In their own words:

“It is a practice in which a deep understanding of territorial politics, and aquatic resources, designed atmospheres, and an expanded notion of environment are driving forces to generate future landscapes.”

This strategies and policies are explained using LCLA Office projects as a tool for better understanding how micro-tactical interventions can be a catalyst for change at a larger scale.

Tactical Archipelago. LCLA Office

We’re not going to describe here the projects included on the publication, as they are well documented at LCLA Office web-site, but to highlight the theoretical framework of the publication which includes interviews with Geoff Manaugh and Mason White, and afterword by Charles Waldheim.

Reading the very personal conversation between Luis Callejas and Mason White, it’s easy to understand the roots of the immanent presence of landscape at the core of a high percentage of their projects, where the limits of urbanism, landscape and architecture become blurred and diffuse. The work of his father Rodrigo Callejas and specially the series “Paisajes Agredidos” has a strong influence on Luis’ interest on the effect that certain devices and objects have on the landscape, that currently it’s possible to see on projects like the Tactical Archipelago or the project Weightless, developed with his former studio Paisajes Emergentes [Emergent Landscapes, is also a wordplay with Paisajes Agredidos].

The non-built environment around Medellín was more important than the architectural heritage as a basis of influence for the first projects developed by the studio. Their first projects were deeply speculative and driven by a positive skepticism, perceiving landscape as an architectural and technical device, with a notorious fascination for buoyancy, lightness, ephemerality, and weightlessness.

Weightless. Paisajes Emergentes.

The way that LCLA Office uses some of their project as manifestos against the seriousness of architecture is thought provoking. The utopian approach behind some of their proposals have also more philosophical roots. The role of utopian isolation is also a liberation from some controlled limits, as we can see in projects like La Carlota Airport Park or the Serrana & Quitasueño —based on the idea of an island within an island within an island—, which are just two examples of this desirable condition of isolation in a wide range of proposals.

About “islands and atolls”, Luis Callejas explains:

“Going back to geographic categories, I think the atoll is a better term to frame my interest in contained unpredictability. I like the determinacy on the external figure —the figure defined by the beach is clear, yet it is vulnerable to erosion and wear. At the same time the liquid interior gives me a perfect frame for vital and amoral play with live matter as a design medium.”

Other important presence on Luis Callejas’ work is fiction. The kind of fiction that uses technology, ecology, culture, representation, storytelling, and environment as a framework to develop architectural projects. As pointed by Charles Waldheim, we can talk about Callejas as a curator of atmospheres.

This understanding of emerging islands as future fragments of past continents can be found embodied in several small details along the book. Based on the way that projects are fragmented and interconnected through the interviews and the fluidity of representation, we can say that this issue of Pamphlet Architecture is an archipelago of ideas.

—Ethel Baraona Pohl, editorial team Quaderns.

/// We have published the work of Luis Callejas on Quaderns #262 Parainfrastructures
/// More info about LCLA Office on their web-site.
/// To buy Islands and Atolls, Pamphlet Architecture #33, go here.

“It is time for architects to understand that the structures of infrastructural modernity are just so many ruins and, in conceiving of new infrastructures for the millennium, to learn how to embrace the new modulated world of invisible fields.”

Based on this understanding of new infrastructures and other ways of developing the architectural practice, David García, founder of MAP Architects and Jan Kattein has just finished an Icelandic Expedition with 2 and 3rd year students for The Bartlett School of Architecture.

The research and practical workshop were developed on Iceland, a land which is caught between two major tectonic plates, and is a well known land of endless volcanic activity is also home to Europe’s largest glacier. We should remember that Iceland is volcanically and geologically active. The interior mainly consists of a plateau characterised by sand fields, mountains and glaciers, while many glacial rivers flow to the sea through the lowlands. At the same time other changes of cataclysmic proportions are affecting the land. All this facts are the leitmotif of the expedition, where the students had the opportunity to experiment on-site the geological characteristics of the context and focused on understanding the complex reality of nonbuilt environments. Here, the group had the main task to design a shelter that the students built themselves to be used during the days they were working on the survey. It should be mobile, adaptable and versatile, in order to respond to the crucial needs of the environmental context.

According to David Garcia, “these ‘constructs’ allowed them to record, test and live in a wide range of sites, from urban Reykjavik to the volcanic beaches of Vik; from the glacier lakes in the south and boiling landscapes, to high mountain plateaus at 20 degrees below zero. Living in their shelter for up to four days, the structure performed as active laboratories and testing beds for an array of experiments to understand specific aspects of the sites in question.”

