z

Architecture will never Abolish chAnce

destruction
number 2 mAy 2011

PROGRAM The Destructive Character Walter Benjamin Atlas 1 - Gordon Matta-Clark : memory Destruction: a work in progress Jos Brtolo Destruction: notes on the trauma of Rural Portugals Loss lvaro Domingues Atlas 2 - DGEMN (1929 - 60) : restoration Vell Poble Nou Tiago Lopes Dias Plotting David Knight & Cristina Monteiro Atlas 3 - Auschwitz : testimony Architecture|Art|Destruction Tiago Casanova

WALTER BENJAMIN

the destructive character*

t could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a destructive character. He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of representing the destructive character. The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. This is the great bond embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony. The destructive character is always blithely at work. It is Nature that dictates his tempo, indirectly at least, for he must forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself. The destructive character sees no image hovering before him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space the place where thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without occupying it. The destructive character does his work; the only work he avoids is creative. Just as the creator seeks solitude, the destroyer must be constantly surrounded by people, witnesses to his efficacy. The destructive character is a signal. Just a trigonometric sign is exposed on all sides to the wind, so he is exposed to idle talk. To protect him from it is pointless. The destructive character has no interest in being understood. Attempts in this direction he regards as superficial. Being misunderstood cannot harm him. On the contrary, he provokes it, just as oracles, those destructive institutions of the state, provoked it. The most petty bourgeois of all phenomena, gossip, comes about only because people do not wish to be misunderstood. The destructive character tolerates misunderstanding; he does not promote gossip. The destructive character is the enemy of the tui-man. The tui-man looks for comfort, and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction.

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

The destructive character stands in the front line of traditionalists. Some people pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them; others pass on situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them. The latter are called the destructive. The destructive character has the consciousness of historical man, whose deepest emotion is an insuperable mistrust of the course of things and a readiness at all times to recognize that everything can go wrong. Therefore, the destructive character is reliability itself. The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere. Where others encounter walls or mountains, there, too, he sees a way. But because he sees a way everywhere, he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always stands at a crossroads. No moment can know what the next will bring. What exists he reduces to rubble not for the sake of rubble, but for that of the way leading through it. The destructive character lives from the feeling not that life is worthing living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

* Text published originally in the Frankfurter Zeitung at 20th November 1931.

Walter Benjamin (Berlin, 1892). Philosopher. Literary Critic. Sociologist. Translator. Wrote among others The Work of Artin the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Theses on the Philosophy of History and the unfinished work The Arcades Project. Committed suicide while running away from the Nazi Secret Services in 26 September 1940 in Portbou, Spain. 4

Holland House, London, after a Nazi air Raid, September 1940

- Days end, 1975 -

Matta-Clark fragments or splinters architecture, turning it into a kind of reverse Cubism or anti-monument, but one whose task is to reconstitute memory, not conventional memory as in the traditional monument, but that subversive memory which has been hidden by social and architectural faades and their false sense of wholeness.
- Dan Graham - Bronx Floors: Threshole, 1972 -

- Office Baroque, 1977 -

ATLAS 1

MATTA-CLARK DESTRUIO AS MEMORY

I see the work as a special stage in perpetual metamorphosis, a model for peoples constant action on space as much as in the space that surrounds them. Buildings are fixed entities in the minds of most the notion of mutable space is virtually taboo even in ones own house. People live in their space with a temerity that is frightening. Home owners generally do little more than maintain their property. Its a baffling how rarely the people get involved in fundamentally changing their place by simple undoing it. Im experimenting with alternative uses of space that are most familiar...This work reacts against a hygienic obsession in the name of redevelopment which sweeps away what litle there is of an American past, to be cleansed by pavement and parking. What might have been a richly layered underground is being excavated for deeper, new building foundations. Only our garbage heaps are soared as they fill up with history.
- Gordon Matta-Clark

- Circus-Caribbean Orange, 1978 -

- Conical Intesect, 1975 -

Poster of The Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS), London, 1966, organized by Gustav Metzger

