CARTHA
The history of every city, the phenomena surrounding it, are tied to an infiniteness of circumstances that directly or indirectly define its destiny and, by consequence, its form. Boundless growth, prosperity, abandonment and destruction, among many other events constantly shape cities, in a process where the reality settled by the past and the expectations of […]
The history of every city, the phenomena surrounding it, are tied to an infiniteness of circumstances that directly or indirectly define its destiny and, by consequence, its form. Boundless growth, prosperity, abandonment and destruction, among many other events constantly shape cities, in a process where the reality settled by the past and the expectations of the future define in the present an always-evolving form; that as André Tavares said, form is “where everything comes together”, but it is not everything.
Reflections on the Form of Cities intertwine in this last issue of CARTHA’s cycle on the Form of Form. The issue consists of two complementary sets of contributions; one where Lisbon served as a base for a selected group of international architects to design and reinterpret a stripe of the current city. Based on Parallel Realities, without social, political or natural restrains of any kind, the results show the unimpeded character of these architects and force us to look at Lisbon through their eyes, speculating on the present and, precisely because of that, perceiving it with renewed attention.
In addition, a series of contributions resulting from an open call for papers, takes us into similar journeys where the designs confront the issue’s topic not only with Lisbon, but with a number of different cities and situations. From a 37 million metropolis [1] to the eternal city [2], these contributions offer us a vast palette of reflections on the shaping of the city that complete the overall reflection of the issue, while being more direct in the confrontation they offer with the concepts contained in the analysed forms.
Lisboa Paralela marks the broadening of our awareness towards the form of the city through the lenses of all the contributions we gather here. It is the last of three issues on the Form of Form but it is not the end of our relation with it, it is but the beginning of a more informed and curious one.
Lisboa Paralela was published on the 8th of December, alongside the vernissage of the second exhibition of the “CARTHA on The Form of Form” cycle, at the Mãe d’Água das Amoreiras. All three issues of the cycle (How to Learn Better, Architecture of the City. A Palimpsest and Lisboa Paralela were exhibited. This exhibition was part of the official program of the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennial’ closing week.
CARTHA
The core concept of Issue III is rooted in the exercise Roma Interrotta, from 1978 when Italian architect Piero Sartogo invited 12 architects to reimagine Rome by redrawing the Nolli map. For Lisboa Paralela the current map of Lisbon will be used as a base, cutting out a section, running from South to North, across […]
The core concept of Issue III is rooted in the exercise Roma Interrotta, from 1978 when Italian architect Piero Sartogo invited 12 architects to reimagine Rome by redrawing the Nolli map. For Lisboa Paralela the current map of Lisbon will be used as a base, cutting out a section, running from South to North, across the city at its longest extent. A number of architects will be invited to redraw this section according to their visions of a possible parallel reality. The resulting drawing becomes an acte manqué, a representation of an alternative Lisbon.
The goal of this exercise is to display the unimpeded personal intentions of the invited architects: their visions of how the city of Lisbon could be. The architects are offered complete freedom to reinterpret the current city, both in physical and socio- cultural terms. The concept of parallel reality is suggested both as a process to attain the goal and the goal itself, being that the resulting dra- wings will be depictions of parallel realities. The sole immediate consequence of this concept in the design process is that a parallel reality of any kind would forcely be different from the one we find ourselves in. The degree of difference is for the architect to decide, ranging from altering the laws of physics, mirroring a neighbourhood or tearing down/ building a structure of some kind in the city. To reinforce the freedom offered to the architect in the exercise, the concept of acte manqué is suggested. If one would interpret the city as the result of the expression of society’s conscience, one could ask how the city would be if there were no oppressive factors or entities, if a sort of continuous and conscious acte manqué could happen. How would the form of a city, that results from a different society with a different set of rules and expectations, be? The architect is free to invent his/hers own society in the exercise, in a subversion of Rossi’s view on the role of the architect as a designer of “systems in which the spatial order becomes the order of society”. Here, the architect is challenged to set his/hers own “order of society” and, therefore, the guidelines on how to approach the formal representation of their intentions.
When approaching the question of which map of the city should be used for the exercise of a parallel reality, it is clear that a depiction of the actual reality has to be offered as a base to envision alternative ones. A section of a current official map of Lisbon, a stripe running from South to North, will be subdivided into 10 equal parts, each of the parts will be offered to an architect to be reimagined. The choice of this stripe of city is not random or innocent; it‘s intention is to dissect all the chronologic and geographic layers of the city, from its genesis (Castle) and lowest point (Mouraria) until the XXI century’s political borders and highest point of Lisbon (Airport). The remaining city is off limits. Even though the architects are given carte blanche to manipulate and curate the parts within the stripe, the imaginary lines that delimitate these parts are absolute borders that cannot be crossed.
Based on Parallel Realities, without social, political or natural restrains of any kind, the results show the unimpeded character of these architects and force us to look at Lisbon through their eyes, speculating on the present and, precisely because of that, perceiving it with renewed attention.
baukuh
We believe that the Praça do Comercio is incomplete. It misses a volume that could give back the urban tension to its void. The new volume amounts to 33,675 square meters of easily marketable office space, distributed in 5 floors. Immediatly west of the square, the elevation towards the Tagus is 288 meters […]
We believe that the Praça do Comercio is incomplete. It misses a volume that could give back the urban tension to its void. The new volume amounts to 33,675 square meters of easily marketable office space, distributed in 5 floors. Immediatly west of the square, the elevation towards the Tagus is 288 meters long.
Edelaar Mosayebi Inderbitzin Architekten
Overwriting the European City Our map of central Lisbon does not represent a utopian notion of city, depicting instead the condition of today’s city in a critical analysis. In a way, it depicts a contemporary image of the European core city in general. Over the course of various crises and the accelerated globalization of […]
Overwriting the European City
Our map of central Lisbon does not represent a utopian notion of city, depicting instead the condition of today’s city in a critical analysis. In a way, it depicts a contemporary image of the European core city in general. Over the course of various crises and the accelerated globalization of our economy and society, these cities are undergoing latent changes. In terms of its historical and cultural quality, the physical substance of the city is being reduced to containers that are refilled with globalized content. We read headlines of how vacancies are hollowing out the centres from within, how Airbnb is becoming the newest mode of gentrification, and how Asian buyers of property also get a European passport when purchasing a home. The permanence of the form (Rossi) shifts from the ground plan and the building type to the facade and the simple codes of so-called urbanity. The text of the city is rewritten, and the palimpsest of the urban fabric acquires yet another layer.
Camilo Rebelo
All cities, like organic bodies, have problems. Structural design failures or bad postures can injury the system as a whole. These injuries tend to get worse with time and when the system is already a living organism, destroying or demolishing is always an aggressive method to cure. Alternative ways to destruction should be considered. Acupuncture […]
All cities, like organic bodies, have problems. Structural design failures or bad postures can injury the system as a whole. These injuries tend to get worse with time and when the system is already a living organism, destroying or demolishing is always an aggressive method to cure. Alternative ways to destruction should be considered.
Acupuncture is a technique that uses needles sometimes associated with heat or small spheres being inserted into specific points of the body. It is an interventional procedure that strikes one point to heal an area.
On these premises we have identified 7 cases on a sector of the city where we could use the acupuncture treatment. They reflect 3 types of intervention reinterpreted from this healing technique: punctual, gradual and temporary intervention.
