?

S. S.: Boston has a terrible climate, therefore in its streets, potholes keep appearing in the road surface. To solve this problem, a group of residents developed an application with the aim of pinpointing the potholes and reporting their location to the local council so that, this way, staff can be sent out to repair the street. The project is called Fix my street and it is based on the knowledge that citizens themselves have of their neighbourhood, their locality. A knowledge that exceeds by far that which the experts may have, often subject to the centralised view that frequently dominates city management policies. This is only a very modest example of how to use new technologies and open source language (you can see my article “Open sourcing the neighborhood“) and make them converge with the public space.

In this context, the 15-M Movement can be understood as the first step on a trajectory that concerns us: we are all important for the city. That is why today it is so vital that new organisations – like Podemos – use new technologies to activate participation, or to debate on very specific issues. In parallel, the public space plays a very important role when reinforcing the neighbourhood fabric, which is a determining factor in recovering local economies and moving away from the economy of the banks, because the banks base their strategy on extraction.

Q: Following the global city idea, what are the systemic factors that are arising in the construction of the public space?

S. S.: We are living through a very special time, there is generalised exhaustion. While Syriza was taking power in Greece, Madame Christine Lagarde was saying publicly that the IMF was going to work with Syriza, contradicting in a minimalist and elegant way the intentions of the German government. At the same time, the head of the European Central Bank admitted that the European austerity programme had not worked. This set of contradictions reveals a search for change and, in the case of various countries in Europe, new politics are emerging from meetings in squares, in public spaces.

Every complex condition that exists is partial. But its partiality allows me to enter into a discussion that is closer, which is that which makes it possible for people to unite and fight for a common cause. That is why it is important that in Spain a political party like Podemos has been born. All these aspects emerge from the public space but, when creating relations, they also in turn create public space. For example, in Spain an economic space exists that is incredibly distributed, where every locality has its traditions and these traditions include distributed economies. Economies that employ people and that in addition maintain cultural elements and are based on local production, such as clothing, olive oil or cheese.

Q: Previously you have referred to the dangers of the instrumentalization of language, to the problem represented by naming something. This issue is titled ‘Atlas of Political Clichés,’ which undoubtedly concerns language and the recurring use of certain terminology -or concepts- and their pitfalls. What do you believe is the importance of language?

S. S.: The vast part of the vocabulary used nowadays has no power. Sometimes we use politically correct terms as an invitation not to think. The categories that one uses to think are very powerful, they concentrate a large amount of information, of historical connections of all kinds, such as “the State”, the “middle class”, etc.

We must rethink these categories. That is why a need exists to extend the conceptual space beyond the social world. To question language: not accept “climate change” but “dead lands”. This is the only way of avoiding manipulation of the message and managing to assume responsibility for our actions.

—Interview conducted in February 2015 by the editorial team of Quaderns, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Guillermo López, Anna Puigjaner, José Zabala.

[This is an extract from a series of interviews conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Kazuo Shinohara.]

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In our last interview we discussed the “beauty of chaos” and “progressive anarchy”. This time around I’d like to ask you about the “mathematical city”. Designing a city generally involves all kinds of calculations and planning. But once built, it is very difficult to calibrate the city that exists. In this sense, the concept of the “mathematical city” sounds both paradoxical and extremely interesting.

Kazuo Shinohara: I majored in mathematics before studying architecture. Therefore, for me, thinking about mathematics is almost the same as thinking about architecture. It is like two sides of the same coin. I first started to talk about the “mathematical city” around 1967. At that time I had completed the House in White and my thinking was still deeply related to Japanese tradition. So, I started to say that the composition of a city should be based on the abstract and the neutral, which both include mathematical thinking. In short, I was now talking about something completely the opposite of Japanese tradition. These two directions are not in direct confrontation. But they do have an ambivalent relationship. The concept first provides a reason for small houses to exist; and then an opposing aspect emerges, so that the huge urban space of the city itself surfaces.

Until the 1960s, I had no direct experience in handling a city, and I said simply that the city could be left in chaos. In other words, we could only describe a city as an aesthetic of chaos. After that, I stated that the composition of a huge city could not be controlled without mathematics. It was impossible to achieve a real city composition by formal means, as was fashionable at the time. It was useless. And then, some ten or twenty years later on, chaos theory appeared in the field of mathematics. Therefore, my point of view, i.e. that the composition of a city has a complex mathematical nature, was given theoretical support by mathematical progress after a decade or two. Since chaos theory in mathematics was very new at the time, the rest of the architectural community reacted coldly during the 1970s and 1980s. Then, the theory suddenly became highly influential. My own vision, which I had stated around 1967, was perfectly synchronized with it. It was a mathematical approach positing that very state of confusion, or lack of unity, as its essential significance.