JoS BRToLo

destruction
A WoRk IN pRogRESS

here is a kind of vital experience time and space experience, of us and of the others, of life possibilities and dangers that is shared by women and men all over the world, today. To this group of experiences we can call contemporaneity. Maybe we, the contemporary, arent living something substantially different from the ones that came before the ones that came before us the moderns lived. The environmental experience of the contemporaneity in what it has of return to the modern and of awareness of the impossibility of such return is marked by the crisis and resistance to the models, categories and values that from the political to the economical, from the religious to the artistic drive ourselves into a confrontation with forms of production, circulations and archive that, echoing Marx suggest us, that everything that is solid melts in the air. For the ones that have come before us and after the moderns, the dissolution was not an anguishing shadow, but a whole program. The reduction to the concept, carried out by a young generation of artists and architects by the end of the 50s, expressed such programmatic concern of returning, by radical means, to the modern project original concern of constructing the synthesis between life and art, being

this twentieth century second half neo-avant-garde ideologically closer to the XIX century utopists than of the historical avant-gardes from the beginning of the last century. The object destruction was the recurring strategy in this reduction to the concept process that Luccy Lippard describes very well, in full process, in the beginning of the 70s1. The objectives pursued by the conceptual program were diverse but, as recalls Suzi Gablik, depriving the works of art from their aura or singularity and, therefore, preventing that they transform themselves in objects of consumption, was one of the main objectives of the conceptual art2. As Robert Barry expressed, in 1968, the world is full of objects and I dont intend to add any other. This trail, we know it now, would reveal us some perversions. The dematerialization, but mostly the destruction of the artistic object, through an anti-artistic intervention over an object (everyday object or work of art) instead of removing it from the commercial chain, exempting it from the condition of good, generated a new value dimension (ironically, a certain aura) that, rapidly, would find its own production system, circulation, trade and archive. To the production of objects, the conceptual art, intended to oppose two alternative creative processes: the production of ideas and the destruction of pre-existing
9

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

objects. In 1969, Robert Barry presented his Telepathic Piece that consisted in the effort of communicate, by telepathy, a work of art. Three years later before the presentation of the Telepatic Piece, Gustav Metzger organized in London the DIAS Destruction in Art Symposium particularly animated by actions as Painting with Explosion in which Pro-Diaz proceeded to some creative detonations or by the Viennese Actionists performances that aimed, as well, a kind of explosion through the abrupt liberation of big amounts of energy. The recourse to explosion was one of the most symbolical means and radically actual of the contemporary art, working with a referential triangle that dominates the second half of the twentieth century culture energy/production/consumption. The approach to the literality and to the explosion imaginary and through it the construction of creative processes based in the controlled and intentional act destruction built one of the most contusing representations of the contemporary culture, that Peter Sloterdijk, already in this century, called the fast burn culture. The destruction of the object by the contemporary art appears, in this way, as a representation, between the melancholic and the unusual, of a process of fast combustion, explosion and destruction of enormous amounts of energy that characterizes the industrial and liberal culture of the XX century. The forms of destruction were, as we know, the most diverse, as very well enunciates Metzger in the Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art of 1960: Materials and techniques used in creating auto-destructive art include: Acid, Adhesives, Ballistics, Canvas, Clay, Combustion, Compression, Concrete, Corrosion, Cybernetics, Drop, Elasticity, Electricity, Electrolysis, Feed-Back, Glass, Heat, Human Energy, Ice, Jet, Light, Load, Mass-production, Metal, Motion Picture, Natural Forces, Nuclear Energy, Paint, Paper, Photography, Plaster, Plastics, Pressure,
10

Radiation, Sand, Solar Energy, Sound, Steam, Stress, Terra-cotta, Vibration, Water, Welding, Wire, Wood. This drop drop dropping of HH bombs was, in this way, developed in several ways: by dissolution (as in the Metzger or Mark Boyle and Joan Hill paintings with acid); by incineration (as in the Pyromania Projects of Ben Vautier, in the Burnt Instruments of Armand or in the Peintures de Feu de Yves Klein); by split (as in the project Passage of Saburo Murakami); by smashing (as in the works of Csar Baldaccini or John Chamberlain); by dismantle (as in the Piano Destruction of Rafael Ortiz); by cut (as in the compositions of Arman); by penetration (as in the anti-buch of Herbert Zangs); by strangulation (as in the Implosions of Ewert Hilgemann) and finally by explosion, recourse that from the Hommage New York (1960) of Jean Tinguely to the recent works of Kendekk Geers is still recurrent. To Metzger the auto-destructive process was a path to the total conception, being the idea, by chance paradoxically, of a total conceptual work of art, slowly defined since mid 50s: Auto-destructive art is primarily a form of public art for industrial societies. Self-destructive painting, sculpture and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, color, method, and timing of the disintegrative process. Auto-destructive art can be created with natural forces, traditional art techniques and technological techniques. The amplified sound of the auto-destructive process can be an element of the total conception. The artist may collaborate with scientists, engineers. Self-destructive art can be machine produced and factory assembled. Auto-destructive paintings, sculptures and constructions have a life time varying from a few moments to twenty years. When the disin-

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

tegrative process is complete the work is to be removed from the site and scrapped.3. In 1973, after a decade of massive destruction, the energetic crises confront us radically with the crisis of over-abundance It will not be simple coincidence, the fact that the Post-modernity affirms itself, through Charles Jencks, in the same year that the oil crisis reaches its peak. An organization paradigm of the energy/production/consumption referential triangle, that reached a declared exhaustion. Almost forty years after this point of exhaustion, there was no real paradigm modification. The creative processes of intentional and controlled destruction were gone in the last three decades extinguishing it and becoming merely residuals. We remain inside a fast burn culture, but evolved in the vertigo of this combustion, maybe we lost the ability of representing it and potentially create a critical alternative. After this experience of critical destruction, to us, it seems only to be left the experience of keep the ashes or to free them in the air.

