No dia em que um homem decidiu não comer sozinho, colocou uma pedra no meio e convidou um outro para a mesa, iniciou-se a palavra, o diálogo, a capacidade de partilhar as coisas. O homem humanizou-se à mesa.

Enzo Bianchi in Público, 06.10.2009

The exhibition sets its sights on modernity’s design for a more humane and contemporary society since the early twentieth century: a design for new forms of living and new cityscapes. What happened to this utopia?
The architecture and design concepts by the artists represented in the exhibition contemplate "models" of utopian, pure design in their state of deterioration. Sometimes preserving moments of the crystalline, they are riddled with decay, entropy, ruin, and "rust" (Smithson), yet find nourishment from the idea of the bricolage, the implementation "of that which is there," from the concept of recycling, so to speak. With that, they formulate final day stages, testing survival on the remnants of a demised civilization. These remnants are the final resources. On the other hand, these approaches thus take up a practically utopian thought of "sustainability," the idea of a better society, born of the spirit of dystopia.
When desolation, neglect, and the degeneration to slums as bleak and relentless final evidence of an exploitative, brutalized society of competition, profit, and fanaticism have caused the utopia of a humane, enlightened society to collapse, then humility is called for in order to make something from the void with whatever means remain after the catastrophe. These dystopias are constructed from the hackneyed ideas of a thousand-year old human history, of the resonance and reflected memory of utopian design and architecture, in view of which an awareness ought to be generated that available resources are limited and a redefinition of the new, of progress is called for.

It is no coincidence that the genealogy of the exhibition’s artists begins in the 1970s, a time in which the shimmer of pop and minimal art began to crumble and the post-industrial era made visible the limits of growth. Key figures here are Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark, who analyzed their present day in their own special way, critically and emphatically, also prophetically. Taking the concrete run-down or repressed reality of the cities’ wastelands as well as the monuments of industrial archeology and the suburbs as their starting-point, they aimed at detecting the entropic state of the present, or possibly even invoking it. Despite the attraction of the shimmering and reflecting surfaces of 1930s Modernism that Smithson described in an equally ecstatic and ambivalent way in his legendary essay "Ultramoderne," Smithson and Matta-Clark became deeply involved in the entropic ruinous state as proof of fleetingness. Nonetheless, Smithson also described the state of postindustrial architecture with the concept of reversed ruins, buildings which "rise into ruin before they are built This negative dialectic becomes clear as "undoing" in Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed and Matta-Clark’s dissecting interventions—affirmation through deconstruction. Entropic areas, places of transfer and dissolution, such as the garbage dumps favored in Matta-Clark’s Fire Child, become sites of alchemist action: the purifying powers of fire serve to create a site of non-alienated action in a practically primordial ritual within the urban wastelands—to gain something new from garbage—rather than to dispose of undesirable garbage. Allegorically, the Garbage Wall functions as a prototype or first building block of a structure; later the fire serves to grill a pig finally distributed to all present.

What is still a site of involved action here, the site of an "art of practice" of the urban flaneur, who is a critically observing participant, is perceived from afar, with detachment in Bantar Gebang by Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij: people who have set up a neighborhood on a garbage dump are perceived as others by another. Rob Voerman, on the contrary, uses parts of garbage to erect his hybrid dwellings.

When Isa Genzken and Dan Graham in Chicago Drive or Private "Public" Space: The Corporate Atrium Garden take up the promise of Modernism’s utopian architecture, that is, the Ultramoderne, in cruises through an iridescent, sparkling, crystalline, and simultaneously ethereally cold, gleaming Chicago of skyscrapers, or pursue the attempts to bring back nature manifest in corporate buildings—where talk is thus of the beauty of the architectural, its brittleness and fleetingness and false appearances likewise emerge, allegorically presented in the intro to Chicago Drive with the journey past the idyllic eternal calm of a cemetery, a special type of suburb of the dead.

