Domus 946 – editorial

In his first issue, Joseph Grima wonders what became of the belief that architecture could transform for the better the lives of many. And make an appeal to Reyner Banham to claim that “at the risk of soiling it, the Absolute of architecture must be brought back into the kitchen”. #domus1000

#domus1000, on newsstands in March, is the occasion to get back to the archive for some relevant articles of the editors that guided the magazine from 1979 until now. This editorial has been published in April 2011 in Joseph Grima’s first issue.

 

“The cost of bringing the Absolute into the kitchen is to soil it” – Reyner Banham.

 

Lima, Perù. In the early evening, a group of 26 individuals sits huddled around a table. Their discussion is earnest, but not disproportionately to the matter at hand: how to address an unfolding housing emergency in a rapidly urbanising Latin America. The year is 1968, or perhaps early 1969. From that meeting, at which James Stirling, Aldo van Eyck, Charles Correa and ten more of the best-known architects of the time were present, was to emerge PREVI (Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda), an ambitious and innovative attempt to place the knowledge of the world’s most renowned avant-garde designers at the service of the urban dispossessed.
Fast-forward 35 years to mid-2004. Around another table sits a similarly distinguished group of architects. The place is Nanjing, and the topic is the planning of CIPEA (China International Practical Exhibition of Architecture). CIPEA is probably best described as a private park in which visitors are encouraged to observe and experience architectural masterpieces by two dozen of the most respected international and local practitioners at work today—Arata Isozaki, Odile Decq, Steven Holl and David Adjaye among them. In this dream world, some buildings have programmes, but it would be difficult to dispute that their primary purpose is simply to exist.
Lest one be tempted to surrender to a sense of powerlessness, though, the city itself continuously offers confirmation of its innate resilience, even in the face of extreme crisis.
Leaving aside certain uncanny similarities—the five-letter acronyms, for example, or the idea of pairing a dozen locals with a dozen international stars—nothing less than an abyss separates these two schemes. The comparison is enlightening, and highlights a 30-year trajectory through which architecture’s ambitions have been radically rescaled.
What became of the belief that architecture could transform for the better the lives of many? Is it possible that architecture has been reduced to a protected species, forced to beg sanctuary from the dirt and grime of the real world in fenced reserves? It’s not that there’s anything wrong with CIPEA’s architecture—if anything, its audaciousness reminds us how close we’ve come to achieving some of the wildest ambitions of the 20th century’s avant-gardes. The problem is larger in scale: in an era of bubbles, fantasy economics and credit gorges, far from being the antidote to squalor that PREVI’s architects imagined, the urban realm is largely synonymous with speculative development.
Our ambitions must be greater than to become the voluntary prisoners of the architecture reserves.
Lest one be tempted to surrender to a sense of powerlessness, though, the city itself continuously offers confirmation of its innate resilience, even in the face of extreme crisis. Conceived as a brash emblem of Venezuela’s oil-fuelled economic surge, Torre Confinanzas was abandoned before completion, etching into the skyline an indelible reminder of the greed of a finance left unbridled. In an act of spontaneous self-redemption, the tower today offers shelter to 2,500 desperate victims of the economic inequality it was conceived to celebrate and intensify.
Our ambitions must be greater than to become the voluntary prisoners of the architecture reserves. We must reclaim the city as an unfinished project, a realm of unending possibility: at the risk of soiling it, the Absolute of architecture must be brought back into the kitchen.
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