MOS Architects
Like most cities, it began with a Grid, which made sense when we had to navigate, remember, negotiate, and find our own way. Its single-mindedness physically structured all parts into a whole, providing orientation, location, address, memory, and identity. It made things much more manageable and rational. We had a sense of where things stood […]
Like most cities, it began with a Grid, which made sense when we had to navigate, remember, negotiate, and find our own way. Its single-mindedness physically structured all parts into a whole, providing orientation, location, address, memory, and identity. It made things much more manageable and rational. We had a sense of where things stood in relation to each other.
What happened next is impossible to completely grasp. Maybe it was the landscape, maybe it was the people, or maybe no one was paying attention. But at some point cities grew unrepresentable as a totality, became an ungraspable, entropic mess of stuff and events—all the parts overwhelmed the whole. The city became a collection of monuments, of neighborhoods and archipelagos. We needed cognitive maps to make sense of it all.
Nowadays size and distance don’t matter, only resolution. Objectivity is a matter of perspective. And everyone’s sole concern is how strong their signal is. We are emancipated from everything. We are imprisoned by everything. We no longer need maps, cognitive or otherwise, only directions. We communicate in bed at any hour, with anyone, to anywhere; we collect friends; we search infinite heaps of information in an instant; we follow each other closely, from great distances: our memory and the navigation of cities are outsourced to the cloud. The city now fits neatly in our pocket, the unrepresentable chaos of the past now relatively manageable and representable. There are no differences between parts and wholes. Everything is simultaneously isolated and interconnected.
Studio Anne Holtrop
Open Space for Lisbon, 2016 Anne Holtrop (1977) graduated in 2005 from the Academie van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam with a cum laude degree in architecture and in 2009 started his own studio. Today his office is based in Muharraq (Bahrain) and Amsterdam (The Netherlands). His work ranges from models, temporary spaces and buildings. In 2015 […]
Open Space for Lisbon, 2016
Lütjens Padmanabhan Architekten
In our work we operate in an imagined architectural universe, a kind of ahistorical deep space in which works from all epochs meet on the same plain. Here, unexpected friendships are forged, coupling into surprising partnerships. Lisboa Paralela is a city without monuments or memory. Its places bear the names of the 72 heteronyms that […]
In our work we operate in an imagined architectural universe, a kind of ahistorical deep space in which works from all epochs meet on the same plain. Here, unexpected friendships are forged, coupling into surprising partnerships.
Lisboa Paralela is a city without monuments or memory. Its places bear the names of the 72 heteronyms that constitute Fernando Pessoa’s literary universe, signifying nothing. In an equally hopeless effort, the architects propose a number of nameless structures that are modelled after some of their unbuilt designs. In a gesture full of optimism, we marry an architectural diptych with each of the eight sectors of the map.
Johannes Norlander Arkitektur AB
The Alvalade district contains a verdant and diverse streetscape – most of it already present in the 1945 master plan, and later realized by various teams of architects, including a young Ribeiro Telles. Toward the airport, Alvalade becomes an aimless clash of interstitial and institutional space. A seemingly missing element – in both the wide […]
The Alvalade district contains a verdant and diverse streetscape – most of it already present in the 1945 master plan, and later realized by various teams of architects, including a young Ribeiro Telles. Toward the airport, Alvalade becomes an aimless clash of interstitial and institutional space. A seemingly missing element – in both the wide streets of the post-war plan, and in the confusion of the airport – are the dead ends of older cities; the courtyards of Nolli’s Rome. In a parallel Alvalade, enclosed spaces appear at key points. Inserted into the flowing master plan, freestanding courtyards add tension to their surroundings. Next to the airport, a wall is opened, and an outdoor pool stretches into the landscape. These are pure objects, containing intimate public space. Clearly defined, and still ambiguous, the entities suggest a city with different levels of shared life.
In an area planned to allow for walks, the interventions are clean breaks. Breaks in the pattern of the city and in the rhythm it provides. The courtyards introduce something both naive and excessive – a formalist simplicity that challenges the city. As much as the entities serve to define public space, they are objects in their own right. And they share a simple, uncompromising language. The formal gestures are derived from a reworking and reduction of formal idioms – a plain architecture, like the one observed by George Kubler in the Portuguese tradition. The forms emerge from the simplest gestures; the establishing of a wall, a roof or a floor. From this, a choreography is developed; through openings, flow, composition – and through references and relations to immediate surroundings. The result is an introspective urban object. Understood as a recurring typology, the entity suggests a city of narratives and intimate, irrational counternarratives. A city of promising tensions, and new kinds of shared experience.
Raphael Zuber, Laura Cristea
The ‘city of common space’ defines the public space, leaving the biggest possible freedom for the privately owned parts. Infrastructure is rationally organized in an orthogonal grid. Streets and squares have given profiles and are freely distributed, creating one continuous, designed space throughout the whole city. The only urban rule for private construction is to […]
The ‘city of common space’ defines the public space, leaving the biggest possible freedom for the privately owned parts. Infrastructure is rationally organized in an orthogonal grid. Streets and squares have given profiles and are freely distributed, creating one continuous, designed space throughout the whole city. The only urban rule for private construction is to build a wall as part of the common space, being façade for each single building and the entire city at the same time. The wall can be freestanding or attached to a construction behind it and can have a certain percentage of opening. Buying a plot, one would have to choose, for example, between a wide street with a low wall or a narrow street with a high wall bending over the sidewalk. The conflict between the precisely predefined and the self regulated, as well as the ambivalence between uniformity and the unpredictable beauty of chaos, will determine the physical expression of the city and generate a highly mixed and inventive environment.
Ciriacidis Lehnerer Architekten
Outer Kinds of Structures A dusty path just recognizable among the shrubs and tumbleweeds dotting the foothills of the mountain range provides just enough room to guide a horse. The desert path, coming in and out of view, winds its way over and between these hills making its way somewhere, meandering as it goes. The […]
Outer Kinds of Structures
A dusty path just recognizable among the shrubs and tumbleweeds dotting the foothills of the mountain range provides just enough room to guide a horse. The desert path, coming in and out of view, winds its way over and between these hills making its way somewhere, meandering as it goes. The path eventually leads to a place, in this case to a long-stripped valley, which appears below the foothills. A small town appears along this valley, its buildings showing enough affinity for each other to provide the town with a barely monumental presence in the otherwise desolate environment. The path moves past the town’s sign announcing its city limit, but as the rider approaches the entrance of the town the path begins to fade into a street-like landscape. Facing buildings provide the only structure needed for defining the street, which would otherwise just be a dusty, shrubby, rattlesnake-ridden and infinitely expanding ground plane. There is no structure known as infrastructure here and if there is, it happens automatically, as a casual yet legible by-product, never conditioning yet always being conditioned.
Patrícia Barbas
Instead of utilizing the circulated draft, I rather prefer to share my thoughts, that I assume are shared by a sizeable portion of my generation, on what is the current state of affairs. And I’m thinking about a current perspective on the discipline and on our lives as well, because I cannot conceive being an […]
Instead of utilizing the circulated draft, I rather prefer to share my thoughts, that I assume are shared by a sizeable portion of my generation, on what is the current state of affairs. And I’m thinking about a current perspective on the discipline and on our lives as well, because I cannot conceive being an architect without a strong awareness of the world in which I live. And as long as I’m around I will do my best to hold on to the idea that we must contribute to the construction of a better world, conducting both my professional practice and my life according to the these principles, that I was fortunate enough to inherit from my parents, and that I find everyday in my family, friends, colleagues and students.
