To resolve such problems, people don’t usually resort to architects. Probably nobody thinks of them as professionals willing to help, or to interpret the case history of a person or a residential community that requires on-the-spot analysis.

Arquitectes de Capçalera (General Practitioners in Architecture) offers the Raval neighbourhood’s neediest residents the possibility of collaboration with future architects in imagining, planning and studying the viability of such changes to their houses and residential buildings, improving both their habitat and relations between them.

The idea is to accompany them in charting their needs and diagnosing possible solutions, guiding them towards the start-up of the necessary rectifications, both in terms of planning and legal management, as well as the obtaining of financial subsidies for implementing them. The idea is to establish close contact, in line with the main goal of reconnecting architecture with society. This is an opportunity to place emphasis on cooperation models where learning intervenes directly in actions directed towards and by citizens.

Arquitectes de Capçalera at Piso Piloto exhibition

In the CCCB’s patio, during the period that the exhibition “Piso Piloto” (Show Home) was running, a Free Residents’ Advice Office opened allowing a limited series of cases to be tackled. A team of students and lecturers from the Housing and City course at Barcelona’s Higher Technical School of Architecture (ETSAB) was assigned to attend queries from the residents.

At university we are trained in an ABC that supposedly equips us with the instruments necessary to exercise as architects. Diverse and simultaneous study plans show the enormous difficulty in setting basic criteria aiming to make what the profession needs compatible with what is ordered by the European, national or autonomous community regulations, often governed by generalist bases that do not recognise the uniqueness of these studies that swing between the technical, the artistic and the social. Individual teaching units, even individual lecturers, have the responsibility and authority to accentuate the few levers remaining to them in order to gear studies towards wherever they believe is appropriate at a time when the dual crisis – economic and professional – is pushing us to reformulate the fundamentals of architectural training.

Some teaching staff believe that the important thing is to learn techniques consisting of tools and construction elements and supposed laws of composition that allow the planning, and ultimately, the construction of buildings. Others lay stress on cultural and artistic aspects, understanding that an architect acts as a creative director who has essential technical knowledge that allows him to run and coordinate the project’s conceptual and stylistic materialisation. Still others, in contrast, include architecture in a more diffuse field where the architect (whether he builds or not) mediates in a more complex society where technical experience is at the service of a collective aspiration influenced by other agents who demand complicity from the social sciences with the aim of exhausting reality through the design project.

All these simultaneous and complementary visions accentuate the nature of each study plan according to its traditions, and, of course, the labour context in which each operates. Because, let’s not forget, they should all share a common aim: offering studies that guarantee that their students achieve entry into the labour market.

Today, in Barcelona and the rest of the country, this target is far from being reached. One only has to review the statistics to realise the enormous and dramatic difficulties architects face in finding work, not to mention in embarking on their own entrepreneurial adventures.

Some will say that the problem is circumstantial, which means universities do not need to adapt to such ups and downs. “Everything will revert to normal”, they say, suggesting that the architect’s profile need not be substantially modified because sooner or later architects will recover their original status and society will continue needing talented (higher?) technical architects who will retake the sceptre and crown of the built environment. Others demand in-depth revision of the contents and assignments of a profession that has changed forever; whether assuming the remains of a certain technical responsibility, sharing it with other professional collectives that by simplifying and specialising their knowledge have demonstrated the same efficiency, or by demanding of themselves greater commitment to a disaffected society that is demanding bottom-up transformation, where the architect has not yet become fully incorporated as an agent in city policy, or in community management, negotiation or communication processes.

The level of disorientation is considerable and every teaching unit tackles it by emphasising its own criteria. In the case of the ETSAB – undeniably the star of the glory years of a Barcelona influential in architecture and urban design matters – the changes seem to be coming in fits and starts. Left orphaned of reference figures (due to deaths, retirements and departures), today nobody exists who can push and give a unitary sense to an in-depth transformation. In fact, we do not even believe that such a unitary vision is desirable in a profession that has diversified and is increasingly distant from society, and in a school that is in decline (in terms of students, resources and influence) and is resisting the renewal of its structures.

