La arquitectura sale a escena

PROYECTO, PROGRESO, ARQUITECTURAN19_ARQUITECTURA Y ESPACIO-SOPORTE A. RAMOS–CARRANZA. “La Arquitectura sale a escena”. Proyecto, Progreso, Arquitectura. November 2018. Universidad de Sevilla. ISSN 2171–6897 / ISSNe 2173–1616 – RECEIVED 2018–11–17 CC BY-NC-ND – DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/ppa.2018.i19.12 A. RAMOS–CARRANZA. “La Arquitectura sale a escena”. Proyecto, Progreso, Arquitectura. November 2018. Universidad de Sevilla. ISSN 2171–6897 / ISSNe 2173–1616 – RECEIVED 2018–11–17 CC BY-NC-ND – DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/ppa.2018.i19.12 p.13 p.14 LA ARQUITECTURA SALE A ESCENA ARCHITECTURE EMERGES ON THE SCENE Amadeo Ramos–Carranza (https://orcid.org/0000–0003–4195–5295) p.15 In today’s society, a good part of the architecture disseminated in specialised media is valued particularly for its technological advances, its forms and materials, which qualify it as a constructive and highly innovative activity that helps society to progress. All these types of tests accumulated in the global world push the idea of architecture as an experimental science, although the scientific world maintains the idea of not admitting this reality. The impossibility of establishing a common methodological framework, as recognised in other sciences and disciplines, may be the reason for segregating architecture from this typified scientific world. Explanation of internal logics that construct architecture is guided by other considerations of social and cultural aspects, of desires and intentions that allude directly to people’s way of life. Many of these circumstances are manifested once construction of the work is completed, so that, in the end, all architecture is subordinated to the sense, arrangement and use that is made of it. It also happens that in the developed society of the 21st century it is not so easy to identify groups of subjects that respond to similar traits or characteristics; on the contrary, rather a diversity of identities is imposed that does not express common desires or aspirations and that are changing almost in real time. This constant otherness of use of cities entails a confrontation of orders and disorders that coexist simultaneously and that are usually identified with different forms and attitudes: the former seems to correspond to the planned part, which is geometrically recognisable, which responds to hierarchical spaces; while the latter expresses the unscheduled, improvised or spontaneous, as a consequence of other types of life that also transit the city. The alterations that new architecture produces on an inhabited environment reveal multiple conditions of reality creating transgressive situations. Time is a determining factor that reveals the different life cycles that cohabit in these environments. Recognizing various temporalities serves to distinguish places that remain stable over time against any actions that occur transiently, or against other spaces and architectures designed and created to respond to specific needs for a specific time. These are places conditioned by architecture and activated by the action of people. Aldo Rossi, in his scientific Autobiography, relates an experience that discovers that a singular place can be experienced in different ways according to the capacity of observation and reflection used. This happened in Piazza Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, when the triangulations created for its raising did not close. Errors in measurement resulted in drawings in which the shape of the plaza was always original, although reality was immutable, which allowed Aldo Rossi to think of another dimension that was hidden in that singular urban space. Imagining a quick visualisation of all the drawings as if they were stills of a film, the formal variations of the plaza would be discovered, and the dynamic and current condition of a space built in another era would be revealed. Georges Perec observed and discovered the multiple attempts to use a space, recording for three days everything that happened in Plaza Saint-Sulpice. The objective was not the observation of the architectures that give form and image to the plaza, but to date everything that is carried out habitually and daily and, therefore, apparently inconsequential. These are actions that, due to their short duration, would qualify as instants or moments and that, moreover, would not be recorded to memory, except for express attention as performed by Perec. He does not observe the plaza from the same place; Perec enters the same dynamic game as that observed bystanders: inhabitants of the plaza, tourists, vendors, passers-by, taxis, buses, etc., which relate a multitude of positions and ways of inhabiting this urban space, so that each narrated event would be described differently, according to the place, time or environment from which they are observed. Aldo Rossi places emphasis on the architectural form of the plaza space, i.e., on the space that would support many of the actions described by Georges Perec in the Plaza Sant-Sulpice. Rossi’s drawings could easily be imagined; if the descriptions of Perec were drawn, only the traces of the narrated events would appear: footsteps, trajectories or chromatic spots, which would indicate the most frequented parts, pauses, communications or permanence. And superimposing both drawings it would be discovered that what Perec observes happens on the pavements, among the furnishings and the vegetation, next to the fountains, the temporary kiosks or in front of public buildings, that is to say, between the architectures that Aldo Rossi would have drawn. This translation and subsequent superimposition of the actions narrated by Perec on the plaza drawn by Rossi imposes an order of appearance and, consequently, an obligatory temporal sequence: the space-support was built in another era and the alterations that change its sense and meaning are a consequence of the ways of life and use of today’s society. One of the most suggestive examples of the alteration of a space by the action of an architecture is the Teatro del Mundo that Aldo Rossi designed in 1979, that moved by seas and lakes. On the enormous world of the lagoon the different trajectories of the barge that carries the Teatro del Mundo would be mapped to its berth along with any fondamenta. Its light construction is derived from its sense of use, from the need to be transported, so that the Teatro del Mundo could be in other scenarios beyond the water, in any space of a city, surrounded by any architecture. Also observing the local reality in line with the previous reflections. Professor Rosa Añón, in her article “Active architectures”, published in the book Architecture and construction: landscape as an argument (Sevilla: UNIA, 2007), identified with this concept architecture that is available within the actions of people, promoting them, generating strategic tensions or also involving them. Architecture of daily life tailored to human activities, often humble, silent and human, which often goes unnoticed, but which can achieve great repercussion. But does architecture need a space-support? Can a space-support be understood or created from the different elements or architectures that occur within it or that comprise it? Does architecture have a capacity to alter attempts to use an inhabited space generating new cartographies? The articles in this issue try to answer some of these questions. It is possible that the first territory is space-support. Before a transgressive situation, the opposite thesis is imposed, in which landscape and nature should continue to dominate any man-made otherness. On the contrary, the port fronts are one of the places that have awakened most interest in modern and contemporary architecture and, consequently, the most transformed along with their buildings. Conversion of architectures due to functional obsolescence provokes new movements that modify the meaning and use of urban space: a diversity of flows that propitiates reuse or expansion of communication networks, enhancing the different interconnections generated in the city. From the territory to the city and from the building to the street; from architectures that alone constitute container-spaces to objects inserted in an urban roadway for new habitability. One of the ideas of Louis Kahn that lately seems forgotten has been recovered: “The street is probably the first institution of man; a place of encounter lacking in cover”. On the domestic scale, when the project tries to be a logical response to all possible certainties, even more unpredictable scenarios are produced. The house ends up being altered at the same time as the city is altered. In all the debates that are expressed through the articles, architecture is part of a game of logic, essential so that everything is finally activated by the people who inhabit it. From the territory to the house, an idea of place is built in all of them, identifying cultural, traditional, historical or socio-economic values through architecture. New situations generated by an independent, diverse and, very often, multicultural society, alter this idea of place that refers to belonging and permanence. It seems that nothing escapes the global meaning of our time, technological advances, forms, materials and innovations. Concepts are renewed and the experimental field is expanded exponentially; architecture claims its place among the sciences.