If architecture is deeply related with economy, culture and social concerns, then it’s easy to understand why the economic situation of Iceland becomes an interesting case study for the group. Only a few years ago, Iceland was the economic promise land, while purchasing spree by its banks and over-reaching private investors caused an even greater dive into recession when the economic crisis hit the western world. The challenge to propose projects for a 20 degrees below zero environment, while at the same thinking on the unique nature of Iceland’s history and culture, is the start point to raise strategic questions and address real-time issues that concern the people of this nation after their economic turmoil. García and Kattein add, “Housing, schools and cultural interventions are real needs and hamper social and economic progress.” The question is, how to create good architecture exposed to the forces of nature?

Maybe we don’t know the final answer, as materials and technologies are constantly being improved. But academic efforts like this, addressing this kind of questions, are valuable. We are now living times of change and uncertainty, that’s why we should embrace the new modulated world of invisible fields. And with this, we’re not talking only about communication and networks. Going beyond, it is possible to note that with this kind of experiences, students create their “own infrastructural fields”, expanding their networks, getting to know new contexts and different realities, working with their hands to create micro-shelters, and interacting with other communities.

…..
All the images and video courtesy of David García, founder of MAP Architects, Jan Kattein and The Bartlett School of Architecture.

This book studies the strategies used by architects to secure commissions, sell projects and erect buildings. Although their modus operandi might seem to be mere marketing techniques, the economic conditions in each stage of a project that determines the final result cannot be overlooked.
Selling strategies are not taught in school, since it has traditionally been considered that architects cannot market themselves. Nor are they discussed among practicing professionals, since no one is willing to reveal his recipes for success. Therefore, there is no specific bibliography in this area, although architects have always been excellent salesmen for ideas.

California is a place for opportunities where results matter more than theory. Everyone working there uses strategies to secure profits. Most of the architects in the study were born or developed their careers in the area: Gehry (who lives in Santa Monica), Gensler (who lives in San Francisco), Ma (who is dean of USC), Jerde (who works in L.A.), Koolhaas (who created Amo on the basis of a project for the Universal Building in L.A.), Jobs (who founded Apple and worked in Cupertino) and Page and Brin (the founders of Google in Palo Alto).
The inclusion of software architects in the list of building architects may come as a surprise; however the change undergone by architecture justifies it. Nowadays, corporations do not commission buildings to represent them, but rather strategies to improve their brands, efficiency and sales. Offering these is also the work of today’s architects.

Nowadays architects are designing fewer buildings and focusing on designing strategies. Let’s begin to study them. We shall discover how they work and where can they take us. We are certainly going to need them to convince society that we can still be useful.

AUTHOR

Eduard Sancho Pou is the head of an architecture studio where he combines his work as an architect with his strategic consultancy activities. In the past, he was the director of Barcelona Centre Arquitectura, where he organized architecture exhibitions, colloquia, and conferences attended by international architects. He has also been an architectural consultant with the Swiss multinational Holcim, for the announcement of the Holcim Architectural Awards. Sancho Pou holds a doctorate (cum laude) from the Polytechnic University of Barcelona. He is currently a member of Cercle d´Arquitectura Research Group (UPC) and teaches to Phd students at the same university.

More info: Graham Foundation and arquia/próxima

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)

But what does it mean to say that an infrastructural system is efficiently managing its environment? Consider two instances within a discrete category of infrastructural concerns: the problem of human effluence, or bodily waste.

In the early years of its growth, Chicago sat on a completely flat expanse of bedrock. At that time, the population dealt with its problem of effluence with a simple system of open drainage ditches. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, these ditches had become open channels of stagnant wastewater, which by mid-century came to be seen as a threat to human health. The city addressed this problem by way of a two-step, ten-year, ‘modernization’ project.

First, the entire downtown—which until then had sat on perfectly flat bedrock—was raised by several meters, in order to provide it a slope adequate to ensure proper rates of flow. Next, the first underground sewerage system in the United States was buried within the newly created slope. The project was completed in 1870, and in terms of relative expenditure and effort was far more radical than anything being proposed by infrastructural advocates today. Was the project a solution to the problem of Chicago’s effluent? We can return to that question. In any case, it certainly ensured that the effluent would efficiently flow away from the downtown.

Now take a more recent example, the Hyperion treatment plant, which is Los Angeles’ largest wastewater treatment facility—one of the largest in the world, in fact. Initially built in 1894 as a raw sewage discharge point into the Santa Monica Bay, it was “upgraded” during the 1970’s through a series of modernization efforts. It now “processes and treats 360 million-gallons per day,” and is generally regarded as one of the great American environmental achievements of the 20th Century.