Something similar is happening in the whole of society, where the degeneration of democracy and of political parties is causing a systemic disorder. We are living through a crucial time where citizens who do not feel properly represented are demanding greater participation, transparency and a decided course towards a new model. At the university, which has many qualities of a laboratory but has never completely lost its link to the social reality, in-depth changes are also augured. The first symptoms have been experienced in recent years with emotive assemblies where many students have demanded greater participation in the definition of the studies model, with greater contingency in a pressing reality and with perspectives complementary to that of the invariable builder architect. Hopeful students who continue believing that the university is the best bridge for strengthening the contract that the profession has with a society that, these days, sees us as distracted with a supposed beautification of our environment, under the orders of the political powers or the pressure of runaway capitalism.

And although students are demanding changes, it is surprising that – for example – academic plans on housing are still so close to the “commission” and so distant from the emergencies that are shaking our city and by extension the world. One only has to ask associations such as Cáritas, Arrels, the PAH, Médicos Sin Fronteras, or even the military, how many architects are cooperating with them. But even more important is asking them what added or intrinsic value they believe architects can bring to the vast task of helping improve the habitats of collectives that suffer or are at risk of suffering exclusion and that, today, can not count on us.

They barely need us and this is hard to accept, despite the fact that the raw materials with which they work (subjects and objects) are also concerns of ours. At the university we remain ill-prepared to show capabilities in these issues or rather, we remain unwilling to accept that these matters also form part of our capabilities.

Coderch, in his oft-cited article for Domus in 1961, “It’s not geniuses that we need now”, reminded us of this contract with reality: “Open you eyes wide, look, it is much simpler than you imagine.”

I doubt that it is simpler, but undoubtedly it is more urgent, useful, surprising, impassioned and educational than many of us teachers imagine. Reality outdoes fiction and, in my opinion, the school is living in a determined fiction and being dowsed with a reality imposed by an inherited script that few will be able to put into practice in the future. The architect that does not yet exist (at least in the academic plans) is a different architect who should be able to work without a closed script that prejudges problems and solutions, instead being someone who investigates by opening their eyes wide, converting each project into a kind of documentary where, step by step, the usefulness (and the beauty!) of the project design is described.

The best examples are outside the university, in the hands of multidisciplinary collectives that day by day invent small-scale pilot proposals – real and utopian – that reveal truisms that academia does not see, does not look at, or that are at most relegated to “optional” status. These show us the enormous potential for cooperation in the gestation and co-management of projects with people. Knowing how to ask, demand, communicate and, in short, share knowledge, making private laboratory research work compatible with a clear vocation to open up the process by going down into the ring to contaminate it with harsh reality.

We do not know what will happen with the ETSAB and the ETSAV. Every day new and intriguing voices emerge that augur a progressive disappearance of one or the other, the sale of their premises to reduce the UPC’s enormous debt, cuts in the already miserly financial remuneration of their associated teaching staff, the impossibility of incorporating new staff or the refusal of resources for research projects already under way… Today, inviting somebody to give lecture is fundamentally a commitment based on personal favours that it is difficult to maintain, while publishing anything becomes an exhausting nightmare. The new management at the ETSAB is trying to tackle these evident shortfalls with fresh and promising ideas that we hope will maintain their freshness and a commitment to not justifying changes only through cuts. But I do not believe today that solutions will emerge from subtle adjustments and even less so from internal debates between professional classes who wave the flag of authorship and supposed responsibility for the “commission”.

Political expert Joan Subirats in his article “Repolitizar la Arquitectura” (Repoliticising Architecture), published in El País in relation to the project “Barraca Barcelona” (Barcelona Hut) of 2003, reminded us that from the 1990s onward, architecture abandoned its social and political commitment, becoming solely concerned with stylistic issues. We have abundant evidence of this when we see how the starchitects move around the world taking advantage of the major opportunities offered by a globalised economy and a technology that allows them unprecedented audacity. Architects, like any other technical experts, should start experiencing problems with their conscience if they totally sever technical solutions from social problems or from explicit or implicit objectives in relation to what is requested. We need to introduce politics into what we do and it is imperative that universities accept the challenge of re-politicising architecture and of asking themselves what is the use of what is done, who wins and who loses out because of it, and at the service of what reality we are placing our work.

—Josep Bohigas, architect. Curator of “Barraca Barcelona”, “APTM” and “Piso Piloto” and promoter of Arquitectes de Capçalera

***

In Febrero, 2016, the project Arquitectes de Capçalera has been awarded with the Premi Ciutat de Barcelona 2015. From Quaderns, we want to congratulate all the team and people involved in the project.