The obverse of these representative buildings is to be found in the outskirts and their tower blocks, which Stephen Willats and Cyprien Gaillard both investigate in their own way. Gaillard accepts the dilapidated beauty of the neighborhoods degenerated to ruins and social problem zones, which as in the case of Pruitt-Igoe, Scampìa, or the Parisian Banlieues are laid in ashes in baroque fireworks. Since the 1960s, Willats has carried out systemic studies with the inhabitants of blocks of flats on the outskirts, presenting the results in diagrammatic photomontages. The inherent shady side of the "concrete blocks" comes up, but is not demonized per se; he rather focuses on the changed lifestyle and the failure of politics.

In the 1970s, the crisis of capitalism clearly manifested itself in the downfall of some cities, in particular, New York. This made it deducible what it means when resources become ever scarcer and social services cease, entire neighborhoods go to ruin, and the economy is controlled by combines. Yona Friedman raised his voice as an architect already at an early stage and, contrary to what one would expect, referred to the second half of the twentieth century as a "poor" century, in which everyone was now urged to share resources. Ecological and social utopian thoughts, as developed by Friedman and Matta-Clark, who was trained as an architect, have lost nothing of their explosiveness. Thus, quite a few present-day artists deliberately refer to "forerunners" from the 1970s; but there is also an indirect thread of thought figures orbiting Modernism’s themes and their results which carry through until today and which we see reflected in the exhibition in works by Rob Voerman, Jeroen de Rijke / Willem de Rooij, Giuseppe Gabellone, Florian Pumhösl, Gyprien Gaillard, and Stephen Willats. An arc spans here from concepts such as the crystalline, entropy, ruins, and bricolage, which in reaction to Formalism have been increasingly theorized in Postmodernism, to the works shown in the exhibition


Modernism as a ruin, An Archaeology of the Present

[Partially Buried Woodshed, Robert Smithson, 1970]

[...]
It is hard to know how the current financial crisis will affect this trend. More than once I’ve heard it suggested that the downturn will be good for architecture. The argument goes something like this: The economic tailspin will put an end to the boom in gaudy residential towers that are distorting the city’s skyline. Cheap rents will attract young, hungry creative types. This will spawn a cultural flowering similar to that of the 1970s, when the Bronx was burning, graffiti artists were the norm and Gordon Matta-Clark was carving up empty warehouses on the Hudson River piers with a power saw.

But cheap rents alone won’t do it. On the contrary, the construction slowdown, if it lasts long enough, will likely drive many young talents out of the profession for good. It also looks less and less likely that a government-sponsored, Works Progress Administration-style civic project will revive the profession — another favorite fantasy of the ever-optimistic architecture scene.

Real change will first demand a radical shift in our cultural priorities. Politicians will have to embrace the cosmopolitanism that was once the city’s core identity. New York’s cultural institutions will need to shake off the complacency that comes with age and respectability. Architects will need to see blind obedience once again as a vice, not a virtue. And New Yorkers will have to remember why they came to the city in the first place: to find a refuge from suburbia, not to replicate it. That’s a tall order.


Nicolai Ouroussoff in New York Times, 24.08.2009



O Cozinheiro, o Ladrão, a sua Mulher e o Amante dela.

Imagens de máquinas vs máquinas de imagens.


61 essential postmodern reads: an annotated list.

[Pruitt-Igoe, St. Louis, 1954.1955]