1 Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, London, 1973. 2 Suzy Gablik, Ha muerto el Arte Moderno?, Herman Blume, Madrid, 1987, pp. 39. 3 Gustav Metzger, Auto-destructive art manifesto, 1959. Available online : http://www.391.org/ manifestos/1959metzger.htm.

Jos Manuel Brtolo (1972) develops work of investigation, teaching and curatorship in the areas of contemporary art, architecture and design. Its author of the blog Reactor ( HYPERLINK http://www.reactor-reactor.blogspot.com www.reactor-reactor.blogspot.com) of the books Corpo e Sentido and Design and editor of PLI Magazine. 11

LVARo DoMINgUES

destruction
REcoRDS oN ThE TRAUMA of RURAL poRTUgAL LoSS

t is said that an act of destruction is an act that makes something to disappear. If one doesnt ask anything else about the circumstance and reasons of that disappearing, there will be few clearing up. It can even be pure illusion, or are not the illusionists themselves the real specialists on disappearance. In a martial view, destruction is the enemys annihilation..., but there are other meanings much more positive where destruction is a necessary condition for rebirth and creation. So has thought the good God when He warned Noah that He would destruct mankind with a flood that restarted everything, like the Sun in each dawn, and the creation reconciled with the creator, once for all. It came to nothing, judging by what happened meanwhile and by the results of multiple floods and catastrophes that occurred. The fragments of image/text that are presented belong to Vida no Campo [Life in the Countryside] (Domingues, 2011, Dafne, Porto), an essay about the destruction or, in a more psychological record, about the loss of Rural Portugal. Vida no Campo is, therefore, a metaphor about the loss of that Rural Portugal and an antidote against this bad living about depopulation, abandonment, or, in an another record, the deep metamorphosis that is ploughing throughout the (ex)-farmers country, the loss of their ancestral practices,

ways of living, territory and landscapes. Ruins, in many cases. It is not a minor matter. Like Language or History, landscape is a powerful identity mark, a common house. Yet, there are no eternal landscapes. Landscapes are a record of the changing society and if the change is so big, so deep and accelerated, there will be a record of it and few time and plenty of space to understand and digest every marks and the way, either relics either disposals, mutually run-over. At the same time, if we change the landscape, the stable referents that the landscapes images produce fall into a mess, in a speeding up of differences where, frequently, it is more recognizable what is lost than what it is gained and the way that this gain is evaluated, because it seems weird or exotic, non-belonging, non vernacular like the Romans said about the slaves that where home born by counterpoint to those who were recruited somewhere. This is why its so common to talk about the destruction in course, the de-characterization, the loss of supposed authenticities that after so much mystification seem to have belonged to a primordial time, with no history or any other referent except this pluperfect past where life in the countryside was the image of Paradise and of the wise good People, poor but
13

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

honest, that lived in its simplicity, joy and communion with Nature and praying to the gods. The marks and memories of that Rural Portugal are decomposing with the de-ruralization and its track of collateral effects: depopulation, ageing, abandonment of fields and agricultural production, disappearing of certain lifestyles, knowledges and cultural practices the interior, in the more frequent words about these matters. The few that stay live from an assisted economy between pensions, subsidies, savings, familys helps and those who can, leave because employment is rare, and the bucolic mirage and the lost paradise image is much more from those who are out (of that interior) and think that the rural and nature are places for vacation and tourism. In a different record from this one when abandonment of agriculture doesnt mean the abandonment of people , rurality transforms itself from inside or its absorbed by what it is usually named urbanization. This post-rurality is so strange that there is no way we can adjectify the landscapes it builds. Transgenic landscapes, new territories that like GMOs (genetically modified organisms) combine and reproduce distinct genetic references and remix them in an unusual way. Those who usually look dont understand, and because they dont see in there the beautiful cities
14

or the good and pretty villages, become sad and call it ugly. Let us leave the aesthetics for later on; people say that one cannot love what they dont know and, in this case, whats most unknown is the most present thing. A paradox. Vida no Campo is about all of this: myths of the last rural country in Europe that persists in inscribing in the collective imaginary (and at the same time), the bucolic images and the disposals of that lost world, variating between calamity and fires, resorts for all tastes with lots of grass and green space, rural tourism, desertification or, on the contrary, houses and roads everywhere like in the NW of Portugal. If 97% of the economy is not rural, the country, the society and the territory, are urban (by default and as while as we cannot leave this dichotomy). It seems baffling, but to write an essay it is quite enough.

