Crise ou transição?

Há muito que a crise na Arquitectura, enquanto profissão, está instalada. Este é de facto um dos temas mais falados por entre arquitectos e aspirantes a arquitectos. Em Portugal, há pelo menos uma década que jovens arquitectos e até mesmo ateliês de alguma dimensão se tentam reinventar na tentativa de se destacarem tentando por um lado, de se libertar de linguagens e modelos "caducos", e por outro de se aproximarem mais perto da sociedade.

Nos últimos 20 anos, os avanços tecnológicos e a revolução na mundo da internet veio não só permitir um grande avanço e rapidez na formulação dos mais diversos conceitos de projecto mas também auxiliar em grande medida nas suas mais diversas formas de representação tais como modelos 3D, animação, pormenorização, etc. A internet abriu a grande porta à discussão nesta área e é efectivamente responsável por estabelecer pontes entre profissionais, estudantes e/ou até mesmo curiosos. Há muito que em Portugal a Arquitectura estava afastada da Cultura e o seu contacto era feito através de revistas e publicações da especialidade tendo como principal alvo o arquitecto.

Felizmente tenho observado que esse tempo, essa era, culminou. A Arquitectura passou então a fazer parte da programação dos canais de televisão e tem se registado um aumento de colunas sobre o tema em revistas e jornais. Claro está que esta mudança cultural e intelectual ainda nada ou pouco se reflecte no volume de trabalho que muitos tanto anseiam. O lado positivo é que finalmente a Arquitectura está mais presente e em diálogo com a sociedade e isso irá sem dúvida reverter o estado actual da profissão.

Muitos problemas têm sido identificados e explorados por entre jornais, blogues, revistas, etc, e por isso não quero desenvolver este tópico. No entanto a manifestação do problema do Arquitecto e da Arquitectura É o tema da actualidade, não fosse este um momento de transição económica, social mas fortemente cultural. Muitos chamam-lhe de crise... eu cá prefiro palavras como as de reflexão ou transição.

Abaixo deixo o link para mais uma crónica sobre este último tema escrita pelo colega Tiago Mota e extraída do P3 do jornal "O Público".

Doce Controversa Arquitectura!

Texto: Rodrigo Ferreira Rodrigues

Imagens: Lara Jacinto, in "O Público"

Useless? A Dor errante

De Hans Maier-Aichen e Max Bruinsma

Quando Phillippe Starck afirmou que “o design é absolutamente inútil”, tocou num nervo sensível. Afinal, a história do design está carregada da ideia modernista de utilidade. Desde inícios do século XX, o funcionalismo tem feito parte do ADN do design, enfatizando as características intrínsecas de um produto e em que medida este satisfaz as necessidades do utilizador.

Mas no actual mercado de massas, o enfoque transitou: a produção é direccionada em função da geração de receitas, e maximizar vendas com o mínimo de custos parece ter-se tornado principal objectivo do design. A funcionalidade básica de um produto é agora a sua capacidade de ir a reboque da mais recente e lucrativa tendência de mercado. E para esse efeito, cópias baratas são melhores que originais dispendiosos.

Em parte alguma se consegue experienciar mais intensamente este afunilamento – ou simplificação redutora – do que se considera funcional que nas feiras para profissionais: uma sucessão infindável das ditas últimas tendências. Para o observador que vagueia por estes vastos bazares de imitações e cópias a viagem é dolorosa. Mais que pés doridos, o que prevalece é a dor na alma. A esmagadora maioria daquilo que se celebra como “novo” é perfeitamente intercambiável com as novidades do ano anterior. A esmagadora maioria é redundante.

Um dos conceitos fulcrais do funcionalismo – suprimir a redundância, quer do desenho do próprio objecto quer do seu processo de produção – foi subvertido para o seu oposto: celebrar a redundância como a forma mais eficaz, do ponto de vista da rentabilidade, de simular inovação. Assim, numa interpretação simplista do funcionalismo, o que se considera sem utilidade do ponto de vista comercial é eliminado do projecto. A variação em aberto – este mecanismo essencial da evolução – é minimizada. A dialéctica de tentativa e erro cessa.