As indústrias criativas têm vindo a ocupar o centro do debate no ano europeu dedicado à criatividade, a maioria das vezes tendo por referente algo muito vago. Em Portugal, a sua evocação é feita como se as mesmas fossem as salvadoras da economia das cidades e aparecem no discurso político como uma tentativa de configurar os seus elocutores como agentes de políticas modernas. O facto é que as indústrias criativas, promovidas na Europa no quadro da ’terceira vaga’ decorrem de um conjunto de mitos que é oportuno desconstruir:
Apesar de aparecerem como usurpadoras do género, a criatividade não se esgota nas indústrias criativas; muito menos nas actividades artísticas, em particular no design, nas telecomunicações, na moda ou nas artes tecnológicas por via, sobretudo, do seu carácter de artes reprodutivas, em especial graças ao baixo custo da produção do digital. A criatividade é, antes de tudo, uma faculdade humana que pode ou não ser motivada e activada conforme haja, ou não, a capacidade da sua detecção e as condições favoráveis à sua manifestação, não sendo previsíveis a maioria dos seus impactos. A criatividade é um talento que muito ultrapassa o marketing político. A este propósito, seria oportuno ler cuidadosamente a obra de Ken Robinson.
A criatividade não acontece por mera vontade política nem basta que seja enunciada para que a sua performance seja actuante - se houvesse dúvidas sobre a ineficácia do discurso político nesta matéria, o fiasco retratado no ambiente decadente da tão publicitada Feira das Indústrias Criativas, realizada recentemente na Expo Norte, era disso exemplo -. O exercício da criatividade exige disciplina, métodos adequados, informação actualizada, crítica, debate, trabalho colaborativo e condições profissionais e de produção para que se possa materializar em objectos ou ideias. A sua passagem a um sistema de produção industrial decorre mais das capacidades distributivas e da marca cosmopolita da cidade do que de “estratégias de incubação, ninhos de produção” e outras ilusões provindas geralmente do aparelho educativo e produtivo mais conservador.
Não basta apontar exemplos de relativo sucesso temporário de algumas zonas de cidades internacionais, onde o ambiente criativo, proporcionado pelo talento, tecnologia e tolerância, produziu uma cena artística nova e gerou algum emprego para que o mesmo possa acontecer em qualquer outra cidade. A criatividade e a sua manifestação materializada exigem massa crítica substantiva, cidades de escala média ou grande, excelentes escolas de formação artística, científica e tecnológica, que são a base de recrutamento dos criadores, mobilidade e diversidade da população envolvida. Ao pensarmos nas cidades portuguesas a partir destes itens, tomamos com certeza consciência da dificuldade destas transferências de ’receitas’.
As indústrias criativas não são a solução milagrosa para a economia das cidades e os números que habitualmente são avançados em termos de percentagem de PIB (entre os 4% e os 7%) escamoteiam que a parte substancial desta economia provêm das telecomunicações, da indústria do audiovisual e das televisões que, a bem verdade, nem são indústrias recentes, nem se pode afirmar que traduzam sempre o melhor da criatividade.
Do ponto de vista de análise cultural, as indústrias criativas e o seu suposto sucesso fundamentam-se não na criatividade nem nas artes mas sim na ideia de consumo. Para os defensores mais fundamentalistas das indústrias criativas, o importante é que estas vendam e giram receitas. O envelope da criatividade com que as vendem vai buscá-lo ao domínio das artes e à aura de que estas são proprietárias mas com o espírito de que já não existem nem receptores, nem públicos e, muito menos, utilizadores críticos mas apenas uma massa anónima de consumidores globais passivos. É com certeza muito importante ler Richard Florida mas é também fundamental ler Aristóteles, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stigler, Jacques Rancière, entre outros.
Nenhum obstáculo aqui se coloca face ao desenvolvimento da criatividade e à sua possível materialização que se pode, eventualmente, configurar nessa ideia de indústrias criativas, desde que se considere que a desideologização radical da cultura tenha, como consequência, o fim da ética da economia e da criatividade científica ou artística. Impõe-se, pois, quando se falar de criatividade, de indústrias criativas e de desenvolvimento, que se seja intelectual e politicamente honesto.
No caso concreto de Portugal, a criatividade deve e pode ser estimulada e actualizada em termos concretos, desde que se tenha consciência que o processo criativo é lento, que não se coaduna com calendários legislativos, que implica reconhecer a possibilidade do erro, da falha e do sucesso adiado; que exige investimento nas retaguardas de formação elementar, que se precisa de muito tempo; que exige um forte investimento na investigação científica e na produção artística (e que, neste último caso, está muito longe dos patamares mínimos de eficiência); que há áreas potencialmente mais capazes de fornecerem a médio prazo resultados muito positivos, como sejam a arquitectura, a fotografia, a música urbana, o documentário, e que há outras que vão exigir mais tempo e podem haver casos em que os próximos tempos sejam de falhanço. É preciso, de facto, tempo, muito tempo.
A nossa relação primária com a tecnologia - para a qual contribui a história do país, a económica, a tecnológica e a cultural - é muitas vezes traduzida numa relação de deslumbramento improdutivo (há sempre ilhas, claro) não ajuda e, por isso, exige não mais tecnologia mas um melhor uso epistemológico da tecnologia.
Em conclusão, para as nossas cidades precisamos que elas sejam orientadas num sentido mais cosmopolita, que se constituam em cenas artísticas e científicas, que se internacionalizem e dêem tempo, o tempo e as condições necessárias à formação que actualize a criatividade.