House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch

HUO: In your opinion, what is the ideal model for living?

KS: The central concept of modernism in the 20th century has been to unify. One of the concepts was an “international style”, by which architects tried to unify everything making use of its clarion principles. To take an extreme example, the Bauhaus even tried to coordinate table linens.

Now we’re approaching the 21st century and I am writing a series of articles, which say that the “un-unified” will assume superior value over humdrum unity. Restoring disjunction will become more important during the next century. After World War II, Tokyo had become a heap of ashes, and many progressive Japanese architects thought that they could completely transform it making use of Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin. They were dreaming. But I didn’t agree with their view. I stated that there is beauty in chaos. That was in the early 1960s, forty years ago. Nobody agreed with me, it was such an un-avant-garde idea for those times. The area surrounding Shibuya station was a typical example, with its sprawling, inconsistent, messy and natural conditions. But in fact, ten years later, a newspaper interview with younger people and foreign tourists asked them what they considered the most exciting area in Tokyo. Many answered, “Shibuya”. However, for progressive architects, Shibuya had always been one of the most ugly spots in Tokyo.

HUO: Could you tell us about your ideas of myth and chaos?

KS: In every myth, wherever it derives, there is a chaotic state. A great deal of energy is wasted. And, at first glance, that seems a negative loss. However upon reaching a certain level, it will be condensed into a powerful force. To achieve this, one must jettison all the force so far expended when this energy is sublated. What is created at that moment is a new first order. Take the example of an older period when ancient empire is the first order. But as this order gradually expands, it begins to break up. Then, a chaotic state starts to seek the next step. Through a repetition of confusion and conflict, the next order will appear. Thus, I can also say that chaos is a force or activity that advances toward the future. But, intentionally, I try not to use such words, because they sound too vague for what I want to convey. Anyway… although I do not know how the mechanism works, concentrated energy is actually converted into order whenever I introduce extraneous matter. The word “stimulation”, or “intervention”, might be better.

Kazuo Shinohara house in Yokohama, 1984. Photograph: Terutaka Hoashi

Interpreter: In scientific fields, and especially in complex systems, they use the word “emergence”, not “generation”, when describing something new. Your term is thus very close to science.

KS: I wanted nothing to do with the city when I was young, and that fact gives me a unique stance. But after working with smaller spaces that I tried to purify or to unify, I was able to take an opposite approach in my thinking. However, whatever I design, the world itself does not become beautiful. Formerly, I succeeded in generating opposition and I frankly stated my attitude as a “manifesto”. Since I examined our chaotic situation from an opposing point of view, by means of small houses, I gained an understanding of the structure of chaos. And I would like to add one more important point. I may design individual buildings but I am unable to design a city. In my opinion these are two completely separate things. People, culture, and climate generate cities. Not individuals. That was the biggest mistake made by Modernism.

HUO: What can you say about the self-organizing city?

KS: Oscar Niemeyer designed Brasilia as a very beautiful city, which is also well organized. At the same time, a slum area grew up, where the construction workers were living outside the designed area of the city. Soon after the city was completed, people began to prefer this older area to the new part because it was more comfortable. This is a typical example of what Modernism tried to eliminate. If a city becomes over orderly, you can always uncover an opposite and contradictory system. Therefore, there is clearly some other more complex structure of the city at work. Brasilia itself has a perfect design, but when a residential zone springs up alongside it, this latter is regarded as agglomerative or confusing. My idea is just the reverse. My small houses have a clear principle, whilst Tokyo is itself confusion. But we should be wary in construing the meaning of “confusion”, which isn’t the same as “disorder”.

HUO: When I talked with Cedric Price, he suggested that we use the word “city” too frequently and with so many different meanings that we are losing the original sense of the word. It becomes ever more blurred. So, it might be better to create a new term instead of “city”. If you have any good ideas, please tell me.

KS: I do not use the word “city” that much these days. In Japanese there is the notion of machi. I prefer this concept; it is closer to the term “neighborhood” or “district” in English.

Kazuo Shinohara, House in White, 1966. Photograph: Hiroshi Ueda.