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

1 Was is the past of the indicative of the verb to be. Had been is the pluperfect past, of a primordial time where the rural had been a time out of time. It was in fact a stone house with inscriptions on the door lintel which probably had met other times of prosperity and abundance. Meanwhile, since long ago theres a vineyard where before there was the first floor pavement or the oak wooden ceilings; an interior vineyard like the garden of a convent cloister. Today it is just one more real estate product commercialized by an international business network: local products in global commerce, like it is common in almost everything. In this case, what would be for some the disgrace of a ruin, for others is the charm of the ruin itself. The theme is not from the present. Since the aesthetics of the antiquity, disposals were produced and fed in European Renaissance, until the Romanticism (that amplified its senses and poetics), and the ruin kept its museum patina and aura of sacralised things. Its difficult not to feel a certain nostalgia, the same that is able to feed the interest and raise of cost of this and other ruins. Greater than the loss, is the conscience of the loss that truly matters.

2 The Voo do Arado [Flight of the Plough] is the name of a 1996 exhibition at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia [National Museum of Ethnology] and also an indispensable book to understand the fading out of traditional agriculture in Portugal from the 1950s decade1. Transmuted to a condition of flying object or decorative adornment of padiment of the entry of the house, the plough jumps from reality and from the museum to the ready-made world and the symbolic programs of architecture and domestic space. With the , plough an object that constitutes a strong symbol of the civilization process itself, everything that comes from arts and crafts of agriculture wheels, cars, millstones, jars, pipes, barrels, granaries, etc converts into an object whose symbolic record unfolds simultaneously into relic, exorcism, identity, memory,...

1 J. Pais Brito; Oliveira Baptista; Benjamim Enes Pereira org. (1996), O Voo do Arado, Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Instituto Portugus de Museus, Lisboa

15

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

3 How it is beautiful my village It is so beautiful my village, the place where I was born Under the light of a candle, I remember the land where I lived in It is so beautiful the dawn, the sun falls on the farms There you couldnt live, today you cry that loss In the Holy Mary time, when the bells are ringing It has arrived the end of the day, our people will pray At that time of joy, soon we prepare the meal At the Holy Mary time...how it is beautiful my village Oh olive trees garden, guard your beautiful wheat fields Youre the true hope, youre my parents land It is so beautiful the dawn, the sun falls on the farms There you couldnt live, today you cry that loss In the Holy Mary time, when the bells are ringing It has arrived the end of the day, our people will pray At that time of joy, soon we prepare the meal At the Holy Mary time...how it is beautiful my village2

4 This thing of an art of the field and of a field of art has plenty to be said: without understanding the field of art we dont understand art, or the field, or anything else3. Bourdieu says that the field of art is like any other social field, a private arena where each one plays the game rules to stand a position face to face to the players that legitimise the authority from who are the artists, the arts and the properties of those symbolic goods. Marcel Duchamp knew about the iconoclast weight of his Fountain, refused by the Independent Salon, 1917, New York; to increase its (counter)power at the Salon, he plotted with a wealthy friend of his to offer a good amount of money by the Fountaine of Richard Mutt (the company that produced the urinal). It was just the beginning of a long story about art and its narrative power, for those who see and for those who give to be seen. Is it possible to do works that arent art? questioned Marcel of the fields [Marcel Duchamp] while installing this readymade train of troughs to some meanwhile mad cows.
3 Jos Olaio Correia Carvalho, O Campo da Arte segundo Marcel Duchamp, Departamento de Arquitectura da Faculdade de Cincias e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra, Coimbra, 1999 Pierre Bourdieu, La production de la croyance. Contribution une conomie des biens symboliques, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, n 13, 1977, p. 3-43 Pierre Bourdieu, Les rgles de lart : gense et structure du champ littraire, Ed. du Seuil, Paris, 1992 J-Franois Lyotard, Les Transformateurs Duchamp, Ed. Galile, Paris, 1977 http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ensduchamp/ens-duchamp.htm

2 Roberto Leal, Canto a Portugal, 2003

16

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

5 It is urgent to help the villages tomorrow it will be late, tomorrow well have railroads, the disordered invasion of new ideas, the new uses and habits; tomorrow there will be fashion (), obliteration of pure kinds, ruin of homemade industries, pottery, textiles, embroideries and canvas, kept with some much care4. It is urgent to help the villages is an expression that could be from our present days, in the set of many nostalgics that dont see in the villages the old typical villages that they still think that exist. Some locals those who live in villages but are not any more real villagers in the real sense of the word , build these miniature replicas of their own churches and chapels. It is not to override the loss feeling of the real chapel; it is to recharge and celebrate the existence of the chapel itself; to highlight its feeling of identity and self-esteem; to detach from the reality that which is beyond that reality. Its like this, sacred things.