António Pinto Ribeiro


Público, 19.03.2009

Severe architectural recession on the one hand, grotesque architectural luxury on the other.

O Bilbao Effect e a recessão.

[Palazzo Versace Dubai]

[California Academy of Science, Renzo Piano, 2008]

40 anos, calças pretas, camisa preta. Em muitas cidades do mundo este poderá ser o retrato de um arquitecto. Em Pequim também.

Francisca Gorjão Henriques, em Pequim


Mas vale a seguir a digressão da jornalista com o colega (que veste de preto) pela nova Pequim no P2.

A 25 de Agosto de 2008 redefinir-se-á a identidade da China. Aos olhos do mundo, aos olhos do Ocidente. Porque é este o jogo. De identidades. Da Nova China, como peão global e já não regional e do próprio Ocidente que, em crise económica e psicológica – que não cultural – se vê na contingência de se repensar enquanto “farol” da humanidade. Muito mais que performances desportivas, o que se ergue a Oriente é uma nova ordem mundial. Um bater de asas em Pequim...
Ícones globais de uma arquitectura global erguem-se no horizonte de uma geração – Koolhaas, Herzog, starchitects – que se propôs rever a matéria monolítica do final do modernismo anquilosado. Complexidades e contradições de quem (se) libertou da previsibilidade tardo-modernista, apostou na democracia da forma, e agora estende a carteira de clientes às mega-corporações e a regimes autoritários.
Se o Ninho de Pássaro exala uma “beleza intoxicante”, ícone universal do capitalismo asiático, enredado no interminável debate da moralidade de servir um regime bárbaro, não será o melhor ponto de fuga uma entusiamada estética, um terrífico sublime, ou realpolitik, como justificação dos triunfos estéticos alcançados no dealbar do milénio.
Cínicos? Sabemos bem que muita da arquitectura que nos emociona tem sangue como argamassa.

Floating Steven Holl.

Via Architectural Scholar.

O mundo após Slavoj Žižek.

[Fetish, David Lynch, 2007]

My apartment reflects my views as an architect. It is minimal, austere. The architecture doesn’t impose itself upon you. The apartment is a stage for other things to take place.


Bernard Tschumi, New York Times Magazine, 8.6.2008


Todo um programa estético: minimal, austere.
Todo um paradoxo ético: The architecture doesn’t impose itself upon you. The apartment is a stage for other things to take place.