HUO: What exactly is this notion?

KS: There are so many houses everywhere in Tokyo. And these houses will generate a street. The important point is that a street doesn’t generate houses. Houses make the street. So, to be more precise, machi implies houses producing the street as “house-scape” or as townscape.

HUO: Is that something organic?

KS: Well, for example, Europe’s older towns came into being naturally. And I do not know what the process was; a situation where houses stand beside each other as a matter of course is really something that just happens. This situation generates a street. In this sense, a street is no empty thing, in terms of figure and ground. Thus houses become the figures, so I prefer this view. That is why I use machi or “housescape”.

HUO: So is the line more important than the points?

KS: Rather, the façade line of the houses. I recall whole small villages I saw in southern Spain. In those little villages, the street seemed like a floor and the houses on either side like walls. I felt surrounded by white walls, and I liked that feeling very much.

HUO: You have written about chaos in the city, and at the same time you have influenced a couple of generations of architects when it comes to designing small urban houses. Would you tell me more about this?

KS: It is hugely important to understand the process of designing a tiny work. On the one hand, there are so many tall buildings around us, such as in Shinjuku, but they possess no power. Then there is the tiny house I constructed on a small budget making use of inexpensive materials, and somehow this tiny house exerts influence. A French architect based in Bordeaux who had seen this House in Uehara published was so impressed that she came all the way to Japan to study it. I perform experiments within a tiny space. I put extraneous elements into that tiny space to see what will happen. It is like a scientific experiment, and it is great because you can follow the process visually. It’s like the theory of elementary particles in physics, where a particle reflects the structure of the whole world.

/// Header image: House in Yokohama by Kazuo Shinohara [model]. Photo by Enric Massip-Bosch.
Special thanks to Enric Massip-Bosch for his wonderful contribution with the photographs of Kazuo Shinohara, Office and own house in Yokohama, 1984.
/// More info about the work of Kazuo Shinohara can be found in the latest issue of JA+U, Kazuo Shinohara Complete Works in Original Publications.

Quaderns: In this issue we focus on the notion of domesticity, both from a political point of view and from the generation of domestic architecture by means of its smallest unit, the room, i.e. two radically opposite but at the same time converging scales. In this sense, and since this section is dedicated to revisiting images or texts published in former issues of this journal, we would like to select a project by Kenji Ekuan. As a matter of fact, Ekuan’s work as an industrial designer has ranged from the small scale of objects to the big scale of the city during its Metabolist period, a period that, after the crisis of WWII, was left facing some uncertainties about the immediate future. In your own practice you have constantly referred to the concept of Metabolism and its architecture. What is your position towards this movement and its implications more than five decades later?

Yoshiharu Tsukamoto: Metabolism was a fast movement that tried to conceptualize the nature of the city and of Japanese forms of construction; therefore it has been very important for the modern architectural history of Japan.

Metabolism emerged in the 1960s, in the midst of major economic growth where people were seeking a promising future. Metabolist architects believed that for this to happen, it had to be by means of a concentration of power and capital. This is clearly shown in the model of Metabolism buildings, which were formalized by means of a core around which capsules could be placed and, therefore, buildings could supposedly be easily adapted to changes affecting society. These kinds of infrastructures could only be tackled with the support of powerful public initiatives. But instead, what really happened after the 1960s, is that the surface of the city was occupied by very tiny, two- or three-story high houses promoted by individual initiatives. The Government didn’t have sufficient budget to reconstruct the whole city using public money, so instead incentives were given to people to allow them to build their own houses, thus promoting individual private investments. Many people were given 20- to 30-year mortgages to build their home. That turned out to be a very powerful driving force for the reconstruction of Japanese society after WWII.

Therefore, the reconstruction of the city was not achieved through a concentration of capital and power, as Metabolist architects would believe, but instead, it was achieved by the dispersed nature of capital and power. Today, the city of Tokyo has more than 10 million inhabitants and the properties are owned by 1.8 million owners, so that can give some idea of how the city is highly subdivided into small individual ownerships.

Q: You have referred to the term Metabolism with some kind of irony when you defined Void Metabolism, could you explain to us how you relate the two?

YT: We keep on continually regenerating buildings in our cities. The average lifespan of a house is thirty years, so there is constant replacement of buildings going on. We could call that Metabolism, but in a very different way to how Metabolism was addressed in the 1960s. Not referring to a core and capsules, but instead to a void and a grain. I started to call this type of Metabolism based on empty spaces, that is happening today, Void Metabolism.