6 From my village I see how much from the land that can be seen from the Universe... So my village is as big as any other, Because I have the size of what I see And not my height... In the cities life is smaller Than here in my hillside house. In the city the big houses close down their view, Hide the horizon, push our look far away of all heaven, Make us small because they take us what our eyes can give, And make us poor because our only wealth is to see.5

4 Joaquim da Vasconcelos, 1882, cit em J. Leal, Metamorfoses da arte popular: Joaquim de Vasconcelos, Verglio Correia e Ernesto de Sousa, Etnogrfica, Vol. VI (2), 2002, pp. 251280, p.261

5 Alberto Caeiro, s/d, O Guardador de Rebanhos. In Poemas de Alberto Caeiro. Fernando Pessoa. (Nota explicativa e notas de Joo Gaspar Simes e Luiz de Montalvor.) Lisboa: tica, 1946 (10 ed. 1993), 32.

Photos taken by the author lvaro Domingues (Melgao, 1959) is a geographer and Professor at Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto (FAUP). 17

- So Martinho de Cedofeita Church -

- So Frutuoso de Montlios Church -

- So Pedro de Rates Church -

- Santa Maria de Aguiar Monastery -

- Santa Clara Convent, Santarm -

ATLAS 2

DESTRUCTION AS RESTORATION
DGEMNs Intervention (1929-1960)

- Domus Municipalis, Bragana -

Restoration was the name chosen to characterize the new political power first years of action. Restoration that should extend to all sectors of national life. The restoration of monuments, besides of being an activity visible almost immediately, allowed a new reading of Historys nation, laid in its most glory moments, true lesson of the lusa race value, signs of warrant and trust in the New State, just and true captain of the Nation
- Maria Joo Baptista Neto, O Restauro dos Monumentos Nacionais (1929-1960). - Santiago Church, Coimbra -

- Porto Cathedral -

- So Martinho de Mouros Church -

TIAgo LopES DIAS

veLL poBLe nou

t was hard, for those who visited the Agbar Tower in Barcelona, a few years ago, to be indifferent towards a small settlement of constructions that surrounded it. This fragment, uncomfortable reminiscence of an obsolete city, disturbed the image of the modern Barcelona from the beginning of the century, on which the Jean Nouvels building would be a high flag. I remembered, in one of my local wanderings, of a passage of the recently published book from the anthropologist Manuel Delgado. I remembered the meaning of the words but not with their whole accuracy, which I confirmed, as soon as it was possible: standing at the feet of singular architectonic volumes, around them, the unwished but real city extends1. Today, standing at the feet of those singular architectonic volume there are no more graffitis, the churreria or the kiosk that sells lottery tickets: it all vanished to give place to one more singular architectonic volume. It was equally hard, for those who walked through the Poblenou neighborhood in Barcelona, to be indifferent to the amount of abandoned buildings that there were. No catastrophe, natural or man-made, has had place; just that Mighty Sculptor, Time (paraphrasing Marguerite Yourcenar) was working relentlessly, transforming two hundred hectares of industrial buildings into ruins. On this scenario, suggestive as a bucolic landscape from the late-renaissance, one could wander like dandys, with eyes lost in the past. The cult and poetics of the ruin, legacy of European Romantism that reached its climax in the end of the 18th century, was frequently confused with simple nostalgia; yet, as Dalibor Vesely explains, the fragment, to romantics, was not a goal, but an incomplete project that

was intended the conclusion at a high level of synthesis and perfection as a part of a totality and an organic system 2. Giving as an example the rocaille, Vesely stands that unfinished nature is intentional, because it expresses a possibility of achievement in the future, in the same way that an organism reaches plenitude, realization and perfection by growth 3. I believe that it is this idea of hidden signification, latent in ruin, that is behind the unload of Juan Jos Lahuerta in his love letter to the city of Barcelona4. More than a model of an already dead and ended life, ruin mostly means the possibility of an interpretation, of a definitive explanation an interpretation of the whole by the part. Its this desire of plenitude that Lahuerta sees as the essence of the kitsch that demands that everything must have a solution5. And the solution, in this case, passed through the redefinition of what should be the new Poblenou: a district of innovation that offers modern spaces for the strategic concentration of intensive activities around knowledge6. Conservation, by the new singular architectonic volumes, of the industrial chimneys crystallized, totemic solved that incomplete project that was the ruin of the productive city. Isnt this scenario (that seems to mimic a Giogio Di Chirico painting: an astronomy of anchored objects to the planet only by the fatal gravity law)7 a result of the essence of a policy that presents physical destruction, trivialization and selling of the city as the way without solution towards the happiness of living in a store, the showcase ecstasies of modernity8, like Lahuerta mentions? Isnt the new Poblenou an example of the relation between destruction and disappearing of the life that lives the city and commercialization or marketing of the same?