Though spaced nearly one hundred years from one another, we find in each case, I think, two ways of understanding this very modern notion of ‘functionally efficient’ infrastructures. The first is through the lens of the kind of managerial discourse just quoted; that is, through the lens of a specific kind of language in which life is regarded first and foremost as a set of problems that can be managed through proper techniques of maintenance, monitoring, etc. This is a discourse that replaces the older, normative, deductive concept of ‘solution’ with the far more expansive, flexible and inductive concept of ‘management.’ It is a psychological orientation to the world that has expanded in tandem with the emergence and maturation of the modern bureaucracy, and the adiaphorization that typifies its subjects. Under the suzerainty of this logic, problems—which, in other words, are no longer solved-solved, but instead managed-solved—are rendered as sets of statistical monitoring data whose extents are actively confined to a certain range through processes of parameterization and regulation. This is ‘environmental management’ today.

But there is a second possibility, a second view onto these conditions, in which infrastructural elements like Hyperion function as remarkably convincing images of functionality. If we admit, for example, that Hyperion belongs to a system encompassing some 6500 miles of sewage lines, which during this decade alone has averaged roughly 600 Category 1 “sewage events” each year, and which itself sits within an even larger territorial system that, according to biologists, released some 28 million gallons of raw sewage into California waterways during 2008 alone…

Only when certain undeniable realities are made to illuminate the dark space beneath the rhetoric of managerial discourse—where systemic realities lurk unabashedly; where modernity is shown its own bowels—can we recognize that facilities like Hyperion are playing an active and highly visible role in the grand myth of manageability that we confer upon our infrastructures. Put differently: since their radical extension during the nineteenth century modern infrastructures have carried out their assigned tasks by ensuring the ‘proper’ distribution of the contents of modernity—cleanliness, comfort, convenience—by continually externalizing its discontents.

This strategy of negative externality has taken place simultaneously across two registers: conceptually and substantially. Conceptually, through ordinary words such as ‘byproduct,’ ‘waste,’ and ‘side-effects,’ the discontents of infrastructures are continually re-inscribed within a language of systemic functionality. And yet, at the very same time, the substantial material effluence of modernization is continually dispensed along infrastructures to an outside that is simultaneously abstract and real. That outside is simply any designated repository of continually externalized exponential accumulations: the inner city or its territorialized hinterlands; the Global South or the upper atmosphere; the inner lung or the adipose tissue …more or less anywhere beyond the ordinary perceptual grasp of the population specific to an infrastructural intervention.

These accumulations are themselves far more substantial than the pleasures they provide. The infrastructure of human effluent in the name of hygiene; the infrastructure of the commodity in the name of capital; the infrastructure of animal ‘processing’ in the name of appetite. In each case the managed accumulations outpace the pleasures, such that the functional language of infrastructures has, in a sense, always perfectly misrepresented, or precisely reversed, their material reality.

This has always been the case. The Chicago project instantly and exponentially intensified the amount of human effluent being released at a single point in the Chicago River. It also prepared the ground for a population explosion of staggering proportions, unrivaled in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, the project so quickly and drastically altered the composition of the river that in 1906 Upton Sinclair named its central section “Bubbly Creek,” in reference to the tremendous off-gassing that resulted from the decomposition of human effluent and swine entrails.
Today, at places like Hyperion—that is, at discrete but evident nodes in territorial systems—the concept of management centers on the treatment of effluent, through various processes, until it is ‘safe:’ that is, until its composition has achieved certain statistical-compositional parameters. At that point the liquid effluent is “clean enough to be discharged out at sea, through a 5-mile underwater pipeline.” In other words: everything is externalized, removed from our perceptual frame, substituted with the imagery of managerial prowess.

And here we confront a rather remarkable feature of this perceptual ruse: that even the so-called failures associated with these systems have come to reify and reinforce the grand theater of modern functionalism. The assertion that something has temporarily failed is of course a logical correlate to the assumption that it is usually functioning properly.

Take for example a recent failure that, while larger than average in size, is far from atypical. In 2006, 2 million gallons of raw sewage were released onto a Los Angeles beach in a single spill, when a pumping station immediately south of Hyperion failed. The spill lasted for 14 hours before being reported, and it was later remarked how surprising it was that even the fail-safe back-up alarm system had failed. The accident led authorities to quickly close off the beach while emergency crews tried to repair the pumping station and siphon away the sewage.

Like similar spills, it of course summoned a diverse mixture of elements though which ‘infrastructural events’ are produced—bureaucratically, discursively, sociopsychologically: cinematically. “Real time” mass media; the practices of scenario modeling and accident investigation; the managerial discourses of prevention, monitoring and response; public relations and engineering bravado as a politics of sanitation; the whole, sad spectacle unfolding as an urban dramaturgy of excrement. Hopeful and sincere, surrounding the event on all sides, these elements set the relations of cause and effect. They perform and form a kind of perceptual apparatus in which infrastructural processes are represented first and foremost as localized, brief spectacles; as discrete, fleeting failures within otherwise benign networks; tragic happenings that visit us for short time periods in specific places. This, too, is environmental management: a continual, exaggerated histrionics of functional-infrastructural salvation.

