PARADISE SOMEWHERE: A CONVERSATION WITH GRACIELA SILVESTRI

Isabella Moretti, Magdalena Tagliabue

America has an immanent mixed culture. Argentinian architecture historian and cultural theorist Graciela Silvestri interrogates its fluvial geography to find clues in understanding its exceptional compound and imagination. The lines rivers draw are never permanent nor dividing but transient; they join, mix, and change. In this interview, she talks about her new book on the lowlands of the Paraná River and the Guaraní culture, her long-lasting research on landscape theory, and a constant concern on how political ecology cuts across concepts.

IM The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) gives us cause to think about America in its territorial continuity and what that produces in architectural discourse. How can we think about a continental territory? You have dealt with the figure of water as a transversal and elemental subject that articulates territories from a geographic and discursive perspective. Water runs through, and delineates, regions. Does this give us an idea about how to approach the territory of the Americas? How has the region come up in your research?

GS This is a problem that I ran into with my last book Las tierras desubicadas, 1 a book about the Latin American lowlands and the Paraná River. To begin with, we must look at the relationship between everything in what was called Hispanoamérica in the 19th century and what later came to be Latin America, which comes from a concept that is more French than Spanish because it includes the Caribbean. The territory is intersected by very different cultures. For a long time, appreciation of South America and part of Central America was centered on the Andean zone. Undoubtedly, the cultures there were those that most fascinated the Castilian conquerors because of their heightened development. The lowlands remained, then, a place of wildness: they were considered people without culture, nomads, who lacked the status of the Incas, the Aztec, or the Mayans. According to some researchers, there existed a kind of Andean-centricism.2

The areas extending to the Atlantic Sea are, on the other hand, areas of great mixture. There, the class and caste systems are rather determined by money than by skin color. There are large cultural differences across the continent. That is why I focused on areas crossed by sea-bearing rivers. It is the geography itself that leads to this mixture, to this impossibility of defining its roots. I have to say that this, to me, is fantastic. I prefer mixture.

Anthropologists hold a key place in the study of these lowlands, especially from the 1970s onward. Anthropologists, and Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular, were looking for ‘pure savages;’ some isolated peoples still resist contact in the Peruvian-Brazilian Amazon. This anthropological gaze did not include indigenous people who lived in cities, because they were considered corrupted. This delusional idea aside, LéviStrauss and his disciples did a lot to rescue particular cultural subjects: Hélène Clastres, who wrote La tierra sin mal (Land without Evil) [1975] is one example. The Guaraní culture is represented as an anarchist and self-organized model of life, with no state power. Looking at that representation, a really interesting ecological and political question emerges, even if it makes reference to small groups of humans. This type of research helped to record this culture, which is, in actuality, several cultures. The name ‘Guaraní’ was created by the Jesuits, who transcribed the language. There is not much purity there, either.

MT In your multiple efforts to define the identity of the territory and particularly in your book El lugar común, (The Common Place) [2011], the ‘figure’ appears as a form through which past, present and future are articulated, even as the representations help to define the landscape. Just now, you incorporated all the other elements needed to describe the concept of culture, and thus the representation associated with culture appears in the element of the figure. Besides representations, what other concepts or general elements are necessary to define landscape as a concept?

GS I was interested in connecting words, which in the West are enormously abstract (especially the written word), with the visual image. The figure interests me because it is used both from a rhetorical and plastic point of view. In architecture, both are linked. We can take, for example, classical architecture—or what is understood as classical architecture. Leon Battista Alberti first wrote everything in Latin without using drawings, only later, illustrations were added to follow the descriptions; Vitruvius was also given to us originally with no images, that is, it was rewritten, reinvented. This relationship seems fantastic to me.

When the Jesuits arrive in this lower zone, they find a non-iconic people, a people without images. They did not have drawings, although they did have a way of making pottery that already bore some traces of decoration. But they learned very quickly. This is absolutely remarkable because they became superb artists and were to be highly sought after.

This brings me to the other question:

Were they talking about landscape? No. Environment?

No. The ideas of nature and culture were not even separate. We think that nature is everything objective and biological, while culture is a matter of arts and interpretation. This was much discussed following Philippe

Descola and Bruno Latour. In these places, however, there was no differentiation: the jaguar they hunted was considered a person like them, a person from a different family, but everything was within the natural world. The aesthetic distance created to enjoy the landscape did not exist.

Now, something very interesting happens for us architects. The Jesuits erected the famous Jesuit missions or Jesuit cities there, which had an overwhelming success in Europe. They were made up of the church, the plaza, the side pavilions, and the jungle. The Guaraní way of life was to open a clearing by slashing and burning. Those same ashes regenerated the jungle where they hunted. The pavilions caused a sensation: we have nature, there are no streets, there are pavilions, and there is a green heart in the middle of the square. Doesn't that sound like the basis of the modern movement? The neoclassicals knew this. For example, many kinds of hospitals mimic the ranch form of the Guaraní dwelling, in which several families lived together; it is just done from a hygienic perspective. The Jesuits allowed the Guaraní to maintain their own rituals. The Jesuits had already travelled through the Middle East, through China, and they knew that they had to adapt to local customs to evangelize, differentiating themselves from orders that took an inquisitive and harsh approach. Bartomeu Meliá, a Jesuit friend of mine, came to America as a young man and spent a year with isolated tribes. He thought of himself as the son of the Guaraní god Tupã. He brought together both religions, this can be traced back a long time. In these lowlands, mixing began a long time ago; the creation of some modern landscapes is rooted here. Especially in the flowering of the Jesuit city between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at which time the Jesuits were thrown out.