21

 Lahuertas mistrust towards the way without solution of the happiness was possibly transmitted by the one that best expresses the hate against that (illusory) doctrine of progress: Charles Baudelaire. Who, better than the french poet, sang, in the 19th Century Paris, that future where all is past, where everything has already happened and limits to repeat itself?
Paris change! Mais rien dans ma mlancolie Na boug! Palais neufs, chafaudages, blocs, Vieux faubourgs, tout pour moi devient allgorie 9

alcohol, the north-American master had seen the last ruin, the fragment with no possible reconstruction: the interior of modern man. The crack in the Uscher house faade, that announces the imminent collapse, is not more than a metaphor of its trust-less and tormented soul. I travel back to Poblenou by a series of pictures that I lightly took in the last four years. And I remember, this time, the incisive observation of Susan Sontag about the relation between photography and destruction: Cameras started to double the world in a moment where the human landscape started to suffer a vertiginous rhythm of transformation 12 - the moment when Baudelaire wrote Fleurs du mal. Someone wrote as well, this time in the walls of what was once a house, te quiero Poblenou (I want you, Poblenou). This urgent declaration, possibly of someone that didnt possessed any other mean than a quick graffiti, is now certainly gone as Im writing these quick notes. As a consolation, I have left the ability of photography to record what is about to disappear.

Baudelaires poetry, as so well Benjamin resumed, made appear the new in the alwaysthe-same and the always-the-same in the new 10. The Baron Haussmann works will also be, one day, ruins; they wont be able to escape the inexorable cycle of destruction and construction that characterizes the great city and life itself. It is not strange that Baudelaire, in a small exercise, wrote that it pleased him more Edgar Allan Poe drunk, poor, chased and aliened than calm and virtuous Goethe 11. He knew that, in the thick curtain of opium and

1 Manuel Delgado, La ciudad mentirosa. Fraude y miseria del Modelo Barcelona, Madrid, Los Libros de la Catarata, 2007, p.239. 2 Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation, the MIT Press, 2004. 3 Dalibor Vesely, op. cit., p. 330. 4 Juan Jos Lahuerta, Destruccin de Barcelona, Barcelona, Mudito & Co., 2005. 5 Lahuerta, op. cit., p.14. 6 www.22barcelona.com. 7 Giorgio De Chirico, On Metaphysical Art. Citado por Dalibor Vesely, op. cit. 8 Lahuerta, op. cit., p.14. 9 Charles Baudelaire, Le Cygne. In Les Fleurs du Mal. Publicado originalmente em 1857. 10 Walter Benjamin, Central Park. 11 Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, Coimbra, Editora Alma Azul, 2008. Entre 1852 e 1865 Baudelaire traduziu a obra de Poe para o francs. 12 Susan Sontag, Sobre la Fotografia, Barcelona, Debolsillo Contempornea, 2010, p.25 (orig.1977). Tiago Lopes Dias (Porto, 1978). Architect, graduated in Porto Faculty of Architecture, where was teaching de design unit. Is currently developing his PhD Thesis in Barcelona. 22

Poblenou (Barcelona) between 2006 and 2010 - author: Tiago Lopes Dias

Aerial photograph, Pruitt-Igoe, 1968

DAVID kNIghT & cRISTINA MoNTEIRo

pLottinG

he collective life of buildings in time, what could be called their metabolism, has a profound relationship with their plots - the areas of ground that they occupy. Destruction can become a charged moment when such patterns of ownership can be redrawn, a moment which frequently overwhelms the subsequent intent of the architect or designer. It is a potent reminder that construction is the beginning, rather than the end, of a buildings life. The size of a plot, or the complexity of its ownership, is intimately related to processes of change in any city or built environment. Small change has a small effect and can happen frequently: a building can accommodate several lifetimes worth of different functions at street level while the residential uses above continue undisturbed, whilst a single terraced building can change entirely without damaging its neighbours or its street. In contrast, the demolition of an entire terrace is almost inevitably an act of violence to its context1.