Apart from its many political ramifications (aren’t the most efficient infrastructures also the most effective forms of population control?), one of the disquieting qualities of this generic event-formula is its near total exclusion of the most pressing realities facing the world today. So many of our unfolding catastrophes are simply not amenable to the kinds of spectacular productions to which we have grown accustomed. In most cases they are slow processes, unfolding across months, years, decades, and centuries. Often the scale of their incidence renders them invisible to our methods of documentation: microscopic phenomena comprising accumulations that are, paradoxically, imperceptibly large.

We are presented with two distinct time signatures, one of which actively conceals the other. The first—the managerial time of infrastructures—is the time of statistical reasoning and the calculus of variations. Up-tempo and staccato, it is punctuated by regular crescendos, which we call accidents or malfunctions, and which are immediately attributed to either temporary failures or resolvable localized inefficiencies. Managerial time renders systemic failures un-visible. The second time—the historical time of infrastructures, or the time of accumulations—is a slowly unfolding, long-wave threnody, in which the full extents of modernization are evident.

In the first signature, where the concept of efficiency has been fashioned so as to exclude its own externalizations, our managerial rhetoric makes sense. In the second, that same language appears utterly absurd, contradictory even.

The widespread inability to recognize or acknowledge the historical time of accumulations is the most pronounced and obvious symptom of an entrenched infrastructuralism. Particularly acute today among urbanists and bureaucrats—for whom efficiency is an almost erotic obsession—infrastructuralism is a modern pathology in which the rhetoric and imagery of managerial discourse serve to erase any differentiation between primary and reflexive modernization. Infrastructuralism is marked by the self-veiling of a truth—a terrible truth, unendurable for The Moderns—that the most efficient methods of environmental management are also in fact the most destructive and wasteful. It is a lie we tell ourselves in place of truths that would change us if we were made to face them, and the primary material-moral alibi for the supposed superiority of our limitless, ‘civilized’ lives.

Are we now completely unable to dream of antiinfrastructure? Of urbanisms that do not exists solely at the behest of efficient dispersal, distribution, and externalization? Of populations that are not victims of their own cynical machinery? For now, we simply play out this drama, willingly blinded to the circuitry of its staging.

Among the dangers of the architecture-fashion industry has been its anesthetizing effects on our collective cultural sensitivity to original thought and genuine architectural innovation. When the shock of the new is felt, it is often in obscure and marginalized contexts, and often resists easy categorization. In spite of this cultural condition, and the difficulty that it poses for the dissemination of deserving work from a range of emerging talents, architecture does emerge in new and stimulating varieties. And architecture persists as a vibrant cultural form through which actual innovation is still possible. No contemporary practice represents this perennial potential for the shock of the new through architectural innovation better than the trio of young Colombian architects practicing under the collective description “Paisajes Emergentes.”

The work of Paisajes Emergentes is embodied through an astonishing array of recent projects exhibiting fluency with a range of scales and subject matter. Their provocative appropriation of the culturally loaded term ‘paisajes’ to describe their practice signals their ambivalence regarding traditional professional role of the architect. It also points toward their literacy with international architectural culture and the recent recovery of landscape as a medium of design. Combined with the adjectival modifier ‘emergentes,’ their appropriation of landscape as a frame for their diverse body of work illustrates an appetite for addressing the ecological imperatives of contemporary design culture as well as the diverse array of international environments in which they find their work projected. As such, Paisajes Emergentes serves as an apt appellation for both the medium and message of the collective’s architectural aspirations that have as much to do with curating atmospheres as with constructing buildings.

Many of the young practice’s projects exhibit specifically horticultural or botanical strategies in the service of complex public realms. These projects typically resist easy identification with the traditional typological categories of landscape, urban design, or architecture. Rather, these projects more often conflate various aspects of these diverse disciplinary practices, in favor of a new hybrid form of work. This confluence of disciplinary commitments often reveals itself through robust representational strategies hacked from various architectural and landscape precedents. More often, it is revealed through the very subject matter and operating assumptions driving the particular design response on a given site. At its best this work simultaneously reveals aspects of a particular site and subject, while conjuring remote and fleeting environments and emotions.

The architectonic language and design sensibility of Paisajes Emergentes reveal a deep literacy with contemporary architectural culture, they are equally informed by the rising importance of environment as a category of architectural thought. In this sense the recent work of Paisajes Emergentes transcends Iberoamerican architectural precedents from late 90’s and early 00’s by pushing the limits of the architectural object to its extreme end conditions, into environments, experiences, or even atmospheres. Many of the projects of Paisajes Emergentes accomplish this through a close reading of the particular ecological or phenomenal contexts in which they are sited. While these effects can reveal themselves through architectural artifice, they are best described through that dated term landscape. While much of Iberian architectural culture (and its international diaspora) has been actively engaged in resisting the rise of landscape as a professional and cultural practice in recent years, Paisajes Emergentes have firmly declared their commitments to the messy and productive potentials of landscape in relation to architectural production. In so doing, they have not only offered us an example of genuine innovation and a whiff of the new, they have also made a generational and geographic stake in the ongoing cultural struggle to open architecture to its multiform and various ecological and urban associations.