14 May, 2008
Peter Eisenman set out his thoughts on architecture at RIAS 2008
Point one: Architecture in a media culture
Media has invaded every aspect of our lives. It is difficult to walk out on the street or stand in a crowded elevator without encountering people speaking into cellular phones at the top of their voices as if no one else was around. People leave their homes and workplaces and within seconds are checking their Blackberries. Their iPhones provide instant messaging email, news, telephone and music—it’s as if they were attached to a computer.
Less and less people are able to be in the real physical world without the support of the virtual world. This has brought about a situation in which people have lost the capacity to focus on something for any length of time. This is partly because media configures time in discrete segments.
Focus is conditioned by how long one can watch something before there is an advertisement. In newspapers stories keep getting shorter, the condensed version is available on the internet. This leads today to a corruption of what we think of as communication, with a lessening of the capacity to read or write correct sentences. While irrelevant information multiplies, communication diminishes. If architecture is a form of media it is a weak one. To combat the hegemony of the media, architecture has had to resort to more and more spectacular imaging. Shapes generated through digital processes become both built icons that have no meaning but also only refer to their own internal processes. Just think of any architectural magazine today devoted, supposedly, to the environment, and instead one finds media.
Point two: Students have become passive
The corollary to the prevalent media culture is that the viewing subject has become increasingly passive. In this state of passivity people demand more and more images, more visual and aural information and in a state of passivity people demand things that are easily consumed.
The more passive people become the more they are presented by the media with supposed opportunities to exercise choice. Vote for this, vote for whatever stories you want to hear, vote for what popular song you want to hear, vote for what commercial you want to see. This voting gives the appearance of active participation, but it is merely another form of sedation because the voting is irrelevant It is part of the attempt to make people believe they are participating when in fact they are becoming more and more passive.
Students also have become passive. More passive than students in the past. This is not a condemnation but a fact. To move students to act or to protest for or against anything today is impossible. Rather they have a sense of entitlement. The generations that remember 1968 feel that those kinds of student protests are almost impossible today. For the last seven years we have had in the US one of the most problematic governments in our history. Probably the most problematic since the mid-19th century and president Millard Fillmore. Our reputation in Europe, our dollar, our economy, the spirit of our people, has been weakened. In such a state of ennui people feel they can do little to bring about change. With the war in Iraq draining our economy there is still the possibility that the political party responsible for today’s conditions will be re-elected.
Will this have consequences for architecture?
Point three: Computers make design standards poorer
This passivity is related to architecture. Architecture today relies on one of passivity’s most insidious forms—the computer.
Architects used to draw volumes, using shading and selecting a perspective. In learning how to draw one began to understand not only what it was like to draw like Palladio or Le Corbusier but also the extent of the differences in their work. A wall section of Palladio felt different to the hand than one of Le Corbusier’s. It is important to understand such differences because they convey ideas. One learned to make a plan. Now, with a computer, one does not have to draw. By clicking a mouse from point to point, one can connect dots that make plans, one can change colours, materials and light. Photoshop is a fantastic tool for those who do not have to think.
The problem is as follows. “So what?” my students say, “Why draw Palladio? How will it help me get a job?” The implication is this: “If it’s not going to help me get a job, I don’t want to do it.” In this sense, architecture does not matter. In a liberal capital society, getting a job matters, and my students are in school precisely for this reason.
Yet education does not help you get a job. In fact, the better you are at Photoshop the more attractive you are to an office, the better you will work in that office.
If I ask a student to make a diagram or a plan that shows the ideas of a building, they cannot do it. They are so used to connecting dots on a computer that they cannot produce an idea of a building in a plan or a diagram. This is certain to affect not only their future, but the future of our profession.
Point four: Today’s buildings lack meaning or reference
The computer is able to produce the most incredible imagery which become the iconic images of magazines and competitions. To win a competition today one has to produce shapes and icons by computer.
But these are icons with little meaning or relationship to things in the real world. According to the American pragmatist philosopher C S Peirce there were three categories of signs: icons, symbols, and indices. The icon had a visual likeness to an object.
Robert Venturi’s famous dictum categorised buildings as either “a duck or a decorated shed”; the difference between an icon and symbol in architectural terms.
A “duck” is a building that looks like its object—a hotdog stand in the form of a giant hotdog or, in Venturi’s terms, a place that sells ducks taking the very same shape as a duck. This visual similitude produces what Peirce calls an icon which can be understood at first glance.