unless it serves as the prelude to a story of reconstruction2. This phenomenon is echoed in the way we date works of architecture - by their completion rather than their lifetime. Plot size provides an effective critique of the comprehensive redevelopment projects of the post-war period: the widespread landparcelling of areas of city to form new districts and estates. The history of their failure has been written many times, but frequently the failure is described in purely spatial or aesthetic terms. What is not frequently discussed is the change in plot size inherent in such projects, the shifting of land from multiple ownership to single ownership, and the massive all-in-one destruction and site preparation that it entails. This change unites the post-war development boom with new business districts like Canary Wharf (1988-): opposing versions of modernity that both depend upon the parcelling together of previously disparate land ownerships. The replacement of fine-grain with coarsegrain can be considered a characteristic of all modernism, and is found in projects from the building of the railways to Haussmanns Paris (1852-, fig.1), from Plan Voisin (1925) to PruittIgoe (1954-76). This understanding of the metabolism of places may sound obvious but it is not widely understood by the people with the power
25

The built environment industry (with the notable exception of demolition contractors) ideologically prioritises construction over destruction. Demolition, though a complex and artful process, is frequently ignored in the representation of the built environment,

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

fig.1 - Haussmann plan, Paris, 1852

and influence to change them. Colin Ward describes how the centre of Birmingham was ruined not by the stylistic precepts of modernism but by the principle of landparcelling, and recent attempts to recover the city from the dark days of its post-war makeover have led to more, not less of the city centre passing into sole ownership: entire streets passing into the private sector3. This example raises the issue that once plots have got big, they are hard to subdivide, not because of ownership but because After a generation or two, the whole environment becomes obsolete simultaneously, so that total destruction and replacement have to happen all over again4. Similarly, New Urbanist experiments like Poundbury (1993-) in Dorset attempt to replicate the piecemeal growth of an English village, but do so with a fully-detailed plan and an incredibly constraining design code which explicitly forbids ad-hoc development5. Aldo Rossis Quartier Schtzenstrasse (1998-) mimics the growth of a Berlin urban block but was all built at once, as artfully composed as a Palladio faade. This latter project recognises the visual diversity of small plots whilst apparently missing their social diversity, a characteristic of much of the current rehabilitation of central Porto, where patchwork heritage street elevations entirely a product of the economy of small plots - are being retained as
26

the front facades of land-parcelled apartment blocks- a change which almost invisibly, yet fundamentally, alters the character of the city to the point where its whole social structure will have changed without any publicly visible difference. This is not necessarily to demonise large buildings or large plots, but to place them into a complex economy of spatial change, to better understand their consequences for urban life. The process can of course go both ways. The commercial reality of land-parcelling has its opposite in property laws across the world that create ever-decreasing plot sizes by splitting inheritance rights among children of the deceased: a phenomenon that can strangle the city through complexity. This, however, is the exception rather than the rule, and in the contemporary city the bigger violence is produced by the bigger plot. As noted earlier, once land has been parcelled up, theres very little going back: the delicacy and complexity lost through this process is very hard, if not impossible, to recover. This simple fact gives the lie to so much urban design guidance, which can describe in idealistic terms the value of a diverse streetscape without any understanding of the processes that created our most lively and diverse urban places in the first place. In its place we might imagine subdivision systems like the burgage tenements

punkto - DESTRUcTIoN

fig.2 - Bologna Quartier

fig.3 - Square, Chipping Norton

found in medieval market towns, enduring urban forms derived from field sizes that, by using a long narrow plot, allowed for flexible and individual occupation of the site whilst retaining a narrow, but vital presence on the street or market place (fig.3). Until a campaign led by Cedric Price, the only architect member of the National Federation of Demolition Contractors, it was against the RIBA6 code of conduct for an architect to advise a client to do nothing. It was assumed, until Prices campaign, that if a client engaged an architect then the only possible outcome would be the production of new architecture. To go against this assumption would be equal, in theory, to taking a bribe or falsifying a building permit7. With this intervention, Price draws attention to the artificial limits of an architectural practice concerned only with the production of new architecture within predetermined constraints. In giving architects the freedom to do nothing, he is therefore asking them to do more. It is time to recognise the humility of building design in relation to the overwhelming significance of plot size. Engaging with the

political and territorial scale of our built environment, rather than just its aesthetic scale, is one way of living up to Prices request. It also suggests a renewed engagement with the methods, positive and negative, by which the processes of planning and property subdivide the world.
1 For a broader discussion of this phenomenon, see Anne Vernez Moudon, Built for Change: Neighborhood Architecture in San Francisco (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986) and Brand, Stewart, How Buildings Learn: What happens after theyre built (New York: Viking Press, 1994) 2 The demolition of post-war residential blocks as a spectacle is well documented by Joe Kerr. Joe Kerr, Blowdown: The Rise and Fall of Londons Tower Blocks, in London: From Punk to Blair, ed. By Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (London: Reaktion Books, 2003) 3 For an excellent description of this situation, see Anna Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the TwentyFirst Century City (London: Penguin Books, 2009) 4 Colin Ward, Welcome Thinner City (London: Bedford Square Press, 1989), p.23. 5 For ad description of this see Finn Williams, David Knight and Ulf Hackauf, Building without Bureaucracy, lArchitecture dAujourd hui 378, June-July 2010. 6 The Royal Institute of British Architects, www.architecture.com (Accessed 27.01.2011) 7 For an introduction to the life and work see Mathews, Stanley, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog, 2007)