Many of the projects of Paisajes Emergentes depend upon deep horticultural and botanical knowledge. Yet it would be a misreading of their work to take these projects for traditional landscape architecture with a focus on plant material as a medium of design. Rather these projects often illustrate an ambidextrous quality, equally fluent with landform and ecological process on the one hand as with architectonic language and spatial composition on the other. What these various methodological approaches often share is an interest in the specific media of atmosphere itself, water and air. In a diverse range of projects including the Jardin Botanico and their recently completed Piscinas complex both in Medellin, Colombia, Paisajes Emergentes build complex public realms through an obsession with the material and phenomenal properties of water. In this project the hydraulic logics, and experiential potential of liquid water as well as their ephemeral effects on light and air offer the primary operating systems of a complex refined public realm. Further afield, their recent competition entries for the Parque del Lago in Quito, Ecuador and the Venice Lagoon reveal an ongoing commitment to the various potentials of a hydrological urbanism. In Quito their proposal juxtaposes the reflectivity and endlessness of pools stretching to the horizon of an abandoned airfield with the reflective metallic surfaces of the airplanes that once occupied them. In contrast with the bright light, and clear blue of Quito, their Venice Lagoon project plumbs the murky impenetrable depths of a dark, dank, Venice. In both examples, the particular phenomenal and experiential qualities of the site are revealed through the most fundamental of elements, water. Equally these projects explore the associated experiential conditions of fecund humidity of luminous aridity, while constructing complex public venues through the ambient and atmospheric conditions attendant to water in its various states.

An equally significant line of investigation pursued by Paisajes Emergentes might be described by the term atmospherics. In pushing their architecture to the limits of the object, beyond the question of ground, into the realm of climate and humidity, the collaborative has developed an approach to pneumatics and aerial suspension. In a range of projects including their proposals for monumental totemic structures in New York or other North American cities, for Heathrow airport’s guerrilla decommissioning through balloons, and for the commemoration of communities impacted by a Ituango hydroelectric plant in their native Colombia, Paisajes Emergentes have proposed a new age of inflatables.

Through their projects, and the pursuit of an architecture beyond weight and mass, Paisajes Emergentes propose an architecture of atmospherics. In this realm, liquid water, water vapor, and ice emerge as primary representational media for a new form of public life. In this work the fleeting experiential qualities of air and water as seen through light are orchestrated much in the way that the sequential experience of space was orchestrated by traditional typologies and subjectivities of landscape architecture. In pursuing the ends of architecture, the work of Paisajes Emergentes exhibited here simultaneously transcend the limits of the architectural object, while renewing the cultural potential of architecture as a medium of genuine innovation. While this body of work is still emerging, the energy, ambition, and optimism of these projects suggest that an architecture of atmospherics may very well be an important way forward for Paisajes Emergentes and for design culture internationally.

Charles Waldheim
FAAR, John E. Irving Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

This text was originally published as part of the exhibition LIGA 02 Inundaciones/Floodings Paisajes Emergentes held at LIGA Espacio para arquitectura in Mexico City.

We would like to thank Charles Waldheim, Paisajes Emergentes, and LIGA/Productora for their permission to reprint the text.

If we describe any subconscious action of our body, if we translate the slight movements that, from head to toe, our legs trace in negotiating our trousers or our arms in accommodating themselves inside a shirt, we can recognise the difficulty in considering such movements as a single act. Rather, we could describe them as a superimposing of actions of disconnected coherence.

We are not talking about every movement. We are not concerned here with those that require a certain degree of concentration. The movement of the tennis player who positions his body to transmit kinetic energy to a ball, or of the cook who tosses a pancake with a sharp flick of the frying pan. In both cases, although the demands are not the same, the legs adjust their position to provide stability, the torso stretches and lets the arms freely position themselves before the strike. Body parts act in consideration of each other, with a tremendous sense of responsibility because, as everyone knows, at least with a tennis serve there is always a second chance, but the pancake ending up on the floor would be absolutely unacceptable.