Atelier Bow Wow. Japan Architect 17 Spring 1995: 227. Source: RNDRD

Q: In a way, this notion of Pet architectures that you have defined and that refers to all these tiny buildings developed in leftover plots in Tokyo, takes this idea to the extreme and can be understood as the antithesis of those big systematic Metabolist projects, though in both the idea of the micro-unit remains…

YT: Pet architectures could be seen as a counter-hegemonic project to the megastructures of Metabolist buildings, but there is a big time gap between the two. I studied Pet architectures thirty years later, so in this sense it is not strictly a counter project. Pet architecture is instead a counter project to formalism. I am very interested in building as a state of practice rather than in the application of a form to the overwhelmed conditions of a context or to the real nature of a place. I really like to see how buildings emerge from the ground, from people, from everyday life, from some corners of the city, which seem to be produced almost by accident. This kind of building clearly shows the state of our practice and how it can go far beyond the value of beauty or ugliness.

Q: This manner of understanding our profession can be related to the concept of the practice of space, i.e. to the way we use space in relationship with everyday life. In this sense, how is your work related to this idea of everyday life, and how is this concept specifically worked out in your houses?

YT: I am always trying to work closely with clients. Our action through design consists of providing them with a recognizable framework, capable of drawing together their entire life experience up to that point. We try to get as close as possible to our clients in order to understand why they want to build a house here and now, what makes them desire a house. Our architectural designs always try to find the best framework to clarify these reasons and also to encourage them to continue practicing themselves, in order to complete their house and make their own life through spaces. So this is my own idea of the practice of space.

Q: Most of your houses don’t have perfectly closed rooms but instead they appear as interconnected spaces. It seems that there’s always this need to build up a dialogue between domestic corners.

YT: My clients usually are not rich so this way of working comes from budget limitations and from the available surface of the site. In order to establish as relational a space as possible, we try to work with the different behaviors of the house: the direction of human bodies, furniture and windows always imply certain behaviors. We utilized these kind of criteria while working out the exterior enclosure, which allows continuous relationships to be created between different behaviors inside the house, so, ultimately there’s no need for strong partitions, different activities can happen in the same continuous interior space.

Q: Going back to a bigger scale, in Japan there are regulations that define urban spaces in residential areas that are difficult to find in our context. For instance your house-atelier is built in the middle of an interior courtyard and it has only one connection to the street through a two-meter-wide passage. Those leftovers are, somehow, domestic spaces as well.

YT: Yes, those spaces are in between domestic and public space. Unfortunately in most cases they are enclosed. In the old days they used green hedges to do it, so they were softer, but nowadays they use concrete or steel fences. They have become more and more ungenerous. I always try to avoid having fences in property lines. Our houses are always built in the city without any enclosure. The treatment of these leftover spaces has so much potential! They can be totally privatized but, in a limited site, if you enclose it you cannot use it, so it just becomes a dead space. It is better to open it, there is a certain sensitivity behind not stepping into this kind of private space. This tension is quite interesting in residential areas.

Q: How do you address public space from the domestic space?

YT: We always plant trees to make it pleasant to walk in front of it… But on a larger scale, Japanese urban space is really different from its European counterpart. We don’t have squares with a church and a town hall enclosing an open space where everybody can gather. European public space is very well constructed and represented. In the case of Japan, the public space is more related to the time and all that accompanies the season, the best example is the time when cherry trees blossom at the end of March or beginning of April. When cherries blossom, people go out to enjoy the new spring season.

People like to go there to admire the cherries, of course, but they also enjoy the synchrony of this gathering of many different people, in the same place and at the same time. In Japan, public space is more related to this synchrony, to the existence of an event happening in the city, or provided by nature or related to religious rituals. People enjoy the public space more according to this sensitivity regarding time. And this is very different from what happens in European culture. Our public space is less programmed and less settled. We just bring blankets and drink sake, sing and talk with neighbors. It is a very joyful moment for any Japanese person. You lose the boundaries of your self and melt into the crowd.

/// Header image: Designboom

Geoff Manaugh: Let’s start with the idea of reconstruction, which is something you and I have talked about at great length and is also a theme that pops up more and more in your work.