Venturi’s other term, the “decorated shed”, describes a public facade for what amounts to a generic box like building. The decorated shed is more a symbol, in Peirce’s terms, which has an agreed upon, or conventional meaning. A classical facade symbolises a public building, whether it is a bank a library or school.
Today the shape of buildings become icons which have none of these external references. They may not necessarily look like anything or they may only resemble the processes that made them. In this case they do not relate outwardly but refer inwardly. These are icons that have little cultural meaning or reference. There is no reason to ask our more famous architects: “Why does it look like this?”
There is no answer to this question because “Why?” is the wrong question.
Why? Because the computer can produce it. One could ask these architects: “Why is this one better than that one?” Or “Which one of the crumpled paper buildings is better?” Or “Which one is the best and why?”
There is no answer again to these questions. Why? Because there is no value system in place for judging, and there is no relationship to be able to judge between the image produced and its meaning as an icon.
These icons are made from algorithmic processes that have nothing to do with architectural thinking.
Point five: We are in a period of late style
Edward Said in his book On Late Style describes lateness as a moment in time when there are no new paradigms or ideological, cultural, political conditions that cause significant change. Lateness can be understood as a historical moment which may contain the possibilities of a new future paradigm.
For example there were reasons in the late 19th century for architecture to change. These included changes in psychology introduced by Freud; in physics by Einstein; in mathematics with Heisenberg; and in flight with the Wright brothers. These changes caused a reaction against the Victorian and imperial styles of the period and articulated a new paradigm: modernism.
With each new paradigm, whether it is the French revolution or the Renaissance, there is an early phase, which in modernism was from 1914-1939; a high phase, which in modernism occurred 1954-1968 when it was consumed by liberal capital after the war; and a period of opposition. The year 1968 saw an internal, implosive revolution, one that reacted against institutions representing the cultural past of many of the western societies. This was followed by post modernism’s eclectic return to a language that seemed to have meaning. The Deconstructivist exhibition at the MoMA in 1988 put an end to this cliché and kitsch style.
Today I say we are in a period of late style. A period in which there is no new paradigm. Computation and the visual may produce a shift from the notational but this in itself is not a new paradigm. It is merely a tool. The question remains: What happens when one reaches the end of a historical cycle? On Late Style by Edward Said describes such a moment in culture before a shift to a new paradigm. A moment not of fate or hopelessness but one that contains a possibility of looking at a great style for the possibility of the new and the transformative. He uses as an example Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, written at the end of Beethoven’s career. This was the composer’s response to the seeming impossibility of innovation. Instead Beethoven wrote a piece that was difficult, even anarchic, that could not be easily understood and was outside of his characteristic and known style. Beethoven’s later work is an example of the complexity ambivalence, and the “undecidability” that characterises a late style.
Point six: To be an architect is a social act
This last point deals with architecture and its unique autonomy. Since the Renaissance in Italy when Brunelleschi, Alberti and Bramanti established what can be called the persistencies of architecture—subject-object relationships—these persistencies have remained operative to this day. Alberti’s dictum that “a house is a small city and a city is a large house”, remains with us in all works that we see. In other words the relationship between the part and the whole: the figure and the ground, the house to its site, the site to the street, the street to its neighbourhood and the neighbourhood to the city.
These issues constitute the basis of what would be called the dialectical synthesis as an aspect of the ongoing metaphysical project. Thus one of the things that must be investigated is the problematic part-to-whole relationship—which is part of a Hegelian dialectical idea of thesis and anti-thesis forming a new whole or synthesis—and the relationship of building to ground.
Architecture has traditionally been concerned with these dialectical categories, whether it is inside/outside, figure/ground, subject/object. For me today, it is necessary to look within architecture to see if it is possible to break up this synthetic project from within. This attempt is what post-structuralism would consider the displacement of the metaphysics of presence.
If we continue to think that what is presented is necessarily truthful or what we see is truthful and also beautiful then we will continue to subscribe to the myth that architecture is the wonder of the metaphysics of presence. It may become possible with such an awareness to move away from what I call the hegemony of the image.
People always say formalism is the project of architecture’s autonomists. For me it is precisely this autonomy which is architecture’s delay of engaging with society. If it is architecture’s activity and its own discourse which in fact impacts society, then to be an architect is a social act.
This does not mean social in the form of making people feel better or happy. Or building houses for the poor or shopping malls for the rich or garages for Mercedes. I am talking about understanding those conditions of autonomy that are architectural, that make for an engagement with society in the sense of operating against the existing hegemonic social and political structures of our time. That is what architecture has always been.