Nos anos 80 do século passado, houve um momento em que se pensou que a relação do design com a ideologia modernista do útil havia sido descontinuada, tomando uma direcção radicalmente diferente. O que foi o pós-modernismo senão uma tentativa espirituosa de quebrar com o regime da utilidade, enaltecer o capricho e louvar a forma?

Do ponto de vista funcionalista, o pós-modernismo pode ter celebrado o “ruído”, mas veio igualmente complementar os genes mais mundanos de resolução de problemas do design, focando as suas raízes culturais.

Permitiu restabelecer a ligação do design à função simbólica que desde tempos imemoriais tem sido o território das artes “aplicadas” ou decorativas. Esta fonte interminável de ornamentações aparentemente inúteis e de objectos sem aparente finalidade prática serviam não apenas como sinal de preciosismo e status, mas sobretudo como uma expressão de valor cultural – de civilização, por assim dizer.

As artes decorativas são o domínio de antigos processos e técnicas artesanais altamente desenvolvidas que hoje estão quase exclusivamente associadas a raros e caros objectos de coleccionador – bem como à tradição. Mas cada vez mais, esta é também a arena da experimentação com novas formas, materiais e processos de produção, bem como para o confronto crítico entre forma e função – precisamente o tipo de exploração em aberto que foi eliminada pela indústria mainstream como sendo pouco rentável.Muitos dos objectos de luxo e extrema sofisticação daí resultantes são hoje chamados de “design de arte”. Rejeitam noções banais de utilidade e podem mesmo parecer estar a anos luz da responsabilidade do design em resolver os problemas do “mundo real”, nas célebres palavras proferidas pelo decano do design sustentável, Victor Papanek, há trinta anos atrás.

Mas apontam igualmente para um redireccionar das quantidades colossais de recursos energéticos, materiais e humanos, canalizados para o desenho de bens de consumo produzidos em massa Apontam para um novo – ou renovado – paradigma de desenho, produção e consumo conscientes de produtos mais preocupados em fazer sentido de forma sustentável que em ter lucro a qualquer preço.

O objectivo de Useless? A Dor Errante é encontrar as repercussões do “ruído” na temática do uso. Levantar questões a partir do confronto entre o que parece “sem uso” e o que aparenta ser funcional; entre consumo ostensivo e os fundamentos culturais do uso.

Transferindo o nosso enfoque da eficácia de mercado para a dialéctica de exploração, a exposição explora o proveito do “sem uso”.

Siedlung Affoltern Apartements

O edifício longitudinal que se dispõem ao longo da Wehntalerstrasse, Affoltern em Zürich transforma-se num pedestal público sobre o qual  descansam pequenos blocos  criando uma dialéctica urbana contra o espaço verde que foi projectado no interior do quarteirão. No piso térreo da construção longitudinal (paralelo à Wehntalerstrasse) podemos encontrar espaços comerciais, os acessos ao interior do quarteirão mas também a administração desta cooperativa habitacional. Este modelo de habitação permite um acesso mais imediato à habitação, indo ao encontro dos jovens e famílias com recursos reduzidos. A característica principal dos apartamentos reside no modo como estes estão estruturados em relação directa com as generosas varandas que permitem a extensão da habitação para o exterior, promovendo o contacto com a Natureza envolvente.

Images credits: João Amaral & Müller Sigrist Architekten

Architects: Müller Sigrist Architekten
Location: Wehntalerstrasse, Affoltern, Zürich, Switzerland
Construction: 2005-20010

Project S

It used to be that the best architects did the biggest work, while the smaller work was left to all the other ones. Now, it is the opposite. While Pritzker Prize-winning architects are designing clean-sharp tap’s and cutlery, unknown developer-architects are building entire cities from the ground-up in the Middle East and China. In the age of the “scratch-built metropolis”¹, the call for (good) architects to return to big design is more critical than ever. Where have all the “big-design” architects gone? Can large-scale design ever be glamourous again? Will we ever see a master plan in Wallpaper magazine?