David Gissen: [...] I should give you a sense of what I mean by “reconstruction.” Within architectural history, when we talk about reconstruction, we’re generally describing an activity by which an architect or architectural historian visually reinterprets a building from the past. It could be a building that he or she has seen fragments or ruins of, or it could be a building that he or she has only read about within architectural literature from the past. In either case, it generally involves some act of visual representation and re-interpretation.

This idea of reconstructing nature—bringing back a nature that once existed but is lost—is, in a sense, embedded within the history of architecture and, thus, within the potential work of the architect.

Reconstruction of a floating bath house in New York City; model by David Pascu (1999).

G.M.: The theme of reconstructing nature runs throughout much of your work, including the essays in your book Subnature. How did you first get interested in the subject?

D.G.: When I was a graduate student, for my thesis project I wanted to do some sort of reconstruction. But I didn’t want to reconstruct a Greek temple; I didn’t want to reconstruct ancient Rome. I was interested in how reconstruction could have an agitational relationship to the present, and I was also—and have been for a very long time—very much interested in ideas of urban nature.

So I decided to reconstruct a building type that existed very briefly on the East River and Hudson River in New York City, called floating bath houses. These buildings were first built in the late 19th century as a place in which newly arrived immigrants to the city would have a place to wash themselves. To bathe. Bathing in the 19th century had two meanings: it meant to clean or to wash yourself, of course, but it also had a recreational form. To bathe was what, today, we’d call swimming.

D.G.: [...] what’s fascinating, when you look at environmental education and architecture programs today, so much of it is about historical reconstruction. Even if you only look at the mandates of the Kyoto Protocol, they state that we’re meant to reproduce the atmosphere of the late 1980s—in a sense, that’s a project of historical reconstruction. It’s explicitly stated as a project of atmospheric science, but there is reconstruction laced throughout these discussions. In fact, that’s how it’s stated in California now: that we will be at 1990 levels of certain atmospheric pollutants by such and such a date.

/// You can read the complete interview in PDF at David Gissen’s web-site.
/// To buy the book Landscape Futures in Amazon, go here.

We had the opportunity to briefly interview Dan Handel, one of the curators of Aircraft Carrier. Here is what he told us about the project:

Quaderns: Which has been your response to the notion of Common Ground posed by the curator of this edition of the Biennale [having in mind that you have curated a national pavilion and focused on a very specific approach to the history of the country itself]?

Dan Handel: We’ve been working on the project for a year before “Common Ground” was announced. Therefore, we do not pretend to have worked according to it when developing the project. We do think however that on some themes, perhaps because they are very contemporary, we do align well with Chipperfield’s ideas. The first would be the understanding of architecture beyond objects, as a complex of operations that is embedded in its socio-political context. In our exhibition, we try to demonstrate how architectural phenomena are affected by, and can feed back processes in these adjacent realms. The second point relates to the position of the architect: if architecture is now faced with the messiness of the world, it is clear that making architecture would mean something different. While this was an issue that was recognized and discussed by many at the biennale, from OMA to the Japanese Pavilion, our take on it was a bit different. We argued that this was not a new issue, but something that is related to the rise of advanced capitalism some decades ago.

Q: Since displaying architecture has to do with representation, do you understand curating as a form of criticism? Which is in that sense the purpose of showing/curating architecture?

DH: How to ‘show architecture’ is a very abstract question that is, to us, almost meaningless. Curating architecture is a way of framing cultural issues that can be discussed through the built environment. Under these terms, a good exhibition could be critical or supportive, provocative or banal in getting its message through.

Q: Could you explain specifically the basis of “Aircraft Carrier”, including its references?

DH: The immediate reference comes from a quote by Alexander Haig, who used to be the US Secretary of State under Reagan, in which he argued that ‘Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk… and is located in a critical region for American national security’. To us this was a very nice starting point to discuss the unique and ambivalent relationship between the two countries that led, since the 1970s, to a radical transformation of Israeli architecture. An importation of political ideologies, economic models and cultural ideas prepared the ground for a very quick process in which Israel turned from a socialist country into a hyper-capitalist one. In this process, the mechanisms of how architecture is produced changed completely and the way is operates was also altered. In a way, the current crisis of capitalism allows us to reflect on these four decades and ask a question that goes beyond the Israeli topic: that is, how can we understand the structures of capitalism, and how can architecture operate from within to achieve its goals?

/// You can read the curatorial statement of Aircraft Carrier following this link and all the info about the exhibition in New York on Storefront for Art and Architecture web-site.
/// Fotos by Fernando Guerra. Merchandise photos by Florian Holzherr.