In this present world a character like Donald Trump can think about winning a presidential election in the United States. The release of the Panama Papers can bring down the Icelandic government the day after. The Europe in which we live is plagued with inequality, the acronym coined to group the countries in economic crisis could hardly be more demeaning: PIIGS, and the Greek situation confirms the widening of the fracture between North and South. The European Union in which we live is once again putting up walls, like in Hungary, blocking the entrance to refugees running away from war torn countries, and watching daily, with unruffled indifference, the death of thousands of people trying to cross the Mediterranean. The apparent stability is over. Nothing is more abstract than reality.
We are the generation who witnessed both the inception and the failure of the ideals of the European Union: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the opening of the Schenguen space, free circulation of people and goods, ease of access to information and fast communication, Wi Fi, social networks and low costs flights. We are the generation who watched the prodigality with which the European funds were wasted, who watched both the rise of the credit bubble with easy money and its burst, the rise of corruption and who will still be around to pay the bill. We are also the generation who fought against the rise of tuition, who fought for our rights and who demonstrated against social and political injustice. We are the ones who felt the loss of identity, the indignity and shame when our countries sold their souls trying to become part of the first league, the Northern one of course. No, we are not all the same. Nothing is more abstract than reality.
We are the more travelled generation, with friendships across the world and a lived perspective from other realities. We are the ones who emigrated looking for work, and the ones who choose to stay in our countries despite the difficulties. We believe that we can do better, try better, and fail better. We are the true embodiment of the word sustainability. We accept, with the same commitment, to refurbish a cousin’s kitchen, to write a text, to design exhibitions, cities, or real and unreal buildings, and we do not fall lesser for that. We use the lack of opportunities to bundle efforts, to make alliances, to think collectively, to write and mobilize. We are not pampered children and do not need patronizing. We demand parity, we demand to be treated like peers. We rebel and do not fear the heated debate necessary to understand our time, despite the extreme confusion of the present*.
* This was a letter to the president of the FAD 2016 jury, written and sent in May 2016 as a member of it. It was based on a draft, made by him to be commented and completed as the result of all our conversations and debates. In our first jury meeting I was classified as a Young Architect albeit my 45 years. In the draft he used keywords as crisis, never ending recession, new paradigm, sustainability and European convergence in a way that I could not disagree more with. I decided to publish here because this applies to a much larger audience. Unfortunately, Moises Gallego is not alone, and because of that, this is a statement of a generation that speaks not only for itself but for the ones younger than us, already out there with all capabilities and in defiance of beginning and enduring life and practice. We will not go down as ones who undermine our youngest, who as Kronos devoured his sons to prevent to be overcome by them. We are the present, the caretakers of the future of our discipline.
BABAU BUREAU (Stefano Tornieri, Massimo Triches, Chiara Davino)
“[…] crusaders are going to Not assist Portuguese to conquer Lisbon, it is written and so it is the truth, even if different, what we called false prevailed over what we call true, it took his place, someone could come and tell the new story […].” [1] Raimundo Silva, a lowly proof-reader for a Lisbon […]
“[…] crusaders are going to Not assist Portuguese to conquer Lisbon, it is written and so it is the truth, even if different, what we called false prevailed over what we call true, it took his place, someone could come and tell the new story […].” [1]
Raimundo Silva, a lowly proof-reader for a Lisbon publishing house, by inserting a negative into a sentence of a historical text, alters the whole course of the 1147 siege of Lisbon. The past and the reality can be re-written as a romance, a pure invention that sometimes becomes history. The example of the siege, as a theoretic background, suggests in this case a method for the design processes of a city.
The ideal city has to be imagined, the real city has to be conquered.
Poliorceticon is a permanent process that involves transformative heterogeneous-and-punctual actions in the territory in order to provoke systemic reactions and relations between the parts of the contemporary city.
Poliorcetics is the branch of military art that studies methods, techniques and means for besieging cities and fortresses. It is an art that, like architecture, transforms places into tools, actions, strategies, and implies a strong knowledge of subjects that go beyond the Art of War and include engineering, geology, anthropology and politics.
The idea of conquest, is not just linked to control, supremacy and suppression, but also to fusion among cultures, like in the case of Alexander the Great and the fusion of his Hellenic Reign with native peoples. Taking these considerations into account, the contemporary territory can be read as a juxtaposition of antithetical city models, and its form as the synthesis of different interpretive and modelling capacities typical of men and of their being-in-the-world. [3] The contemporary city is characterized by the coexistence of profoundly different types of city models.
Imagining future scenes in order to understand such a complex territory, means starting from a transformative process project, thought up not necessarily to be connected one with the other. On such theoretical basis, the project proposal interprets the theme of physical re-conquest of places and the possibility for the community to regain collective knowledge of the territory where it lives through the modification tools used in architecture. The imaginary scene regards the near future and considers the present city as the reality from where to start from. Through different punctual interventions, the first step for the re-conquest of the contemporary city takes place through new connections among existing elements, able to build a renewed accessibility, with the scope of creating porosity and functional connections.
Some of these areas, once transformed, will be available for the spontaneous and temporary utilization of their inhabitants. The “conquest” process will be considered finished only when a series of new interventions will form with the existing a total functional urban mix, configuring itself as a “city without plan”. [3] This is a city model built on fragments that derive from pieces put side by side for addition, from the repetition of independent elements, from “out-of-sync” buildings and combined with no logic, but that will be a fusion between productive and living culture.
A siege starts with strategic actions such as the identification of the weaknesses of the city to be conquered. Walls, canals, structures, fences, infrastructures, elements that constitute interruptions, limits, critical points, the trespassing of which is the first action of breach and entrance to the besieged city. Poliorecetics provides that city boundaries can be attacked, to start the conquest process, using devices, machines or siege tools.
Connective tools able to open breaches, small architectures that trespass limits that today cannot be solved, demolition of defensive barriers witnessing an industrial past; the art of poliorcetics serves for the transformation of a territory that must slowly be re-conquered by the people.
A second phase of the siege foresees that the customs and part of the changes of the territory derive from non-planned and non-regulated methods. The spontaneous birth of new uses of the spaces will cause the temporary movement of the control of the urban changes from government institutions to the people. It is expected that the spaces accessible and available shall be re-populated, used, and modified by their spontaneous utilization. Eventually, the relationship between territorial and social changes implied in such actions will be studied in consideration of its central role in the understanding of the socio economic changes of the area. The bottom-up approach used in this phase is intended as indicator of changes that now, for the rapidity and complexity with which the context conditions change, would be impossible to foresee by a territorial planning project.
It is impossible to foresee the future form of the city because a lot of stakeholders are involved in its transformation. Strategies could be enhanced, in order to develop conquest methods specific to places, in which the architect will act as a strategist. In the future city, production landscapes as industries or quarries, infrastructures, shopping spaces, wastelands, will coexist peacefully with the living culture. New buildings will stand among silos and chimneys, but synergetic processes of production and energy transmission will investigate visions of a possible autocracy. Reclaimed land, in this sense, is intended as the conclusion of the re-conquest process of a territory, as the total sum of energy able to build a systematic principle that generates changes in the territory.
