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Precarious
architectures
for precarious times?
Pedro
Levi Bismarck
People in town made
lots of jokes about these tarpaulin covers. To me, it just goes to show how
dumb the authorities are. If they want the city to look better, they might as
well do some real work instead of putting up these sorry decorations! It’s sad,
because of course people would have liked Putin to see the reality of life here
and do something about it, especially those who voted for his party.
A local remark
about the large tarpaulin prints that covered the dilapidated houses of Suzdal
for the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in November 2013. [1]
Who does not know of Potemkin’s villages, the ones
that Catherine’s cunning favorite built in the Ukraine? They were villages of
canvas and pasteboard, villages intended to transform a visual desert into a flowering
landscape for the eyes of Her Imperial Majesty.
Adolf Loos, Potemkin
City
One cannot but recognize the important role that the
so call temporary architectures have
come to occupy in the map of current architectural production. A success that
is usually grounded on two main arguments. First: the idea that those emerging practices are a rupture from
the current architectural production system (the star system). This has to
do with the fact that these architectures
ground their practice in the rejection of one of the most basic Vitruvian principles,
the firmitas, i.e., its solid,
everlasting condition. Second: these architectures engage a political and
social activism, along with a call to new ways of interaction with the city,
filling a certain frustration regarding our relation with it and with its
processes of governance. But, however fashionable these arguments may be, they are
grounded in no more than generic misconceptions. That is, neither these
architectures correspond to any operative strategy of questioning architectural
production; neither this political/urban activism is in fact real. They are
just conceptual apparatus seeking to validate those practices. And it’s precisely this misappropriation that I
would like to debate, placing three questions.
1. The critic illiteracy
First,
the total indistinctness that reigns under
this classification: temporary architectures.
As if it was possible to put together such different practices, with such
different strategies and purposes. There is an absolute illiteracy of the critic on this level, which is much more obsessed
in the discourse of the generational rupture, of the creative exits from the crisis, than to
understand what lies beneath them, what are their motifs and what makes them
different. On failing to do this — and promoting practices without any critical
discourse that do no more than repeating fashionable commonplace strategies — the
critics shoot itself in the foot and in the future of the discipline. Ending up
to neutralize the work of the very few indeed interested in problematizing architecture
amidst the current crisis.
2. Firmitas
interruptas
Now,
it’s precisely this absence of a socio-political and architectural critical
discourse that leads us to the second question. Indeed, we should see these
architectures as being simply the result of a new configuration of the
financial capital. As temporary architectures they are, indeed, precarious — precarious
architectures, for precarious times —, light structures, low-cost,
flexible, perfectly suitable to the new needs of the markets and the urban
marketing that has turned the cities into thematic parks. They are the new shape
of the financial capital (fluid, rapid, precarious) and not a critic to this
politics of capital reconfiguration — with all its unbalances and injustices.
These architectures have nothing of rupture or social activism. They will not
be for sure architecture’s salvation army. And if they disturb the principle of
the firmitas is only to adapt themselves
to the new needs of the financial capital.
3. Architectures of enjoyment
This
last question has to with the fact that most of this architectures place their
strategy in a certain space of the enjoyment,
of the ludic, which in some extent is
in contradiction with any discourse on political or social emancipation. The
slogans that they preach for a cool
subversion of the rules of everyday life, the calls to the city as a playground and as a field for new and amusing
ways of interaction give us the illusion that we are members of a community,
that we are even active and responsible citizens. But they are no more than
small toys capturing and amusing our free time. They turn the city into a commodity
and us into consumers of any other product and not in political engaged
citizens. The paradox of these architectures
of enjoyment can be stated in the following way: the more they spread throughout
the cities, turning them into cool places and playgrounds, more advances the privatization of public spaces, the violent
gentrification processes, the real estate speculation and, finally, more
advances the State’s privatization. The more they proclaim that the city is
ours, more this one and the State become property of a few. These architectures of enjoyment are no more
than fetishes, precisely, substitutes of a right to which we have renounced:
the right to the city. And the enjoyment that they give to us is no more than a
compensation for our alienation before the city, before those political
processes that every time say to govern in our behalf, when, in fact, all they
do is to put as pawns in the world’s debt market.
4. Architecture and (the aestheticization of) political
life
Anyway, I would like to
stress that I’m not including all the practices that in a way or another use
these temporary architectures. But, precisely, the need to draw a separation
line between the ones that are engaged in thinking a certain political and
social role of architecture. And the others, that in their behalf, taking
advantage of those discourses, are no more than empty marketing strategies of a
power that while entertains the free time of that small discouraged planetary
bourgeoisie, dissimulates the true nature of its neoliberal politics.
In short, the
achievement of these precarious architectures is in its ability to address some
of our current frustrations regarding the discipline (its lack of
social/political meaning) and the city (our estrangement with its processes of
governance) without giving, however, a proper response. Following a Walter
Benjamin’s cunning formula (on the aestheticization
of politics in Fascism): they grant
us the possibility to express ourselves, but on no account to express our
rights [2]. They
feed themselves from our disquiets and concerns, but on no account they grant
us our demands. And this is the reason of its ideological success as well of
its danger, as watermarks of this endless process of aestheticization of political life.
In any
case, in its small scale of intervention, they can be operative ways of
disturbing our alienation before politics, promoting processes of participation
in local government. And this should well be a decisive field for thinking the
role of architecture in the next future. But this will be only possible if we
are sure to understand who is doing what and in whose behalf. And most of all, it
will only be possible if we address the question of how one can rethink the
relation between architecture and the political. That is, how can architecture
be a response to the true crisis of our time? The crisis of democratic
institutions and of this violent reconfiguration of the financial capital. But as well: how can architecture contribute
to draw new ways of accessing to politics, draw new spaces for the common,
promoting processes of social emancipation, while exposing, giving visibility
to the ones remaining always in the edge of the dominant discourses of power?
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References
1. According to “France 24” locals were told not
to hang out in the streets with bottles of alcohol in hand. “Russian town gets
fake makeover for Putin visit”. FRANCE 24, 11.12.2013.
2. «Fascism attempts to
organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property
relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting
expression to the masses-but on no account granting them rights. The masses
have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them
expression in keeping these relations unchanged. The logical outcome of fascism
is an aestheticizing of political life». BENJAMIN, Walter; The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and
other writings on media, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
London, 2008, p.41.
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Images
1. Large tarpaulin prints
cover the dilapidated houses of Suzdal for the visit of Russian President
Vladimir Putin, in November 2013.
2.
Frame from the movie Blazing Saddles, Mel
Brooks, 1974.
3. Frame from the movie Blazing Saddles, Mel Brooks, 1974.
___
Pedro Levi Bismarck
Punkto
Magazine Editor. Architect and Researcher. Porto
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Editor’s Note
This article was originally presented
in two roundtables on pop up architectures in Porto and London, in the Battle
of Ideas event, October 2013. A debate with: Alastair Donald, Oliver
Wainwright, Austin Williams and Cany Cash in London. Karl Sharro, Luis Tavares
Pereira, Alastair Donald, Joana Varajão e Fernando Martins in Porto. Article
also published in Revista Dédalo #10: “Who lives next door?”.