The movements that interest us here are others, those which seem to be governed in an unconnected way. As if we were extending that curious expression of “being beside ourselves” not only to situations when something gets on our nerves, but also to when each of our nerves has decided to take a path independently. Being beside oneself is to be occupying another place inside of oneself, or to bring to oneself the ways of being of another. In that collective and schizophrenic movement of our subconscious body, the different parts become absorbed in a task that locates them within a specific reference system: while the leg wavers and builds up the speed that will allow it to dissuade the fly from settling on it, one of the arms evaluates the effects of gravity on the book it holds and takes charge of countering them to maintain it at a constant distance from our eyes. Although the brain dictates all these orders, the body parts have become participants in other systems. They are no longer a single body but a heterogeneous grouping of systems. Or to phrase it another way, we are a region of space that incorporates portions of other systems.

Across the entire set of architectural practices, this constructing of heterogeneous groupings has happened in a consistent and subconscious way outside of academic spheres, and only intermittently within academic contexts, emerging when radical or orthodox forms of thinking, whatever their objectives, seemed to weaken. Rococo practices, nearly always underrated or classed as frivolous entertainment, are a clear example of the lack of representativity that these kinds of attitudes have had over the course of history.[1]

The piecemeal division of the world and fragmented interpretations typical of Rococo interiors implied a disappearance of the architectural object through multiplicity and through scale. The world wasn’t built, rather it was furnished. This shift is extremely important because in any furnishing, the relationship and participation of some objects with others is fundamental. In the room, and by extension in other places where it materialised, objects are substitutable, reorganisable and interchangeable, while at the same time they construct situations, describe attitudes and display affinities. In short, the Rococo style proposed the modernity that we know in a different way. Against a fixed ethic, it established tips on urbanity disseminated through different everyday objects.

From a more global perspective, we could think about those ways of operating similar to the actions in operational fields defined by Didi-Huberman. In other words, the operational field, as a particular place capable of making heterogeneous orders of reality coincide and then constructing that encounter as a place of self-determination. This means a “table” (in this case it would be more appropriate to say a room) where we will decide to bring together disparate things, trying to establish their multiple “intimate and secret relations”, an area that possesses its own rules of arrangement and transformation to link things whose links are not evident. And to convert those links into paradigms of a re-reading of the world.[2]

The implications of thinking under a perspective of operational fields mean that certain inertias of “strong” lines of thought, such as that of the modern movement, can be overcome to propose alternatives and shifts in focuses of interest: from visibility to legibility; from uniformity to diversity; from discursive processes to dialogued processes; from narrations with paternity to bastard narrations; from the profound to the superficial; from causal thinking to relational thinking; from the explicit to the intimate.

In the case of Lolita, infrastructure for events and meals, grouping criteria were applied in order to take part in the habitual dynamics that our studies on roadside restaurants had made explicit. Somehow it didn’t seem far-fetched to apply that disfiguring of coherence which helped focus some of the project’s critical aspects.

Some have to do with processes of affinity and identification. At the entrance of roadside restaurants it is common to find imagery, food products and posters that allude directly to the specific territorial situation or to a local designation of origin. From the architectural viewpoint, these elements not only serve to “increase takings” but also to establish a geographical location to counter the traveller’s disorientation. The project incorporated into the finishes of walls, independent solutions that help to make that identification. In the case of the bar, a vitreous mosaic was chosen that used an increased scale pattern of the colours red and black and the weave of the cachirulo (typical Aragonese chequered handkerchief). In this way, on arrival there is an immediate geographical and affective affinity with the place.

Others have to do with the systems of visualisation and control. A common profile is that of a traveller making a short stop, who, while taking a break, seeks an inside space from which to be able to keep an eye on vehicle and belongings. This means that windows and places along the facade perimeter are in highest demand. In contrast, there is another type of user who makes longer stops and seeks less visible and more private spaces. These diverse demands were catered for by opting for different spatial systems whose exterior relationship considered specifically that duality of use. A very open system that would provide a large quantity of perimeter, and another more opaque one with a more occasional and localised relationship with the exterior.

When proposing that architectural constructions behave not so much as compact objects – unitary, defined and synthetic – but rather as regions in which the different systems are summoned, actions are transformed to inhabit this voluntarily shared space. In a similar way to the disconnected coherence that our body is capable of constituting in an absent-minded way, the world establishes that disconnected coherence typical of the action of furnishing domestic spaces, but this time somewhat beyond that, this time furnishing the world.

Los espacios libres en Barcelona (Open Spaces in Barcelona)

“Albergue para congresistas, ICSID, Fernando Bendito, Carlos Ferrater, José Prada, arquitectos” (Instant City)

pp. 85-88

Photography: J.M.Puim

In this issue we address the subject of infrastructures at a time of disjunction between the time it takes to produce architecture and the time of use. We want to recover architectural projects capable of solving this lapse, just like the Instant City of 1971.

PP. The Instant City is an “inflastructure”!

If you are interested, I also have a design for a city of 3 million inhabitants. It is built at 48 metres above the ground, respecting what happens underneath it, the territory. It is demountable and has a weight of 50 kg/m², structure included!