As China plans to set up 20 new cities annually in the coming 20 years², there will be millions more. Historically, tasks of this scale and magnitude would have been awarded to the world’s leading architects. Le Corbusier´s masterplan for Chandigarh, Lúcio Costa’s vision for Brasilia, or Haussamann´s rebuilding of Paris – these were the big visions on a large scale, each plan looking at the city as an integrated whole.

Now almost 15 years after the “death of urbanism”, there is a generation of architects whose scepticism of the “macro” has led them to steer clear of any large-scale work. Instead they are focused in smaller scale projects they can control. Interiors, furniture, a specific material, a fabrication technique... over time, everyone becomes a specialist in one tiny, digestible facet of the field. These projects are easy to understand and they are easy to digest. If a project can´t be explained by a sound bite and a image, if it can´t fit on a spread in MARK Magazine, it is clumsy and uncool. And why not? Architects are enjoying the benefits of being in fashion. More media coverage means more attention, more money, and more freedom to pursue small, glamorous projects. Wallpaper architects get invited to lot more parties than city planners.
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1. D. Mcgray. ‘Pop-Up Cities: China Builds a Bright Green Metropolis’, Wired Magazine, Issue 15.05

2. ‘Twenty New Cities to Be Set Up in China Every Year’, People´s Daily, 2000.

In: Visionary Cities.
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Graphics credits: João Amaral

Social Contradictions - A housing issue

Graphics credits: João Amaral

Skysckraper ON HOLD!

As if on an assembly line driven by market protocols, city after city around the world has stamped out the same inevitable pattern of urban development: Industry out (port, factory, mill), developer in (condo, housing, boardwalk, marina complex). We have relied on the predictable fluctuations of the market to tell us what to do, where to build, and what to design, but we have suddenly lost our beacon.

Without emerging markets, without money, without incentives, architects around the world are now without prospects. Is it hopeless, or can we imagine new models of development in the wake of near economic collapse?

Can we use this crisis as an opportunity to break away from our current tendencies, to escape from urbanism autopilot? This could be just the thing our cities needed.

Right now, the projected five tallest buildings on each of the five continents are on hold.

Based on: A. Stern, ‘Global recession stalls skyscraper construction’ Reuters UK (March 2009).

In: Visionary Cities.

Graphics credits: João Amaral

Oscar Niemeyer Footbridge - Rocinha, Brazil

The FIFA World Cup is heading to Brazil in 2014 and the Olympics to Rio de Janeiro in 2016. Curving into Rocinha, Rio's largest favela, is a new concrete footbridge designed by Oscar Niemeyer, now 103 years old. The bridge is the product of an ambitious and ongoing attempt to improve Rio’s notorious favelas in time for the global sporting events.

The government initiative – Morar Carioca (Living Rio) – involves hundred of Brazilians designers who are instigating radical and diverse urban interventions in city’s slums. Rocinha is extremely volatile: larger areas are run by drug lords, whose ongoing battles with the police frequently result in disturbingly violent shoot-outs. The favelas have a colourful and rich environment but a highly unsafe one.

Only in the past 20 years have the favelas begun to be recognized as a legitimate part of the city. Rio has moved away from the idea of uprooting them and displacing their residents to poorly executed social housing. The economic stimulus of the upcoming events is enabling the successful integration of the favelas into the city by creating community buildings and new public space, improving infrastructure and taking back control from the drug traffickers.

The bridge is a dynamic example of such integration. It establishes a pedestrian path over a busy main road and connects a major favela to a new sports facility, while further contributing to Rocinha’s strong identity. Niemeyer’s design, which he gave free to the city in which he grew up, is a typically grand concept but one that has been executed humbly, constructed on a human scale from locally prevalent concrete, it is a simple and absent of detail.

The bridge is a gesture, emblematic of Rio’s changing attitudes towards the favelas.

Text: Peter Dykes in Mark Magazine

Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism

LeWitt helped establish Conceptualism and Minimalism as dominant movements of the postwar era. A patron and friend of colleagues young and old, he was the opposite of the artist as celebrity. He tried to suppress all interest in him as opposed to his work; he turned down awards and was camera-shy and reluctant to grant interviews. He particularly disliked the prospect of having his photograph in the newspaper.