More info at Arquitectes de Capçalera

***

Tomatoes shine in the sun and, already ripe, are picked effortlessly by an elderly lady in a white hat. The vegetable patch covers a large part of the plot. To one side, a group of people of all ages chat on benches built from demolition remains. This is Manhattan, on a summer’s day in 1973. The oil crisis is battering New York. Social conflict is constantly increasing in certain areas as real estate activity declines. From that year up to today, Guerrilla Gardens have occupied hundreds of empty plots in the city.

***

A white dome covers wooden tiered seating where, in the shade, a group of people listen to a talk about biofuels. Outside, a few people are cooking on a barbecue as they chat. Children run. Somebody turns over the soil to start sowing seeds in a corner of the plot, which until recently was empty and walled. We are in Barcelona one day in 2015. The place is not managed and equipped by the local authorities as in the case of Van Eyck’s parks, nor has it been occupied and then legalised owing to pressure from the local community like many of the New York vegetable gardens; in contrast, it is the result of a public programme by the City Council that temporarily allocates these plots to neighbourhood organizations. This programme, run by the Urban Area Participation Department of Barcelona City Council and known as the BUITS Plan,[1] selects unused urban plots and, via public competition, offers them for temporary management by the local community.

***

The playground at Laurierstraat, Amsterdam in the 1960s, one of the 700 that Aldo van Eyck designed for the city. (Photo: © Ed Suister, courtesy Amsterdam City Archives)

These three images serve to conjure up a storyline: a storyline of plots of land, urban policies and community management.

Following World War II, the social consensus represented by the Welfare State implied that the public institutions would take charge of mitigating inequalities through a certain degree of planning and redistribution. This could represent the construction of public parks such as those designed by Van Eyck, or the building of subsidised housing that fuelled the modern movement. During those golden years of town planning and urban utopias, this movement would opt to respond to human needs through a social architecture financed using public funds. It is important to remember that the Keynesian consensus sought to apply brakes to the expansion of communism, which had also carried out its own experiments in political architecture.[2]

In capitalist cities, beyond or rather along the side-lines of urban planning development of a speculative nature, spaces for shared use will have to be fought for by the communities as in the case of the neighbourhood occupations of New York’s Guerrilla Gardens. During the 1970s, the oil crisis paralyzed the real estate market and left countless plots of land empty and lives broken due to unemployment and poverty. That same crisis represented the breaking point of the post-war consensus and marked the progressive decadence of the Welfare State as a form of government and of social conflict in developed countries. It was a narrative that would be substituted by another that justified reducing to a minimum any state intervention advocated by the neoliberal order. From that decade on, architecture would never again express public values, only those of the private sector.[3]

We return to the present, to a Barcelona that is a pioneer in metropolitan branding policies – its own brand being its Universal Forum of Cultures of 2004. At this moment in time, a new crisis in Europe is at the root of growing social mobilisation, especially in the south, where it is unlikely that a new Keynesianism would be able to tackle the catastrophes caused by financialized capitalism and its speculative bubbles and tax havens, which make even distribution impossible. So, what new narratives will be necessary to prop up the next model that will emerge from this frontier that we are undoubtedly crossing today?

With respect to city government, the great narrative is that of the smart city, where opting for the public promotion of a technologized city – although articulated hand in hand with the private sector – fits in poorly with a policy of reduction in public spending. Undoubtedly today – less visible, but no less important for understanding the future of urban life – new mechanisms for the management of the public arena are emerging.

A “social” capitalism

The proposal of the BUITS Plan based on management by the local community of unused spaces is a response to a historical demand by the city’s neighbourhood movement that fits in well with the policies of cuts in public spending and the slowdown in the real estate sector. Given the State’s incapacity to productively activate spaces in the city that have momentarily lost value and to provide for the basic needs of all citizens – social rights, conquered through struggles that lasted over a century and today are in danger – this institutional experiment aims to test a new management model. One in which the social fabric, always active to protect life, can be redirected towards solving what is contemplated as a passing problem of public management, barely a parenthesis, which is the reason for the temporary duration of the concessions. It is what the City Council’s programme head, Laia Torras, has dubbed “meanwhile management”.

We can say that these new discourses appeal to mixed forms between the artistic subjectivity of the post-Fordist creative classes and a certain social awareness activated as a market niche of unsatisfied social needs.[4]

To put it a little more clearly: self-management has always existed in modern society, from workers’ cooperatives and their networks of mutual support to squatting, whether the properties being occupied are buildings or urban or rural lands. But it is only now that these practices are being institutionally guided towards conversion into an added economic and productive space. Seemingly corresponding with this type of mechanism are policies such as the BUITS Plan, where architects who are out of work due to the crisis – and qualified middle classes or former middle classes – are linked with residents who need spaces for community life but also cheap leisure and consumer goods. What could be an inter-class alliance to reconquer the public arena, suddenly behaves like mutual exploitation.