Q. Nowadays the weight of buildings is being considered once more as a relevant factor… in the 1920s, in magazines such as ABC, there was a defence of lightness and essentiality …

PP. Yes, this is a subject that has always concerned me. In 1971 I took part in a competition to design schools for depopulated areas, for that reason they had to be reusable, so that when there were no more children, you could take the building elsewhere. All the façades were made of sheet metal, and the windows were the same as those installed in buses. Cold profiles were used and everything was screwed together to allow easy dismantling. It weighed practically nothing!

Q. When did you start working with inflatables?

PP. I started at architecture school in1954-55 approximately. I had already seen some ideas by Fuller… at that time I was interested with “less” things: less weight, less structure, less money… so the one idea I could work with was inflatable structures. Then I teamed up with an awning-maker, to start producing industrial units. I produced numerous designs for units. We did one for Astilleros Españoles in Cádiz which measured 33 metres wide by 180 metres long. I remember it folded up into just three packages of canvas measuring 2.5 x 2.5 x 2.5 metres.

Then I was invited to the MIT, at the time that Thomas Herzog was there, and he would later write one of the benchmark books on inflatables. While there I worked on projects of that type, including greenhouses.

Q. While in the United States did you have any contact with groups such as Ant Farm?

PP. No. When I started, the only pneumatic structures that existed were those by Walter Bird. Prior to that there was a patent for very heavy infrastructures made of tarred canvas. Later, during the Cold War, many radar antennas were built but, due to solar radiation, the antennas warped, losing reliability. So they decided to cover them, but Fuller’s domes were not suitable: the metal structure affected reception. Then Walter Bird invented a system using pneumatic structures.

I had seen some of those things… I started doing numbers.

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Q. And how did the Instant City project begin?

PP. One day I received a letter from an “Ad Hoc Committee”. The group was formed by students. Fernando Bendito, Carlos Ferrater and others. I don’t know if it was really Luis Racionero who talked to the congress organisers, or it was the organisers who reached an agreement with him. But around that time, Luis was fascinated by his recent trip to the USA, where he had come into contact with underground movements on the West coast.

Q.  … and the idea of an instantaneous city?

PP. For some years I had had a certain idea in mind. When I was finishing my architecture degree, the tourism activity that later boomed was just beginning. Beaches, previously quiet and bare, had been gradually filled up with cheap, vulgar buildings built in great haste. Little by little, paradisiac and deserted spots had been transformed into masses of disordered buildings constructed willy-nilly. Far from improving, the situation worsened year after year. Degradation was added to degradation, denying the system time to regenerate.

Meditating on this situation and observing how dry-land farmers let the earth rest between harvests, or how lumberjacks plan the felling of the forest in such a way that it can recover, I wondered: would it be feasible to design a holiday complex that disappeared without a trace at the end of the tourist season, in a way that the next year it could be situated in a different, faraway place, and then return to its original site a year after that?

With all these prior conditioning factors, I had started to design a holiday complex whose buildings would not even need a structure. What better and cheaper construction material for such a purpose than air? That way we would not need to transport the most cumbersome and heaviest parts of our buildings.

These details, sparsely sketched in small drawings that depicted giant bubbles mixed in with pine groves and all kinds of nature on the beach’s edge, served as a basis for my proposal to the so-called Ad Hoc Committee.

Q. How could its construction be made viable on such a tight budget? 

PP. My idea, following on from my prior experiences, was that we needed to pour all our efforts in a single direction, resolving everything with the same material.

Fernando and Carlos had contacted the Aiscondel plastics company, which at that time, just as ecology was starting to be discussed, saw the opportunity of enhancing plastic, raising it to the highest rank as “protective”.

We used the cheapest plastic on the market and I spent a month doing trials. As we couldn’t weld it, I invented a four-layered joint with a resistance just 15% less than that of a weld, but with the advantage that if you made a mistake, it wouldn’t be burned and you wouldn’t have to throw the piece away. The staples allowed for errors, they adjusted on their own.

Q. The Instant City must also have helped similar projects emerge.

PP. Well, when the meetings in Pamplona were held, I set up a spectacular contraption, with the largest possible size for the vaults. Being inside that was incredible!

Q. Now it’s in museums and is even interpreted as a work of art…

PP. It wasn’t produced as a work of art, but as a cheap and easy solution for accommodation… 

Q. In contrast, in the case of Ponsatí…

PP. Ponsatí’s work is basically artistic, if there was any technical part it was responding to concerns that the installation would not break. In the Instant City there was no design, even in the colours… zero artistic intervention.

Q. In that project, the architect is simply someone who gives instructions so that the user ends up shaping the architecture.