Every intervention shall use local resources, in order to present itself as a conscious model for future developments.
Living a place also means having a kind of narrative heritage made of a plurality of mental images, sometimes measurable, perceptible. As sensed by J.E. Hobsbawn in “The Invention of Tradition”, every society has accumulated a reserve of apparently ancient material, often merely invented, to legitimate and build their roots. For this reason the project also uses a tale, a short-story, the interpretation of which significantly contributes to the perception of the places, to people’s feeling at home in such places, creating a sort of mental projection. Places become occasions to set stories, to build mental images necessary to the construction of the feeling of belonging to a place.
“[…] the problem I have to solve is different, when I wrote Not the crusaders went away, therefore my looking for an answer to the question is pointless, Why in this history accepted as being true, must I myself invent another history so that it mìght be false and false so that it may be different. […] He realised that until he overcame the problem he would make no progress, and was surprised, accustomed as he was to books in which everything seemed fluent and spontaneous, almost essential, not because it was effectively true, but became any piece of writing, good or bad, always ends up appearing like a predetermined crystallization, although no one can ever say how or when or why or by whom, he was surprised, as we said, for the following idea had never occurred to him, an idea which should have stemmed naturally from the previous idea, but on the contrary, refused to emerge, or perhaps not even that, it simply was not there, did not exist even as a possibility.” [4]
Daniela Silva
Following the loss of heavy, manufacturing industry in many industrial areas in the 70s and 80s, tourism has featured extensively in urban and waterfront regeneration policy because of its ability to generate substantial economic benefits to destination communities. This, alongside a number of additional facts, has created a flux of mass tourism to certain cities, […]
Following the loss of heavy, manufacturing industry in many industrial areas in the 70s and 80s, tourism has featured extensively in urban and waterfront regeneration policy because of its ability to generate substantial economic benefits to destination communities. This, alongside a number of additional facts, has created a flux of mass tourism to certain cities, in which Lisbon is included. Mass tourism has created a parallel reality within cities and developed a very complex relation to cities’ urban forms. But before we can discuss these relations, I would like to shed some light on the concepts of tourism and urbanity.
To be a tourist is one of the characteristics of the modern experience, for it is modern society that has provided the enabling factors for people to travel and for the supply of tourism destinations, services and amenities. Indeed, for the majority of people living in developed countries, tourism is feasible. Due to technological advancements, mass transportation, the provision of leisure time and increasingly high levels of disposable income, people now have the means and opportunity to travel and explore different places. Additionally, few places in the world today have not become either tourist destinations or in close proximity to them and, the overall number of people participating in tourism continues to grow. Thus, the demand for travel has increased and the supply of tourist destinations, attractions and facilities has also distended to correspond with demand. In the past thirty years there has been a fundamental shift in consumption habits, including the consumption of holidays. No longer do we thrive for package beach hotel holidays but rather, these traditional holidays are being rejected for individualistic, personalized forms of tourism, for example, urban tourism (including short / city breaks), eco-tourism and heritage tourism. Consequently, new tourism destinations have emerged such as urban waterfront destinations like Lisbon.
Globalization can be characterized as the increasing connections (social, cultural and economic) that are taking place around the world. What is in effect happening in today’s society is a wave of cultural transformation associated with a process of cultural globalization. As cultural products such as tourism are assembled from all over the world, they are turned into commodities for a new global marketplace. Thus, as cultures are thrown into immediate contact with each other, new geographies are formed with an emphasis upon the renaissance of locality. For instance, places attempt to revitalize the local as local cultures are overshadowed by a new global culture. Arguably, this new spatial aesthetic reflects postmodern culture with its emphasis on local and vernacular cultures, whilst its global orientation tends to produce a new certainty in which place distinctiveness is etched out for the sake of achieving universally accepted standards of the cultural economy.
As international relations multiply and localities become similar to one another, such a loss finds its cultural expression in the theme of nostalgia: “A movement towards one’s roots and a growing appreciation of tradition are aspects of relating to one’s total environment. They reflect the interplay between the local and the global. Such trends can be viewed as manifestations of postmodernism.” [1]
During the Post-modern era, in areas where manufacturing industries have diminished and deindustrialization has occurred, as is the case of Lisbon, desolate sites have been redeveloped and reinstated with the injection of service industries and consumer-based activities. These new sites cater as tourist centers, where heritage and other forms of tourism have been used to transform the landscape. Spaces such as these embrace a postmodern orientation and arguably appeal to the lifestyle choices and consumption ethic of the new middle class. The creation of the new middle class is responsible for the gentrification of such areas and is connected to the growth of such developments.
The phenomenon of waterfront redevelopment is a highly visible example of contemporary urban restructuring. In many cities, efforts have been made and are currently being made, to renew the strengths of the waterfront through large scale renewal projects. These changes dramatically alter the original character and function of the port area from a site of production to a cultural landscape more readily associated with consumption practices. Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of regenerated dockland vicinities is their distinctive postmodern appearance and appeal. For example, Dodson and Kilian [2] argue that processes of commodification and `spectacle-isation’ have been used to redevelop and forge a ‘post-modern’ waterfront destinations.
According to Law [3] “the term urban tourism simply denotes tourism in urban areas”. Shaw and Williams [4] state that urban areas of all types act as tourism destinations and these areas have the potential to attract domestic and international tourists. They argue that tourism in these environments is a diverse phenomenon. First, urban areas are heterogeneous in nature as they are distinguished by size, location, function and age. Second, they are multifunctional as they offer a variety of facilities. Third, facilities are consumed by a whole range of users, for example, tourists and residents. Cities provide a great range of consumption opportunities for users. These and the facilities to supply their needs, define a range of different types of city which may all exist within a particular urban area, for example the shopping city and the historic city. For Law it is difficult to define urban tourism due to its diversity however, he attempts at describing the phenomenon of urban tourism have primarily focused on its demand and supply side characteristics, which enable the subject to be differentiated from other types of tourism.
Over the last three decades, tourism has had an important role in the regeneration of urban areas in Lisbon. It has contributed to urban revitalization with the recovery of old buildings and by bolstering the country’s economy.
The historic center of Lisbon, experienced a negative development in the physical, social, and economic conditions throughout the 20th century. The problem of urban decline is related to a set of heterogeneous and interacting factors such as suburban sprawl and the freezing of rents (depriving landlords of the incentive to maintain properties and rehabilitate housing). [5] The process of decline in historic city centers has been inseparable from the decline in the resident population.
The money tourists spent helps Portugal’s economy, and the government heralded the flood of tourists as a sign that Lisbon is the place to be. For some residents, however, such flows risk ousting local inhabitants and traditional stores from the city’s ancient quarters as hostels and shops selling cheap trinkets and imitation handicrafts encroach.
The changes are most evident in the Baixa area, a grid of black and white cobblestone streets between two hills facing the River Tagus. An area once dominated by local boutiques has faced an influx of low-budget hotels, restaurants with menus in multiple languages and souvenir shops hawking cheap Portuguese-style products made in China. This new city center came as a response to the problems of degradation, loss of resident population, and ageing of vacant buildings that the city was suffering.
What happens when everything around you turns into shops selling souvenirs? Tourists who come to Lisbon will no longer be able to see the best of what we have to offer.
Lisbon, as many other cities transformed by the mass of tourism, has now a parallel reality, where the locals have one kind of experience and the tourists are led to believe in a different kind of city, a fabricated city for them to enjoy.