David Knight is a designer and currently a researcher at the Royal College of Art. He is the author of the forthcoming Wallpaper* City Guide: Porto. Cristina Monteiro is a designer currently working with muf architecture/art. She has taught at Syracuse University (New York) and Kingston University (London). www.dk-cm.com 27

Auschwitz Concentration Camp, 1941-1945

Drawing discovered in a building of Berlin in 2008. Drawn between 1941-43 they show the calculated and systematic way in which the the 6 millions jew genocide was planned. Plan of the complex. Faade, basement plan and Crematorium II section.

1. Gas chamber; 2. Morgue

ATLAS 3

7 4 5 6 1 8

AUSCHWITZ. AFTER THE DESTRUCTION: THE TESTIMONY

3 9

1. Gas chamber; 2. Fuel tanks; 3. technical area; 4/5. 9. Ventila-

Dissection rooms; 6. Elevators; 7/8. Morgues;

tion System.

Of course that all the horror that emerged in the Nuremberg Trial about the 6 million Jews, and people of other faiths and beliefs who lost their lives. All that struck me as very shocking. But I wasnt able at first to see the connection with my own past. I still felt somehow content that I had no personal guilt and had known nothing about it. I had no idea of the extent of what happened. But then one day I was walking past the memorial in Franz-Joseph-Strasse, to Sophie Scholl, a young girl that opposed Hitler, and I realized that she was the same age as me and that she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. At that moment I really sensed that it is no excuse to be young, and that it might have been possible to find out what was going on.

Traudl Junge, Testimony of Hitlers secretary in the documentary, Im toten Winkel, 2002.

LIVRARIA aeFaup
DEScoNToS AT 20 % pARA ScIoS AEfAUp ABERTA DE 2 A 6 fEIRA | 9h00M - 17h30M

associao de estudantes da faculdade de arquitectura da universidade do porto Rua do glgota 215, 4150-351 porto, portugal T: 226001291 geral@aefaup.pt livraria@aefaup.pt

punkto n2 May 2011 Porto

Team Pedro Levi Bismarck Pedro Oliveira Carlos Castro ARchitectuRe ObseRvAtORy MetA Design Punkto ConTribuTions Jos Brtolo lvaro Domingues Tiago Lopes Dias David Knight & Cristina Monteiro Tiago Casanova PrinT Minerva PrinTing 1000 copies DisTribuTion Free Cover image Radiation international symbol ConTaCTs revistapunkto@gmail.com ISSN 2182-1887

SPoNSoR: ASSoCiAo De eSTuDANTeS DA fACuLDADe De ARquiTeCTuRA DA uNiVeRSiDADe Do PoRTo

30

TIAgo cASANoVA

Tiago Casanova (Madeira, 1988) studies at FAUP. His work relates architecture practice with art, mainly photography. Collaborates with CCRE and organized various architecture and photographies events. Is assistent director of Scopio - Magazine Internacional de Fotografia.

Rural Portuga l

ation

capitalism

lands cape Aus chw itz bu co lic de gr ee ze ro

N M GE D e go itt I Pru y mon testi

preserv

Punkto magazine is an irregular, unPredictable, and indiscilined Publication about limits: of Practice, of theory, of art and architecture.

pl

au

ot
to
the

me

de

reh a

de s

pob

str

mo

roma

uc

nosta

progress

tru

fragmen

ry

marketing

bili

tiv

len

cti

tati

nticis

ar

ou

ve

lgy

on

ch a

rac

ter

cri

sis

DE

ST

C RU

TIO

lter Wa
JOS

Ben

jam

in
LO

BRTO

GUES LVARO DOMIN

TIAGO LOPES DIA S KNIG HT & MON TEIRO TIAG OC ASA Ma NO tta VA Cla G us rk tav M etz ge r

co nc
fas

ar

Ce

e ptu a la
cul ture

Lah

Albe rt

c dri

t bu rn

elaire Baud

Roberto

Haussmann

Edgar A. Poe

uer

ce Pri

oC aeir o

rt

ta

www.revistapunkto.com

Leal