IM You have been one of the major theorists to work on visual culture in Argentina, restoring the image as formative for meaning and power, in parallel to the word. In that sense, you have built a very meaningful intellectual career around the theorization of ‘landscape.’ Landscape has allowed you to mix and match disciplines, combine sensitivities with hard data, contemplate connections and contaminations, and problematize nature-cultures. Twenty years after the publication of El paisaje como cifra de armonía (Landscape as a Measure of Harmony) [2001], do you still believe that landscape can be as provocative category? How do you all [together with Fernando Aliata, co-author of the book] think about it now?

GS It’s interesting; from a scientific perspective, human beings do not see ‘reality,' nor do we see something totally invented; we see something skewed, blurred, because our minds are built to see certain things. We see certain colors and we don't see others, for example. There is a really great book called The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. Rovelli is a quan- tum physicist; he argues that we see only one sector of reality. While explaining quantum physics he offers complete verses of Horacio. The relationship between poetry, subjective interpretation, sensitivity, learning and the way we relate to things are quite well summed up in the word, ‘landscape.’

Originally, landscape is country: paese, paesetto. A small country. One’s little homeland. The word was reinterpreted later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, converting it to its strong impactful aesthetic version, which intersected with the social sciences and the hard sciences. Then it goes back into crisis, and one starts talking about ‘environment’ as if it were an objective question. It is also intersected by our own limitations in seeing, by our predispositions, by certain sensibilities that are taken up in the 1970s and connect social questions with ecological ones. Obviously, there are objective reasons, because for example, if global warming continues, the human race comes to an end. Yet, we still cannot not ignore the particular bias with which we see things, which we fail to interpret.

At the same time, architects trained in the ecole de beaux arts, like us, have what I would call a ‘dry imagination.’ The French landscape is a completely disciplined landscape where what is built is superior to what is planted. On the other hand, there is the Anglo-Saxon ‘naturalist’ movement, which gained traction in the United States. [It is a] view of landscape that is still naive about how it looks at that which they call ‘nature.’ The torch passed from England at the beginning of the 19th century to the United States in the second half of the 19th century with [the founding] of Yellowstone and other parks. The indigenous people who resided there were either evacuated or considered ‘pure nature,’ that is, they decided to ignore their cultural development and the territorial transformations that they had introduced.

In Argentina, on the other hand, the planted or ‘green,’ as we plainly call it in Spanish, was always disliked. I’ll tell you an anecdote—a student of mine’s doctoral thesis proposed the modification of a precarious settlement by incorporating hydroponic crops. The plan was not only to engage in rooftop cultivation and a kind of self-sustenance but also to make economic and sustainable development possible. The architects totally disliked it. It seemed to them a kind of false consolation to put something green inside an ‘emergency’ or precarious neighborhood, although, in reality, these were not emergency neighborhoods at all because they ended up being permanent living spaces. Now it is more accepted, but at that time everything green seemed feminine, and local architecture, in Argentina, is super masculine. It is in the vein of Le Corbusier, I would say, the brutalist lineage. This comes from a long French and Mediterranean tradition, where what is planted is inferior to what is built. Of course, we always build, even when planting, but this idea of growth, of things that came and went, fights the architectural feeling of building for once and for all. Which is not true either, because things collapse. But a thing built is different from a thing planted. That intersection interested me ...

From: Pedro Aparicio Llorente & Juliana Ramirez

Subject: Off-Grid Architecture: Toilet Gardening

Architects know Ville Savoye: dates, myths, measurements, etc, but can we answer where its shit goes down? Yes, literally: where is the human waste it receives deposited or treated? Architecture will become contemporary once it engages in the ecologies produced by the human metabolism. What if architecture assumes responsibility over sanitary infrastructure? Meaning, can architecture integrate the demands that make urban life possible and bypass, or support, the need for large-scale water lines, sewage discharge, and waste management? Can architecture be off-grid?

To engage in the question of autonomy, one must revise relationships between architecture and infrastructure. In Accra, different elements that build a house, from a bulldozer to a front door, from a leather couch to a washing machine, are carefully organized, displayed and sold at the road’s edge. This circulation of domestic space within a multi-use highway (both market and high-speed vehicle lane) presented two key similarities across the tropics: everyone wants to build a house; and zoning is never complete as zoning is always tricked. Similar to Accra, cities like Bogotá or Jakarta share an exponential growth in the last five decades, and with it, an increased demand for technologies of domestic space. By now, we recognize that much of the postcolonial public housing of the 1970-80s stands closer to radical ideas of collective form when compared to the neoliberal system of land developing that shape cities today. However, despite these efforts, cities across the tropics have built themselves and continue to do so, off the grid. In this regard, a roadside market of domestic elements is a precise self-portrait of a self-built metropolis, opening a fundamental question: if autoconstruction is a medium for housing, then who is building for infrastructure? More precisely, where are people dumping their own human waste? As architects, the idea of collective form must be understood beyond the human, making the study of sanitary infrastructure and the design for waste-disposal-flows a pertinent and contemporary spatial act.