Peter Eisenman


Com devida vénia ao António.

Para além da estética, do marketing, da polémica, aquém da política e depois da sociologia, da antropologia ou da psicologia, sigamos pelo espaço (público) da digressão bárbara.
Do subúrbio à cidade, da cidade de regresso aos baldios de depois do subúrbio.
Metro, boulot, dodot?

[Stress, Justice, 2008]

[Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927]


[Linked Hybrid, Steven Holl, Pequim, 2003/...]

[...]
Mas nem por não se ter qualquer solução a curto prazo, a sociedade, nós todos, devemos deixar de olhar para cada um destes desempregos colectivos de mulheres sem a preocupação de vermos e sentirmos a devastação que ele tem por trás, o atraso social que isto significa para Portugal. Estas mulheres não vão educar os seus filhos da mesma maneira, vão reproduzir melhor o Portugal antigo do que preparar o novo. Elas sentem que falharam, tinham algumas ilusões que perderam. Mas nós falhamos mais se não temos a consciência de fazer alguma coisa. Porque se pode, na acção cívica, no voluntariado, no mundo empresarial, na política, fazer muita coisa por estas mulheres. O que é preciso é vê-las e à sua condição e não as cobrir com o manto diáfano da inevitabilidade. A começar pelo Governo, que mais uma vez se vai voltar para o betão e não para as pessoas.

José Pacheco Pereira, Público, 03.05.2008

[...]
Até hoje, a vasta maioria das obras (megalómanas) foram sempre para benefícios dos não-lisboetas e pagas com os recursos da câmara dos lisboetas. É absurdo mas é verdade.
Durante os últimos decénio, os recursos da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, o dinheiro dos lisboetas, foram para fazer viadutos, túneis e parques de estacionamento subterrâneos para que os não-lisboetas entrassem na cidade e estacionassem, o mais confortavelmente possível. O dinheiro dos lisboetas tem sido usado para tornar a vida dos próprios lisboetas num inferno.
Vejamos. Auto-estandartizou-se a grande maioria das avenidas: a Av. da Liberdade, a 24 de Julho, a da República, o Campo Grande, a Gago Coutinho... Transformou-se em campo de batalha a circulação nas várias praças e rotundas da capital. Lembremo-nos do que era o Saldanha, do Marquês que está como está, do Largo do Camões, do que deveria ser o Areeiro, da rotunda de Entrecampos, etc. [...]
Tudo isto para facilitar a entrada em Lisboa de cada vez mais carros, causando mais poluição e mais custos de congestionamento a quem cá vive.
[...]

Luís Campos e Cunha, Público, 2.5.2008

[Danish Architecture Center, OMA]

La angustia del individuo, la perturbación absoluta que puede subyacer o emerger de entre las apariencias estables de lo cotidiano, el ataque a las seguridades basadas en la concepción plenamente racional de la realidad son la materia de la obra hitchcockiana. Imaginar y construir una narración situada en unos lugares visualizados según una concepción espacial no determinada por unos parámetros estilísticos, sino por la sustancia de la comprensión que todo edificio y espacio posee, una dimensión psicológica y simbólica, es un acto arquitectónico. Construyendo realidades diegéticas, donde el significado de la arquitectura, el espacio, las organizaciones y atmósferas de los lugares habitados, que, en su presentación visual poseen un énfasis expresivo, una fenomenología propia y bien diferenciada, Alfred Hitchcock se transforma en arquitecto; indudablemente, de la misma manera en que Piranesi con el dibujo o E. Hoffmann en la literatura lo son. Hitchcock es el constructor de una poética tétrica y claustrofóbica del espacio.

Marco de significado. El cineasta comprendía la arquitectura como "el gran y eternamente provisional marco del significado humano". Su sensibilidad casi obsesiva hacia ella como escenario de la vida da a entender las razones de la profunda y compleja trascendencia que adquieren los decorados y localizaciones en sus filmes -a veces, subordinando a los actores al protagonismo e intensidad visual de éstos-. Las impecables construcciones visuales de espacios interiores y la relación con el entorno urbano de los personajes en sus películas están imbuidas de una dimensión psicológica que, aun concebidas como una prolongación simbólica del personaje que ocupa o percibe dicho espacio, poseen valor como expresión visual de estados psíquicos humanos.

Partiendo de la comprensión que esta sensibilidad y capacidad visual para indagar y revelar aspectos sobre la complejidad de las dimensiones conceptuales de la experiencia arquitectónica hace de Hitchcock un arquitecto, el historiador del arte Steve Jacobs corrobora a través de su ensayo The Wrong House (010 Publishers) a Hitchcock como un intérprete visual de la concepción moderna del espacio arquitectónico.