PP. I am in favour of modular architecture: as an architect you simply provide a puzzle. I have various designs for dwellings under the motto “one house-one inhabitant”, using aircraft and boat technology. That kind of home can cost just 11,000 euros, like a car! But there needs to be a change in mindset, in the form of production, etc., and that is highly complicated.

Q. You are usually described as utopian yet in contrast, much of what you have been explaining responds to perfectly real problems… is changing people’s norms and behaviour more utopian than the projects in themselves?

PP. Yes, in spite of the price! I thought I was the normal one, but in the end I find the behaviour of the world very strange.

Q. The Instant was published in many magazines, such as Bocaccio, where several photos by Miserachs appeared.

PP. Those village women had donned their Sunday best to go and see the Instant. They stood in front of the entrance, looking at each other. As they had to adopt a certain posture to enter, they blushed, they made gestures, they looked at each other, laughed and then started to whirl around and around, and their skirts lifted up, like in a traditional dance. It was a beautiful sight. They did it in involuntarily. They got nervous and nothing else occurred to them than to start turning round and round, and the process was repeated again. Subconsciously they were aware that in that entrance to the Instant, there was something rather erotic and strange. It was an entrance which one had to squeeze through, so it was like a birth. By entering that way, people changed their attitude. Inside, they did things that outside they would never have dreamed of doing […].

In February of that same year we went to the organisers, saying that we wanted to take part, but their response was that everything was already arranged. Together with Fernando Benito we then asked them about the students and their accommodation during the congress. The organisers’ plan was to provide a plot of land for the students to camp. So Fernando and I offered to take care of the matter, despite the very tight budget. We signed, we took charge, and we set to work. We were also in contact with Luis Racionero, recently back from Berkeley. My brother designed the poster. The manifesto/invitation was on tissue-type paper, thus keeping its weight down for postage.

We sent that manifesto all around the world. By March, we had received more answers than those obtained for the congress itself. Then we went to visit José Miguel Prada Poole, who was very knowledgeable about the issue, and later, the company Aiscondel, in search of plastic.

To convince them about sponsorship, first we had to a test in Cerdanyola for which José Miguel travelled from Madrid. That first test was carried out with joints stuck together using double-sided tape, which gradually slipped. José Miguel designed a joint in which the staple is subject to hardly any tension.

People came to Ibiza from all over. I remember that there were a couple of Belgian or Dutch men, with whom we produced an inflatable shaped like a three-cornered hat: a tribute to the Civil Guard, who constantly hassled us. Moreover, the congress-goers had a guilty conscience and they would bring us food or invite us to hotels, which we would not enter because we were not dressed appropriately, and we had to stay out on the terrace.

And at the Instant City, an assembly was formed. Cooperatives were created that went to do the shopping in Ibiza Town in a van owned by some hippies. Then we constructed the toilets, latrines, open-air showers, etc. That was the “committee for the Instant”. It was agreed that there would be no names, no author’s signatures. However, although there was a minimal organisation – similar to a traditional cooperative town – and eventually roles were created and repeated. That was the end. The result was that the instant city, as a counter-cultural model of protest against hotels and the official congress which was completely dominated by English-speakers, also generated its own counterculture.

Many of the Instant’s people detested that community experiment, because it ended up generating its own rules for coexistence: no music to be played at night, notices everywhere, food, cleaning shoes, etc.

It turned into a bourgeois mini-city and so then a small group of us took some plastic, went off into the mountains, and built a counter-Instant city on the slopes above Cala San Miguel, with sticks, reeds, boxes, cardboard and the bits of plastic we had collected. A countercultural group. The counter-Instant.

However, the Instant worked magnificently as a place for collective experimentation and shared experience: we cut and stapled as a group, but, once completed, we should have destroyed it, we should have gone along destroying it as we built it.
Nonetheless, in amongst it all there were valuable points: the idea of recycling, the idea of saving and incorporating a tree, the irony of the three-cornered hat, collective work, work as a specific element in relationships, anonymity, leisure.

We defended the idea that in a technological society, leisure possibilities be offered. A society with a productive surplus should offer leisure time, leisure organised creatively, interdisciplinary connection. Creation was understood as an element of human salvation. However, the kind of leisure that we were demanding, linked to a vital experience, was very different to what can be offered by the theme park that modern-day leisure has become.

Although nothing remained of all those utopias, at that time it was a route for escaping a regime, against an institution. We were rebelling somewhat against discipline itself.

For a long time I didn’t talk about the Instant. Many of the people who accompanied me in that experiment gradually disappeared, so I buried the subject and tried to never unearth it again. I filed everything away.

It was Yago Conde, who knew about the experience and with whom I worked on the renovation of an abandoned warehouse on Calle Regina who encouraged me on several occasions to talk about the project once more.

When Yago died, I decided to explain once more, in his honour, the Instant. I did it for the first time during that year’s course inauguration at Barcelona’s School of Architecture.