Labics (Maria Claudia Clemente, Francesco Isidori)
Foreword The image of Rome narrated by a distracted traveler at the beginning of the XIX century or the image absorbed by the thousands of tourists that every day invade the city has remained substantially the same. In the collective imaginary, Rome is always itself: The Eternal City. But can this image represent the true […]
The image of Rome narrated by a distracted traveler at the beginning of the XIX century or the image absorbed by the thousands of tourists that every day invade the city has remained substantially the same. In the collective imaginary, Rome is always itself: The Eternal City.
But can this image represent the true nature of the city and above all that of contemporary Rome? Would it be possible to find a new mental image able to represent the entire city and its complexity?
Borderline metropolis [1] is an attempt to answer those questions and at the same time is an investigation of the territory of Rome as well as a study that offers a different interpretation of the contemporary city.
Paolo Canevari, Colosseo, 2000 (Marco Andreini)
Martin Parr, Roma, 2006 (Magnum/Contrasto)
The investigation began with a true urban phenomenology, with a bottom-up survey of the territory. A purely visual narration assembled in the everyday experience of crossing the city, from the center to the outskirts, taking unusual itineraries.
Walking through borderlines, thresholds, places of transition, empty zones and varied textures, scraps of countryside, densely edified areas, we discovered an infinite variety of incongruent features capable of generating moments of surprise and astonishment, straddling the picturesque and the sublime. We basically found ourselves crossing a multiplicity of places of transition, places between interior and exterior, between center and periphery, between city and country, places that have an inner instability.
The act of crossing the city brought us to a new image of Rome, or perhaps the same image that has fed the fantasy and creativity of many contemporary artists [2]; an image very distant from the sequence of monuments and places that forms the established imaginary of the Eternal City.
While the condition of instability in urban studies is often associated to a negative image and today’s global cities pursue the idea of a perfect, reassuring stability, Rome then is different and if its mutable, open, unexpected instability is interpreted not as a problem but as a potential condition [3] Rome might offer a stimulus to construct an alternative to the standardizing and generic dimensions of the contemporary city, starting with instability as a condition capable of including openness, vitality, creativity and authenticity, overturning the established equation of stability = security = well-being.
Labics, Roma
Labics, Roma
Alongside the investigation from below, the city has been analyzed from above, to understand possible relations between its Form – the physical condition – and the instability of its perception.
Considering Rome, like any other city, as an evolutionary organism, the research has mainly focused on the structural elements which have guided the transformation of its territory during a long formative process [4]. Convinced that not only the present form, but also any potential configuration the city can assume – what Sanford Kwinter calls the “embedded forms” [5] – is inscribed in those evolutionary mechanisms.
Redrawing the city through several maps we discovered that a few but consistent elements drove the transformation of its territory over centuries: the landscape, with its symbolic power and physical constraints – topography, water, morphology – and the radial structure of the Roman consular road, the real political form. No major planning process, nor strong external rules, Rome followed a kind of natural growing process (the speculative forces followed the same natural pattern).
The result is that of a territory substantially characterized by two closely connected phenomena:
an urban structure organized in islands, each in turn different in fabric, density and typologies;
the presence of a complex, articulated constellation of voids – which as a whole represent over 70% of the urban territory of 129,000 hectares – ranging from small natural spaces to the large green islands of the Ager Romanus [6].
This is why the actual Rome over time has always been interpreted along two Form-Manifestos: on one side that of the Archipelago [7], which is about built islands in a continuous un-built natural space, on the other side that of a great Piranesian Campo Marzio [8] of 2.700.000 inhabitants [9], which is about incoherent built islands one next to the other. Both images are in a way similar, based on an additive logic of incoherent pieces – which is part of the DNA of the city.
But is this the only possible image? Can we find a new image for the city, which is coherent with its genealogy and its actual form? Able to incorporate the immateriality and the openness of the unstable condition but at the same time able to activate, connect, and reinforce most of the recent urban islands disconnected from the rest of the city?
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Ichonographia of the Campo Marzio, 1762
Labics, Topography / Hydrography / Roman consular system / Contemporary structures and city
The present Form of the city of Rome probably allows a different and more fertile interpretation than the one of Archipelago or Campo Marzio: the formal structure in islands, by nature, multiplies the edge condition with its true variegated set of material and immaterial features. This borderline condition can be seen as a phenomenon of “retroactive” consciousness of a strong structural presence that has not yet taken on either a clear organization or the necessary awareness within the metropolitan territory. The system of edges could become, if made explicit, a new structural pattern for the growth and development of the city, capable of connecting centers and outskirts, full and empty zones, different city portions, while being a tool to gain renewed aesthetic awareness of the cityscape.
Borderline Metropolis develops an hypothesis according to which the existing system of edges can be interpreted as an active tool for the transformation of the city. A network that is able to react, and consequently change the quality of the border, in the areas where the city is weaker. In the case of Rome, for example, where is revealed a lack of density or connectivity, or where is prevailing a mono functional character of neighborhood or the spatial qualities of the cityscape are extremely poor. The activation of the borderlines could thus become the driving force for the renewal of entire urban areas [10] and reinforce the public character of the city: Borderline Metropolis in fact combines in-depth analysis of the metropolitan territory with the definition of methods and tools to reactivate the borders, transforming the disconnected voids, reconnecting the inactive parts of the city, treating the territory as a whole and thus permitting a differentiated form of organization of the metropolitan territory.
Labics, The islands and the emerging structure, Roma
Labics, The structure of borders, Roma
Can the Borderline Metropolis be interpreted as a model for the transformation of other cities? Can Rome be seen as an antidote against the generic aspects of global cities?
The form of the city in itself can be considered as a model in its own right: a discontinuous city composed of an infinite series of different ecologies, whose perfect imbalance determines a unique urban territory rich in variety and differences.
But Borderline Metropolis goes beyond that: it advances an idea of the city and a model for its transformation at the same time. It proposes an organization that goes beyond the closed form of traditional planning and the idea of the city made of stable centers and defined city fabric. Borderline Metropolis moves towards an open, reticular, flexible conception of the city, able to respond to the needs of the territory and its inhabitants in a local and at the same time general way. The system of edges is thus a new infrastructure that can be activated and manipulated according to the needs. As a model, the network is a tool that differs from those normally used in urban planning, because it is constantly capable of updating and modifying itself based on changes in the urban fabric and knowledge regarding the complexity of processes of transformation. [11]
Finally, Borderline Metropolis does not give up on the necessity of a symbolic form behind the project of the city and, at the same time, it does not surrender to the free market approach of laissez-faire, or to the ideological approach of the bottom-up planning as a recipe to the progressive city gentrification. Borderline Metropolis does not impose an a priori form but defines the structure of the form: the idea of the network is the one of an open evolutionary form that transforms itself like an organism, and that is capable to melt values of diversity and creativity together with a structured urban system.