Taller Verical, Pla BUITS, 2013. Photo: Re-Cooperar

Social management and social innovation

It is no coincidence that these kinds of community experiences are starting to be called “social innovation experiments”, a rhetoric encouraged by the most prominent new think tanks, the true hinge of the smart city that is connecting social creativity with the private arena capable of extracting its value.

One example could be the Barcelona Open Challenge, a Barcelona City Council competition held in 2014. A call to “entrepreneurs” designed to “transform the public space and the city’s services” that focused on the concepts of social innovation and entrepreneurship as the driving forces of production. The underlying message in this kind of programme is that responses to social demands have to pass through public-private partnerships that can be sustained by social creativity and the community networks that inhabit a devalued urban territory.

In these discourses there will be no more talk of social rights, but of challenges that small-scale private initiatives may resolve, one of the keys behind why it is so interesting today to promote social innovation on a European scale.[5]

Faced with the legitimacy crisis facing the State, who better than citizens themselves to design public services? Faced with the financial crisis and the lack of public liquidity, what public service comes at a lower cost than that undertaken by the social organisations themselves? Faced with generalised unemployment, might entrepreneurship not be a possible solution?

No more talking about collective rights, but about individual work challenges. No more social redistribution, but personal contributions by entrepreneurs. The dispossessing of social rights creates an unattended space that opens up a pathway to a more “social” market: rights as a market niche. A strategy promoted by the European institutions whose objective is to change the apparently unfeasible Welfare State for a “participatory society”[6] better adapted to the new times: that represented by programmes such as the BUITS Plan and the Barcelona Open Challenge.

Crisis cycles bring with them profound institutional changes. Although past cycles can help us to understand the present, nothing can be automatically taken for granted in these processes of regeneration. The quality of the institutional forms of each era is not produced by any think tank, but is socially constructed. Community self-management of plots of land or collective action relating to rights prefigure a new kind of institutionality. An institutionality that points towards both the orthopaedic designing of free-rider mentalities and to a scenario of democratic revolution. Nothing is written in stone about it being one thing or another, nor does it seem to depend on the number of public concessions that are on their way. The tonnes of community resources invested in self-managed plots plus the solidarity that forges urban movements are not a fixed capital for social entrepreneurs, but the apparatus that may just lead us to storming and taking heaven by force.

—Nuria Alabao, journalist and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Barcelona. She has a degree in Information Science from the University Pompeu Fabra. She is currently researching on youngsters, Internet and politics as part of The Institut de Govern i Polítiques Publiques (IGOP) of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB).
—Rubén Martínez, specializes in the relationship between social innovation practices, public policies and new EU economies. He is co-author of the books Innovación en cultura: una genealogía crítica de los usos del concepto; and Jóvenes, internet y política, among others. Member of the Metropolitan Observatory of Barcelona.
—–
[1] Buits Urbans amb Implicació Social i Territorial (Urban Voids with Territorial and Social Implications). More information on the programme’s website: http://bcn.cat/habitaturba/plabuits
[2] If Le Corbusier perfectly expresses that Keynesianism in his “machines for living”, the Russian Ginzburg from whom he took inspiration is not just an architect committed to the Soviet Revolution, but his Narkomfin building aims to contribute towards encouraging a more community-based way of life, including spaces for collective life in the home. Two poles of architectural geopolitics connected by the thread of state intervention.
[3] Koolhas, Rem (2014) My thoughts on the smart city. Digital Agenda for Europe.
[4] For an analysis of the centrality of certain socio-economic profiles in the leadership of these processes see “la innovación social es de clase media” (social innovation is middle class) http://www.nativa.cat/2014/10/la-innovacion-social-es-de-clase-media/
[5] In search of a more in-depth analysis of these hypotheses, Rubén Martínez (co-author of this text) is currently working on an investigation into the promotion of social innovation policies in Barcelona and Madrid. Some texts written in relation to this research can be read at: http://leyseca.net/category/innovacion-social/
[6] Subirats, Joan (2013) ¿Del Estado de bienestar a la sociedad participativa? El País.

