Festival dell'architettura

Berlin 2012 _ Photograph by Sissi Cesira Roselli

Within the norm. A famous essay by Massimo Cacciari bears the title Nomads in prison, foreboding a condition that has maybe only now come to be recognized as tragic due to the new economic context. And yet the signs were increasingly pointing towards the need for a return to the city. In her various essays on urban conditions in the US, Saskia Sassen has shown the value of the economics of a city characterized by depth and diversified stratification: from production of services and ideas to informal and precarious work, and the interdependence of these two worlds. In Europe there are a growing number of design teams that make use of weak or ephemeral economies in order to develop designs that involve a return to the center. In Spain, ahead of his time, Santiago Cirugeda Parejo worked on recetas urbanas (and he continues to do so today with even greater motivation): design strategies bordering on the illegal that enable those who possess very little to live in the heart of the city, because this is the only way they can profit from the closeness that marks a substantial distinction between dispersed and compact. The Spanish architect, who until recently was regarded more as an artist than as a designer due to his small production of cubic meters, offers his services as a consultant for clients with limited resources in order to uncover loopholes in the legislation or, depending on your point of view, opportunities for finding “homes” in places where they apparently could not exist. Scaffoldings of building sites (Andamios, Seville 1998 and Capsula 1 S.C., Seville 1998-1999), the roof of a building (Vivienda ilegal - La casa de Pepe, 2000), the communal spaces in a block of flats (Proprietad horizontal derivada en vertical, Siviglia 2001), a vacant lot awaiting construction (Casa Rompecabezas, Siviglia 2002) become sites where a place and a right to live can materialize. The results are semi-legal places, often usable only for a limited period of time, that are discovered through a specific and skewed reading of the legislation. This legislation is intended to simply regulate the use of space, but if manipulated in a certain way it can offer the necessary tools for the construction of new forms of shelter. One example, this time without a social mission, is the house designed by R&Sie(n) – the title of the work is I’m lost in Paris (2008) – in a Parisian courtyard. Here again, the desire to be inside the urban system lead the designers to use a truc to defeat the boundaries between private property and communal space and make them ambiguous. The architecture activates a game of complicity with the “living” element that covers it: the shroud of vegetation that surrounds the house serves to make the building limits, imposed by law in the “voids” of the Parisian blocks, ambiguous.

Essentially there are, at the beginning of the new millennium, a growing number of designs that explore the need for a return to the center, and as a result legislation becomes a part of the project due to the fact that it offers the possibility, long forgotten or paralyzed, to manipulate the heart of the city. Legislative norms, viewed not just literally but rather as a code system that must be re-calibrated to suit an evolving “normality”, become the means through which the ordinary, the landscape of everyday life and its transformations, may return to the edges or even to the inside of a “new” possible compact urban system.

Characters. If on the one hand the shapeless magma, resulting from the power of the individual and the proliferation of single properties, has produced a common everyday vision often ignored by architecture, on the other the belly of the city offers itself today as a refuge against the crisis of resources, as an invitation for new opportunities deriving from an idea of closeness. This is where the challenge lies for designers: a return to an indistinct uniformity is unthinkable, and needs to be replaced by a return to a sense of community, or better still to the need for vivre ensemble (as shown nowadays by the insistent use of the suffix co-), that requires very careful interpretations of a society that has suffered an explosion of its characteristics and yearnings and is fully aware of its own différences. The notion of “compact” in that context can indeed have the meaning of shared, acting on the same point, articulated in three dimensions, but also the notion of being not necessarily filled but maybe only occupied, frequented.

After witnessing the construction of diffuse but distinct visions, in an obsessive search for personal solutions that often resorted to furnishing rather than to architecture and space, sometimes in the public realm too, the challenge now resulting from a return to the center is to bear in mind what that dispersion has offered in terms of housing and declination of architectural characteristics. The problem transcends mere typology, seems to be immune to the reflections of modernity and rather harks back with growing insistence and nostalgia to the transfer of a historical vision of architecture, which is full of those architectural characteristics, resulting in awkward remembrances or failed attempts. But this aspiration, which goes beyond mere quantity and numbers, recognized and debated but often dismissed for being a simple question of linguistics, in reality exposes with great force a problem of space and its ability to actually become part of the design of the city, not just by chance or as an exception, nor as a significant absentee. Furthermore, the contemporary city shows that the lack of spatial articulation does not just lead to a relinquishment, but causes a concentration of worlds and languages indoors, where they are more easily manipulated and personalized, thus rendering the outdoors meaningless, as it often reveals itself to be; unrepresentative, outspokenly neutral because boringly repetitive, still inhabitable because it belongs to no one, not everyone.

Roles. Essentially, the heralded and imminent possible return to the city undermines the established professional position of the architect. Indeed, if the urban magma is a sea in continuous expansion, then the architect is the one who designs new solutions that have been decided by the political powers and the despotic market; but if the tendency should invert its course, a chance then presents itself to stop and reflect, and to readjust the roles. The overbearing equation between design and increase in volume (resulting in the growth of a construction market that has favored the concept of the new, not in terms of space but in terms of objects: by asserting the need for a new thing, a new dwelling) appears to have halted its race into the future. Maybe – the doubt is legitimate since we are talking about a cultural problem that stems from a material limitation (the end of resources in a broad sense: land, money, ideas…) – the return to the city can be an opportunity to reconsider the spectrum of the designer’s tasks, and naturally all this is already happening thanks to the instinct of survival, but with the awareness of the added value that it can provide in didactic terms. Today the market expects ideas, first and foremost, and then consequential action; urban voids no longer fill up automatically, and the end of this proceeding further requires a new formulation of each party’s role, and in more general terms vociferously calls for an idea of the city.

Essentially, the return to the city represents a return to the pre-existing, and the Italian construction world, the legislative apparatus on which it rests, the forces competing on the field suddenly all realize that they are unprepared for it because for so long they have been busy conquering new frontiers, new land. The frame within which we must re-think the role of the architect, no longer merely an homo faber but rather a forger of ideas capable of reconciling trends and reality, is emerging as the dawn of a new world built with and upon the rubble of a war, that senseless war that the construction world has declared on the land, backed by an aimless design and the pleasure which continuous discovery brought with it. Therefore we need generals, front lines and perhaps very few soldiers, in order to prevent further imprisonments on top of those already registered, to choose and set up a relation based on many returns, that wastes no time with nostalgia if it really wants to be a new world.

Sara Marini is Researcher in Architectural and Urban Composition at Università Iuav di Venezia.