Clímax urbano. Jacobs realiza concienzudos análisis de los aspectos dialécticos contenidos por las arquitecturas que intervienen en cada una de sus películas, incluyendo los planos de las viviendas donde transcurren sus diferentes filmes -algunas tan icónicas como la Mansión Bates de Psicosis-, analizando como rasgo distintivo de su estilo el situar escenas de gran clímax en edificios o localizaciones urbanas emblemáticas. Indica asimismo que algunas de las más cruciales cintas del director discurren en un único escenario y que su construcción a partir de recursos fílmicos debe ser igualmente entendida como evidencia de su capacidad magistral para imbuir de una fenomenología arquitectónica a la imagen cinematográfica.

Hitchcock debutó en el cine como director artístico y, aunque posteriormente no fuese él el creador directo de las arquitecturas y atmósferas interiores de sus películas, sino los diferentes directores artísticos que colaboraron con él, recalcó persistentemente la importancia crucial de su tarea: "Un director artístico debe tener un conocimiento y comprensión amplia de la arquitectura. Debe ser capaz de distinguir entre lo que caracteriza un tipo de alojamiento y lo que individualiza a los habitantes de dicho alojamiento", escribiría al respecto.

Jacobs recalca la decisiva importancia que para Hitchcock constituyó su experiencia profesional como director artístico en filmes mudos alemanes de los años 20, donde asimilaría los conceptos del caligarismo y del Kammerspielfilm. Del primero adoptaría las sombras, espejos y paisajes oscuros para poner en escena un mundo físico oscuro, angustiante y violento, reflejo de un estado psíquico enfermo; del segundo, la meticulosa atención al detalle con que se retrataba la vida de individuos comunes en entornos cotidianos opresivos. Ambos influirían en su concepción del decorado cinematográfico como un espacio objetivo y realista imbuido de la dimensión subjetiva de los personajes.

El potencial de la imagen. De igual modo, aunque éste sea un aspecto en el que Jacobs no se adentra en su análisis, es posible que fueran influyentes sobre Hitchcock en ese mismo periodo las teorías que argumentaban eufóricamente el potencial de la imagen cinematográfica como nuevo territorio donde concretar visiones arquitectónicas radicales, poderosas impresiones visuales que provocaran una experiencia emocional netamente diferenciada por su intensidad de las de la "realidad".

La imagen hitchcockniana crea un espacio que deliberadamente se distancia de la realidad, no sólo del espectador, sino incluso a menudo de los individuos que ocupan dicho espacio: la esencia potente de la imagen y la narración fílmica como cauces de la experiencia arquitectónica creada. El decorado en los filmes de Hitchcock es un laberinto en el cual todos -personajes, director y público- se extravían y se encuentran a sí mismos en la intensidad de sus emociones, escribe el crítico Pascal Bonitze, citado por Jacobs.

La Historia de la Arquitectura no debe abarcar únicamente la Historia de los edificios construidos, ni la de los no construidos diseñados por prominentes arquitectos. Incorporar a Alfred Hitchcock a esta Historia, algo que se hace posible a través de ensayos como The Wrong House, se hace indispensable para desliteralizar la imaginación de los arquitectos, sumidos hoy en la contemplación y asimilación de imágenes vanas de arquitectura y en la autorreferencia dentro de la disciplina. Alfred Hitchcock logró la construcción de imágenes arquitectónicas arraigadas en lo arquetípico. Como individuo dotado de una específica forma de sensibilidad arquitectónica, reflexionó sobre la naturaleza esencial de lo arquitectónico, que viene dada por la construcción y experiencia del espacio. No solamente el espacio material, sino también la esencia filosófica del término «espacio» en contacto con la psique humana.

Énfasis del objeto. Su aportación resulta fundamental más allá de la cinefilia, puesto que permite abrir una reflexión sobre el significado de la arquitectura, un término que se encuentra rozando un proceso de denostación provocado por el énfasis en el objeto. La reflexión sobre esa dimensión esencial e inmaterial del poder del espacio a la que nos conducen los fotogramas de las películas de Alfred Hitchcock tal vez nos sitúa ante una definición que sublima auténtica complejidad y belleza de la arquitectura, exponiendo la necesidad de un vínculo profundo entre ella y el individuo. Una visión arquitectónica que fue construida en la mente de un no-arquitecto.


Fredy Massad & Alicia Guerrero Yeste

O passado acontece cada vez mais depressa.

[UN Studio, VilLA NM]