Labics, Model of Rome
Labics, Model of Rome
Simona Ferrari
The Architecture of the City and the Beauty of Chaos “I am of the opinion that the contemporary Japanese city which emerged in the half-century after World War II should be recognized as the newest element of any legitimate Japanese [architectural] tradition, whose quiet beauty had persisted from ancient times down to one hundred years […]
“I am of the opinion that the contemporary Japanese city which emerged in the half-century after World War II should be recognized as the newest element of any legitimate Japanese [architectural] tradition, whose quiet beauty had persisted from ancient times down to one hundred years or so ago […] There is no reason to deny, or nullify, this gigantic collective, which is the product of tremendous human time and energy. My view of our cities is not limited to Tokyo, for even in smaller and less affluent cities I perceive beauty but never ugliness.” [1]
When I first entered Tokyo Institute of Technology I didn’t expect to recognise that many students had among their books a fully translated Japanese version of “The Architecture of the City”. This fact made me consider how far the legacy of Rossi had reached and also question how the latter could be received in such diverse urban environment. At the time most of the non-Japanese students just enrolled were focusing on gaining an overview of Kazuo Shinohara’s oeuvre of residential masterpieces. While setting in the new urban environment, to catch my attention was his statement toward the urban space, better known as the theory of the “Beauty of Chaos”. His affirmative recognition of the chaotic form of the city offered me a sort of comforting perspective. It was able in fact to legitimate a kind of irrational positive reaction that emerged in me while observing the scenario of Tokyo’s neighborhoods and the daily life arising from the streets, so seductive that it was easily putting into question any notion of the European city learned so far.
Meguro-ku
House in Uehara (Kazuo Shinohara)
The theory of the “Beauty of Chaos” was also very revealing to highlight a link between the individual building and the city. The houses of Kazuo Shinohara appear in fact with a certain degree of autonomy and abstraction, so that a connection between his spatial research and the urban space may not be predictable. Yet, the roots of Shinohara’s urban theory did arise exactly through the experiences with his earliest house designs, as Shin-Ichi Okuyama points out: “And we must take seriously his youthful intuition that, in the Japanese postwar era, the only way to transform the design of private houses into an essentially architectural issue was to confront the city and its implication for society head on.” [2] At the same time we are also warned from misunderstanding that the two stand to each other in a direct and straightforward relation: “any purely linear relationship between house and city meant little to him […] any real recovery could never spring from a single ideal logic but rather from a far more complex collective desire resulting, in turn, from a multitude of individual contexts.” [3]
Decades later another enlightening interpretation of the Japanese city develops within the framework of the individual building, offering a key to understand the possible role of the dwelling in the future of the contemporary city. “Tokyo Metabolizing”, presented by Koh Kitayama, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Ryue Nishizawa at the Japanese Pavilion of Venice Biennale in 2010, starting again from a lucid observation of the peculiar character of the Japanese city, reveals the potential of an initiative taken at the micro-scale of the single-family house: “Unlike the urban structures one finds in Europe that were created with a series of walls, Tokyo consist of an assemblage of independent buildings (grains). In other words, constant change is an inherent part of the system. In examining the unique aspects of this unceasing change, one realizes that the city of Tokyo is an incubator for new forms of architecture and urban architectural theories […] Tokyo has the potential to create change in the city through the quiet accumulation of urban elements rooted in daily life.” [4] Through the gaze on the contemporary urban environment, the house is revealed as an active architectural form of the Japanese city.
On the other hand, the Japanese House is a well-known “object” of interest, which earned great attention internationally. The popularity and fascination for the Japanese dwelling goes back to the early modern period and extends until today. Instead of architects returning us careful surveys of these houses embedded in a culture of people performing completely unknown lifestyles [5], nowadays contemporary architectural medias are mainly reporting to us the latest house designs. Yet running the risk that by omitting contextual implications – as if the global standards have flattened cultural differences and lifestyles to a certain extent that we feel confident to bypass them – the Japanese contemporary dwelling detached from its history and specific environment might appear merely as a collection of eccentric forms.
Again, only by locating the house within the framework of the city – which means to position it within the physical and social context that has produced it – we can return its significance, not only as catalyst element of the urban environment, but also as key to access and understand an entire culture. Since the reconstruction of the modern city, Japanese architects have committed themselves in seeking a form of architecture for the life in the contemporary city through the design of the individual dwelling. In doing so they have been re-defining spatial hierarchies, relations between domestic and public sphere, between interior and exterior space; they have expressed their position between tradition and modernity, investigating the use of materials and construction techniques. The modern Japanese house thus assumes the value collective element of the city, carrying the legacy of the post-war Japanese society.
House in Kyodo (Go Hase- gawa)
Setagaya-ku
Small House (Kazuyo Se- jima)
Shinjuku-ku
Through the individual collaboration between the architect and the client – or by the architect as client himself – the diverse combination of the above-mentioned themes has resulted in a rich architectural production of distinct dwellings, where perhaps the sole aspect truly shared among all of these houses is exactly their character of uniqueness. Certain houses came to represent some of the most known masterpieces of Japanese modern architecture. Since Japan is no longer the far and unreachable country it used to be, today many architects undergo an architectural pilgrimage to these houses. Yet, spread along a territory divided by 1.8 millions of owners [6] these domestic architectures are nothing more than a rarefied constellation of small fragments that sums up to the vast chaotic landscape of the city. The encounter of one of these dwellings is mostly likely to be an accidental and fortuitous discovery of the urban flâneur that wonders around Tokyo’s neighborhoods. Far from constituting an accumulation that could be examined as a dwelling area or manifesting any recognizable typology, the Japanese house designed by the architect is an unicum distinguished by its form and unique character within the urban environment. [7] Only in our minds all these houses form a parallel city of housing uniqueness.
Punctual and exceptional element of the city, the House, with its active and collective character, may be understood as a kind of scattered urban artifact [8] hidden in the urban fabric of the Japanese city.
House & Atelier Bow-Wow (Atelier Bow-Wow)
Shinjuku-ku
Shinjuku-ku
Both Shinohara and Rossi define respectively the House and the Urban Artifact as work of art. “The House is a Work of Art” is among Shinohara’s most recognised statements that together with the “Beauty of Chaos” have conveyed his criticism toward the architectural scene of his time .[9] For Rossi the status of “The Urban artifact as a Work of art” is bind with the collective and unique character of the urban artifacts as well as a fundamental theme raised by several theorists. [10] Nevertheless both definitions are embedded with their own specific reasoning, this fortuitous analogy provide the hint to recognize that both European and Japanese understandings of the city may coexist with their resonances and diversities to grasp aspects of our living environment.
George Foufas & George Papam
We shall not begin with the description of a Parallel City, either desired or dystopian, for to even attempt this, one first needs to question the given facts and recognise the running simulcasts that form each reality. Exactly as in Calvino’s Berenice [1], deducing an image of an urban complex requires knowledge about the hidden, […]
We shall not begin with the description of a Parallel City, either desired or dystopian, for to even attempt this, one first needs to question the given facts and recognise the running simulcasts that form each reality. Exactly as in Calvino’s Berenice [1], deducing an image of an urban complex requires knowledge about the hidden, underlying mechanisms and networks that power the ‘here and now’.
Understood in a broad sense, such mechanisms are properly infrastructural; conduits accommodating flows of commodities and information in physical space. There is no need to dig the earth to reach for them though; conventional infrastructures like highways, terminals and ports, as well as unconventional ones like malls, mass-generated suburbs and free trade zones are well expanding on the surface, although they consistently try to hide themselves from plain sight.. The question of Form in infrastructural projects evolves into a major issue, as it is this which is nowadays able to control both the image and the organisation of territories. Returning to the layers of reality, with infrastructure in mind, we intend to go one step deeper, in order to comprehend the background activities and narratives that shape them. Deciphering the backend algorithms that run their systems essentially means to understand the form of their form.