The complete article can be read at The Architectural Record

Perhaps the scarcity of remains accelerated the urgency of its reconstruction. As early as 1957, Oriol Bohigas wrote to Mies to commission him to build the pavilion once more. The German architect accepted immediately, but the project never came to fruition, inaugurating a series of failed attempts that continued after his death: 1964, 1974, 1978, 1980, 1981…

Its material disappearance was not the only stumbling block. The pavilion existed as a series of images that had circulated in architectural publications, but most of the original plans were lost in the haste of Mies’s move from Germany to the United States. Furthermore, it was impossible to talk of any definitive documentation, given that the design and construction process had undergone numerous last-minute changes. In short, the few remaining original documents did not coincide with the photographs. Its reconstruction would require a twofold operation: reconstructing the materiality of the Repräsentationspavillon originally commissioned to Mies, and selecting those documents that would validate the decisions taken, in other words, constructing the pavilion’s history.

This was the case for the three reconstructions completed in 1986 in Barcelona (Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos), Madrid (Josep Quetglas) and Milan (OMA/Rem Koolhaas), to coincide with the centenary of Mies’s birth. Each of them led to a materialisation and was based on a selection of documents that was radically different, illustrating three histories of the Modern Movement that use the pavilion as a historiographic argument.

[…]

Keep on reading: Three replications of the German pavilion PDF

EDITORIAL
P07 Vacuum-Preserved

AGENDA
P09 Is it worth continuing to spend money on maintaining the Plaça dels Països Catalans? — Josep Fuses i Comalada
P10 Casa Planells — Arturo Frediani

1 ESSAY X 4 CASES
P13 Preservation, Ideology and Culture. Pep Avilés
P17 Haunch of Venison Gallery. Haworth Tompkins
P23 Theaterraum Zuoz. Corinna Menn
P27 Cal Massó Art Centre. Tapias + Salvadó
P33 The Unfinished House. Pau Faus and Claudio Astudillo

ARCHIVE 
Quaderns #25, 1956
Adolf Florensa i Ferrer “La restauración de edificios antiguos”, pp. 129-134
P38 Authenticity and Illusion in the Preservation of Heritage. Joan Ganau Casas

SUPPLEMENT #1
P42 Supplement to OMA’s Preservation Manifesto. Jorge Otero-Pailos

4 ESSAYS X 1 CASE

Monjuïc. Photographs by Adrià Cañameras

P55 Montjuïc: a Stage-set for Memory. Manel Guàrdia i Josep Maria Garcia-Fuentes
P59 Three Replications of the German Pavilion. Urtzi Grau
P65 Two Strolls through the Poble Espanyol. Stella Rahola
P69 The Life Force of Grey Goo. Stéphane Degoutin

OBSERVATORY

SUPPLEMENT #2: Interview
P81 Museum of Ruins. Isidoro Valcárcel Medina

GUEST
P84 Growing Old Disgracefully: Buildings, Preservation and Time. Charles Holland

* Photo: Haunch of Venison. Haworth Tompkins (Philip Vile)

EDITORIAL
P01 Parainfrastructures

AGENDA
P03 Review, Quaderns Sessions: OFFICE KGDVS — Moritz Küng

1 ESSAY X 4 CASES

P06 Infrastructuralism: The Pathology of Negative Externalities. John May
P10 Heathrow Airplot: Weightless. Paisajes Emergentes
P14 Brockholes Wetland Visitor Centre. Adam Khan
P18 Lolita. Langarita-Navarro arquitectos
P22 Nagelhaus. Caruso St John Architects

ARCHIVE
Quaderns #83 (Open spaces in Barcelona), 1971
“Albergue para congresistas, ICSID, Fernando Bendito, Carlos Ferrater, José Prada, arquitectos” (Instant City), pp. 85-88

P30 Interview: José Miguel De Prada Poole
P33 Inflated Ambition. Simon Sadler
P37 The Counter-Instant Instant. Carlos Ferrater
P39 Instant City, Global Village. Felicity D. Scott

3 ESSAYS X 1 CASE
P46 Infrastructure and Time: Apropos Anticipation and Adaptation. Javier García-Germán
P49 Solutions d’urgence. Roger Sauquet
P52 Air Control. Enrique Ramirez

Girona-Costa Brava Airport, photos by Coke Bartrina

GUEST
P57 Infrastructure Preservation. David Gissen #263

OBSERVATORY

*Image: Paisajes Emergentes, Weightless. Heathrow Airplot