His work — sculptures of white cubes, or drawings of geometric patterns, or splashes of paint like Rorschach patterns — tested a viewer’s psychological and visual flexibility. See a line. See that it can be straight, thin, broken, curved, soft, angled or thick. Enjoy the differences. The test was not hard to pass if your eyes and mind were open, which was the message of Mr. LeWitt’s art.

He reduced art to a few of the most basic shapes (quadrilaterals, spheres, triangles), colors (red, yellow, blue, black) and types of lines, and organized them by guidelines he felt in the end free to bend. Much of what he devised came down to specific ideas or instructions: a thought you were meant to contemplate, or plans for drawings or actions that could be carried out by you, or not.

Sometimes these plans derived from a logical system, like a game; sometimes they defied logic so that the results could not be foreseen, with instructions intentionally vague to allow for interpretation. Characteristically, he would then credit assistants or others with the results. With his wall drawing, mural-sized works that sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction “not straight” was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others — their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever — remained part of the art.

In so doing, Mr. LeWitt gently reminded everybody that architects are called artists — good architects, anyway — even though they don’t lay their own bricks, just as composers write music that other people play but are still musical artists. Mr. LeWitt, by his methods, permitted other people to participate in the creative process, to become artists themselves.

Eye-candy opulence emerged from the same seemingly prosaic instructions he had come up with years before. A retrospective in 2000, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, concluded with some of these newly colorful wall drawings. (Mr. LeWitt always called them drawings, even when the medium became acrylic paint.)

Some people who had presumed that Mr. LeWitt’s Conceptualism was arcane and inert were taken aback. He began making colored flagstone patterns, spiky sculptural blobs and ribbons of color, like streamers on New Year’s Eve, often as enormous decorations for buildings around the world. It was as if he had devised a latter-day kind of Abstract Expressionism, to which, looking back, his early Conceptualism had in fact been his response.

He decided to reduce art to its essentials, “to recreate art, to start from square one,” he said, beginning literally with squares and cubes. But unlike some strict Minimalists, Mr. LeWitt was not interested in industrial materials. He was focused on systems and concepts — volume, transparency, sequences, variations, stasis, irregularity and so on — which he expressed in words that might or might not be translated into actual sculptures or photographs or drawings. To him, ideas were what counted.

At the time, linguistic theorists were talking about words and mental concepts as signs and signifiers. Mr. LeWitt was devising what you might call his own grammar and syntax of cubes and spheres, a personal theory of visual signs. It was theoretical, but not strictly mathematical. Partly it was poetic. He began with propositions for images, which became something else if they were translated into physical form by him or other people.

 

He also liked the inherent impermanence of Conceptual art, maybe because it dovetailed with his lack of pretense: having started to make wall drawings for exhibitions in the 1960s, he embraced the fact that these could be painted over after the shows. (Walls, unlike canvases or pieces of paper, kept the drawings two-dimensional, he also thought.) He wasn’t making precious one-of-a-kind objects for posterity, he said. Objects are perishable. But ideas need not be.

“Conceptual art is not necessarily logical,” he wrote in an article in Artforum magazine in 1967. “The ideas need not be complex. Most ideas that are successful are ludicrously simple. Successful ideas generally have the appearance of simplicity because they seem inevitable.”

To the sculptor Eva Hesse, he once wrote a letter while she was living in Germany and at a point when her work was at an impasse. “Stop it and just DO,” he advised her. “Try and tickle something inside you, your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” He added: “You are not responsible for the world — you are only responsible for your work, so do it. And don’t think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.”

Gary Garrels, a curator who organized Mr. LeWitt’s retrospective for San Francisco in 2000, said: “He didn’t dictate. He accepted contradiction and paradox, the inconclusiveness of logic.”

He took an idea as far as he thought it could go, then tried to find a way to proceed, so that he was never satisfied with a particular result but saw each work as a proposition opening onto a fresh question. Asked about the switch he made in the 1980’s — adding ink washes, which permitted him new colors, along with curves and free forms — Mr. LeWitt responded, “Why not?”

He added, “A life in art is an unimaginable and unpredictable experience.”


In: The New York Times