Fig. 1 Invisible infrastructures. Camouflaged antenna in the form of a palm tree.
Infrastructures and their gestalt are considered both by the general public and the technical experts a not-to-be-challenged issue. Distancing themselves from the idea of the ‘public work’, their ‘whys’ and ‘hows’, their scope and their design, are obvious results of the dominant techno-managerial school of thought, favouring the tried-and-true paradigm of efficiency and growth. For infrastructures were built upon the beliefs shaped throughout modernity, namely functionality, economic efficiency and social homogeneity, and consolidated throughout supermodernity with globalisation and the rise of what Easterling calls Extrastatecraft [2]. What’s important here is that the mindset described applies not only to infrastructures’ actual organisation and structure, but also to their most latent narratives.
Having said the above, the dogma of a frictionless running system, outlines two distinct possibilities for the infrastructural spatial products: On the one hand, efficiency may be understood in a literal way, resulting in properly rationalised constructions where function is an end in itself. On the other hand, efficiency may be used merely as a justifying motive, producing much more of a theatrical setting than a serving mechanism. We will call these two distinguishable categories as infrastructures of Superfunction and Superform respectively.
The rationale of the first category is perceived in the light of scientific and technological cultures introduced in architectural thought throughout modernity. The founding declaration of the CIAM, signed in La Sarraz in 1928, communicated the agony for rationalisation and universalisation in the field with its first points referring not to architecture itself but to the “General Economic System” [3]. Standardisation and technical specifications mark the rise of the engineers, whom Le Corbusier himself was praising. Infrastructure space constitutes the most appropriate field for this system of thought to be practiced, therefore transforming it to mere technical elements of the urban whole. In infrastructures of Superfunction, the form of their form is actually more like a rigid diagram; the same diagram that defines functions and specifications, indicated by a specialised engineer or a developer-manager. Let’s bring in mind images of rectangular warehouses like that of e-shops, mall-like big box stores like the IKEAs, commercial ports as well as enclaves of special economic zones like industrial and logistic parks. In spaces like these shape and image are irrelevant; a working diagram and a generic lot are just enough. The actual surroundings play no role, that way annihilating another component which defines form. Relations to the place, the neighbouring structures or the environment are ignored as potential distractions. These infrastructures are placed not just as if on a tabula rasa, but even more, separating themselves from the context with fences, guarded gates and buffer zones. Stripped of any identity or meaning, these heavy functional and closed systems, although coherent in themselves, are essentially machines-in-a-box scattered around. All in all, “form follows function” in its extreme, means we can do without form anyway.
Fig. 2 Superfunction. Possible to be found anywhere in the world, identical warehouses as a result of a spatial formula.
On the other hand, infrastructures of Superform seem to emanate from the postmodern over-investment in meaning. Disregarding anything modern, the obsession against strict functionality is combined with the love for the spectacle that characterises our times. Given that infrastructures have the inherent potential to operate at the level of fantasy and desire and to that of collective subconscious [4], these dynamics are being exploited to achieve a different kind of function, namely that of symbolism. Productive efficiency and growth are put aside making room to a communication mechanism of structured narratives. Still, being accountable to the wider dogma of efficiency, and in order to justify themselves, these irrational or distorted infrastructures invoke stories of progress and modernisation as perceptual tricks. In Superform infrastructures, the form of their form is more like an image; a glossy advertisement of what is not there. Typical examples of this condition are highways and artificial landscapes in Dubais around the world as well as squares and factories constructed by authoritarian regimes promoting their industrial ‘prevalence’. Unduly massive, they were not designed to address a social need or achieve a production goal, rather to broadcast a message of economic or political progress. Actual function is disassociated from form and the remaining structures are embellished and finally sold back either as monument or spectacle. Context as part of the form is defied again, unless it can be instrumentally used as appealing feature of the product on sale. These infrastructures are further stripped off from their fundamental signification as shared means to common ends, in order to propagate power and forward images of economic dominance. The aestheticised infrastructures finally have no form, but rather shape.
Superform. Twenty-lane highway in Myanmar’s administrative capital, a city of less than a million people.
Both these practices have a common end: They tend to disregard the spatial impact of an object, usually immense in scale, and the collateral repercussions it produces on the organisation of the nearby land and its production systems, services and social structures. Yet, we argue that the political power of infrastructural space lies exactly at the decisions that form the object itself and the way it interacts with its surroundings. Especially in the case of infrastructure, these choices are not static, predefined or steadfast. In its operational life cycle, an infrastructural project can reevaluate its goals and practices and therefore radically transform an urban complex by giving priority to certain activities over others [5]. This responsibility should not be overlooked in the name of a ubiquitous and self evident system or a provocative, flashy image.
In the condition of a Parallel city, each infrastructural project could be seen as a place for experimentation, acknowledging the possibility of unpredicted outcomes and opposing the dogma of an over-designed, fully-determinate plan produced by a closed set of rules, standards and indexes. The obvious need for efficiency can’t be disregarded; yet it is political discourse which should describe the type and parameters of the efficiency each infrastructure aims to. Without a predefined answer, in a Rancierian context, we argue that public spaces, like infrastructures, have to be constantly questioned and therefore regenerated, with the given identities, labels and statuses each time in dispute.
Pau Bajet
This essay will explore the idea of time in the making of cities, landscapes or architectures. A possible strategy to do so would be finding existing structures, ‘as found’ spaces, or fragmentary traces, in order to re-inhabit and transform them. […]
This essay will explore the idea of time in the making of cities, landscapes or architectures.
A possible strategy to do so would be finding existing structures, ‘as found’ spaces, or fragmentary traces, in order to re-inhabit and transform them. This way, anticipatory forms would be identified and transformed by being dwelled in a different way, and so extending or stretching their lifetime.
However, rather than simply identifying such forms, the intent of this essay is to explore the possibility of making formal propositions (both new and enhancement of existing fragments) that may allow for former inhabitation as well as later transformation. In other words, using these instigator forms as design tools and as catalysts that anticipate and enable a future territory, city or building change over the course of time. Forms charged with these foreseeing qualities might be called ‘time catalyst forms’.
> Time catalyst forms might be spaces (voids in-between) or physical bodies (topographies, buildings, elements). They might be barely recognizable, immaterial or invisible. Otherwise they could be signs and artefacts clearly inscribed in the human sight. They might also be collective memories, urban legislation or social dynamics.
> Time catalyst forms anticipate program, however they must foresee multiple ways of inhabitation.
> If city or architectural elements might be envisaged either as permanent or temporary, time catalyst forms would be the former, lasting throughout indefinite time and enabling temporary dwelling or any trace of existence to arise. These permanent forms would usually be erected in heavy stone or rough concrete, opposite to their inhabitation often assembled in timber boards or soft textiles. However, in alternative instances, it could be the other way around with pivoting panels, bouncy castles, small furniture or even communal stories and festivities making possible the transformation of temporary streets, squares and buildings.
> Time catalyst forms should be conceived at varying scales (spatially and temporarily). At a larger scale, certain time catalyst forms might be considered provisional occupation and at a smaller scale remnants of inhabitation might become time catalyst forms. Sheltered valleys might be seen as rooms and inland lakes as courtyards from which city inhabitation begins. Delicate topographies, fragmentary dry stone terraces, forgotten paths or canals along large farming fields, might indicate future forms of expansion. Agricultural or urban plots, its open-ended structure expanding through horizontal terrain, might be seen as bookshelves to be designed foreseeing the inhabitation of a rich variety of biographies and belongings; allowing for diverse and collective types of constructions, buildings or plantations, one next to each other; making possible a common making of territories and cities. Permanent building interiors, between distant concrete slabs or masonry walls, might be seen as large public spaces, permitting smaller partitions or furniture –as little houses or forests– to occupy the space temporarily. Small cabinets or benches, somehow designed as buildings, might be seen as permanent landmarks to discover and inhabit momentarily. An approaching hand may be seen as a landscape to be explored.
> Time catalyst forms should have an interesting physical relationship with their future inhabitants, so as to be recognizable, meaningful and anticipate forthcoming collective civic life. Qualities to define such ‘interesting forms’ might be diverse. Primarily, interesting forms should find a sense of size, a sense of weight, a sense of touch; they should find specific and interesting dimensions, shapes and material qualities that our sight might (somehow primitively) understand in order to become sensitive envelopes foreseeing the rhythm of life; anticipating the tone of our conversations, the speed of our walk or the silence of our contemplation. Interesting forms should also find a sense of sequence, a feeling of the contrast experienced between one form and the next; stressing binary oppositions to make themselves clearly readable or conversely, drawing attention to subtle alterations on pale colours to capture a grasp of change in calmness. Likewise, interesting forms might inscribe charged qualities of our cultural constructs, collective memories, ethical beliefs, political principles or even the beauty of transcendental uselessness or banal pleasure; sometimes in the form of sign, symbol and other times as fragmentary gestures unveiled behind our misted glasses.
Pedro Pitarch
The contemporary metropolis erases the traditional conception of context altogether. Its basis relying on its continuous management of content. With a dialogue among its actors and the interchangeability of their forms. By admitting the continuous process of un-contextualization of our metropolises, we are assuming a way of urbanism that does not rely on the shape […]
The contemporary metropolis erases the traditional conception of context altogether. Its basis relying on its continuous management of content. With a dialogue among its actors and the interchangeability of their forms. By admitting the continuous process of un-contextualization of our metropolises, we are assuming a way of urbanism that does not rely on the shape of an urban fabric anymore, but instead in the in-formation of its networks, of its infrastructures and scenarios. The tension within this contradictory paradigm is what rules its machinery.
In-formed Lisbon assumes these contradictions as an inherent condition of the contemporary city. Hence, In-formed Lisbon compiles a series of “sampled urbanisms”, which, imported from other contexts and using the city as a motherboard, are plugged-in to Lisbon generating a catalogue of “faked-realities”.
They point out four urban situations that do not depend on the city’s shape but on its performability. A political artefact acting as architecture. A process of transforming an architectural piece into an economical machine. A natural element converted into a human infrastructure. A peer-to-peer revolution.
They correspond to four processes of generating urbanism that are self-textualized beeing contexts themselves.
Within In-formed Lisbon it is the content what becomes the context.
The Lisbon Wall (Portuguese: O Muro de Lisboa) was a barrier that divided Lisbon from 1961 to 1989. Constructed by the Portuguese Democratic Republic (PDR, South Portugal), starting on 13 August 1961, the Wall completely cut off (by land) North Lisbon from surrounding South Portugal and from South Lisbon until government officials opened it in November 1989. Its demolition officially began on 13 June 1990 and was completed in 1992. The barrier included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, which circumscribed a wide area (later known as the “death strip”) that contained anti-vehicle trenches, “fakir beds” and other defences. The Southern Bloc claimed that the Wall was erected to protect its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the “will of the people” in building a socialist state in South Portugal. In practice, the Wall served to prevent the massive emigration and defection that had marked South Portugal and the communist Southern Bloc during the post-World War II period. […]
The fall of the Lisbon Wall paved the way for Portuguese reunification, which was formally concluded on 3 October 1990.
Image 01_ Axonometric View of a section of the Lisbon Wall next to Mosteiro dos Jerónimos
The Lisboa Effect is a portmanteau used to describe the urban process of introducing a singular piece of architecture into a city’s urban fabric with the aim of transforming its contexts by means of a political and economical shift. By the usage of an icon, a process of urbanization of an area is generated.
Such an urban mechanism has ruled the processes of urban development of the cities’ centres around the globe during the 90s. Cities were worried about “reinventing themselves”, giving precedence to the value given by culture. Municipalities and non-profit organizations hoped the use of a Starchitect would drive traffic and tourist income to their new facilities. With the popular and critical success of the Guggenheim Museum in Lisboa, by Frank Gehry, in which a rundown area of a city in economic decline brought in huge financial growth and prestige, the media started to talk about the so-called “Lisboa Effect“; a stararchitect designing a blue-chip, prestige building was thought to make all the difference in producing a landmark for the city.
Developers around the world have used this mechanism as a prototype for replication in the quest of convincing reluctant municipalities to approve large developments, obtaining financing or increasing the value of their buildings.
Google Maps Screenshot of the surroundings of Guggenheim Lisbon at Praça do Comercio
The Tagus Port City (Portuguese: Cidade portuária de Tejo) is the largest port in Europe, located in the city of Lisbon. From 1962 until 2004 it was the world’s busiest port, now overtaken first by Singapore and then Shanghai. In 2011, Lisbon was the world’s eleventh-largest container port in terms of twenty-foot equivalent units (TEU) handled. Covering 105 square kilometres (41 sq mi), the port of Lisbon now stretches over a distance of 40 kilometres (25 mi).
Much of the container loading and stacking in the port is handled by autonomous robotic cranes and computer controlled chariots. The Lisbon Droid Inc. pioneered the development of terminal automation. At the Tagus terminal, the chariots—or automated guided vehicles (AGV)—are unmanned and each carries one container. The chariots navigate their own way around the terminal with the help of a magnetic grid built into the terminal tarmac. Once a container is loaded onto an AGV, it is identified by infrared “eyes” and delivered to its designated place within the terminal. This terminal is also named “the ghost terminal“.
The port is operated by Tagus City, originally a municipal body of the city of Lisbon, but since 1 January 2004, a self-governed corporation declared as autonomous microstate regulated by NATO.
Official Site Plan of the Tagus Port City as defined by NATO
Occupy Marquês de Pombal (OMP) is the name given to a protest movement that began on September 17, 2011, in Parque Eduardo VII, located in Lisboa’s Marquês de Pombal financial district, receiving global attention and spawning the Occupy movement against social and economic inequality worldwide. It was inspired by anti-austerity protests in Spain coming from the 15-M movement.
The Portuguese, anti-consumerist, pro-environment group/magazine Publi-Cidade initiated the call for a protest.
The main issues raised by Occupy Marquês de Pombal were social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the perceived undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The OMP slogan, “We are the 99%”, refers to income inequality and wealth distribution in the Mediterranean Union between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population. To achieve their goals, protesters acted on consensus-based decisions made in general assemblies, which emphasized direct action over petitioning authorities for redress.
The protesters were forced out of Parque Eduardo VII on November 15, 2011. Protesters turned their focus to occupying banks, corporate headquarters, board meetings, foreclosed homes; and college and university campuses.
Protest movement at Parque Eduardo VII while marching towards Praça Marquês de Pombal