Toilets are a central piece in the history of urbanization. Not only are they the basic interface between architecture and sanitary infrastructure, but also a central place where waste transformation becomes a question for design. The mismanagement of human waste leads to pollution of water sources, propagation of diseases, among other issues. While housing typologies have evolved, why is sewage still randomly dumped in lakes and rivers, burnt or buried? Some refer to this as the world's most urgent resource management crisis.

Understanding ground as live technology with learning loops provides an attempt to propose an architecture that participates in transforming human waste into potential energy. No longer can house and garden be seen as separate entities, we must give shape to an architecture thought of, and designed as an integral element of a garden where microorganisms work in the dehydration and decomposition of manure. An architecture that provides light and shadow for plants: indicator species that enable life within soils and make visible that well-managed human waste, is not waste, but compost. Perhaps it is about looking down to the ground, instead of automating things to magically disappear. In other words, toilets are not only about tile geometry and flush systems, but rather a complex device for redesigning how we conceive of, and inhabit, our metabolic processes.

From: Ana Rascovsy

The fragility of the planet can bring new meaning to architecture: current ecological, social and economic problems have created a generalized discourse that has abandoned senseless practice and self-referential introspection along with the pretense of a false autonomy. In connection to this "great cause," a new architecture has emerged with varying degrees of commitment but good intentions.

The lack of new challenges extending outside the disciplinary limits of architecture are notable: the society, the city, or the culture for those that produce it. How is it possible that, in a region with so many urgent problems, these issues are not present in the architectural debate? Why does architecture talk so much about issues intrinsic to the discipline when it could be getting involved with current issues? Given that construction is one of the factors that most influences the emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, why is this issue not a priority for architects? Why isn't Plataforma Arquitectura full of projects with forests on the terraces? In a region with so much inequality, why are there not thousands of projects circulating about the possibilities for the urbanization of slums? Why aren't new, cheap, natural materials being investigated outside the commercial circuit? If doing architecture is to problematize an issue, what should those issues be?

It is clear that in today’s world the neoliberal policy based on maximum profit has become so beyond grasp that political and economic disciplinary interventions in these issues is complex. The space of architecture is limited to an intimate universe with a limited and domestic field of action.

Moreover, in Latin America, the vast majority of architecture is done by private commission. The problem is everyday and framed in a family environment. And innovation has little place when profit must be secured.

But, on the other hand, just like in Lego Movie 2, (a difficult reference, I know) where that which is pop and feminine is perceived as superficial and banal but ultimately comes to underlines the sensitive and unprejudiced, there is a new Latin American architecture that serves as an invitation to contemplate that which is simple, essential, everyday; the small details that define us.

Within this conceptualization, there are exemplar cases that have been able to create dialectical links between architectural elements and relate few existing resources with the beauty and cultural aspects of each region. They may not be heroic, but instead, simple, understandable, and in resonance with the signs of these times.

Now, once the concept of sustainability has been digested, made our own and when we no longer discuss it but it informs our general practice, architecture regains its meaning. With a new concept of nature: hybridized and amalgamated within architecture: vegetation is one more material in a building. Outer space is part of the program, of the landscape…

Meaning restores a lost glamor to architecture; it puts it back on the market. And that battle should not be easily conceded; real estate developers, politics, art, should not be allowed to take over; architecture will then continue to belong to architects.

MCHAP 2016 CYCLE

(All positions listed were the ones current in 2016)

MCHAP

Dean & The Rowe Family College of Architecture

Endowed Chair, Wiel Arets

MCHAP Director, Dirk Denison

MCHAP Coordinator, Sasha Zanko

IIT College of Architecture Associate Dean for Research, Vedran Mimica

IIT College of Architecture Publications Director, Daniel O’Connell

IIT AC Press Editor, Lluis Ortega

IIT College of Architecture Senior Designer, Travis Rothe

MCHAP Program Consultant, Tyler Waldof

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Wiel Arets, Dean, Board Chair

Frances Bronet, Provost, IIT

Alan W. Cramb, President, IIT

Dirk Denison, MCHAP Director

Helyn Goldenberg

David Hovey, Founding Principal, Optima

Phyllis Lambert, Founding Director, Canadian Centre for Architecture

Dirk Lohan, Founder, Lohan Anderson

Victor Morgenstern, Trustee, Executive Committee, IIT

John W. Rowe, University Regent, IIT

INTERNATIONAL ADVISORY COUNCIL

David Basulto, Founder and Editor in Chief, ArchDaily

Barry Bergdoll, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art

History and Archaeology and Chair, Department of Art History, Columbia University

Dirk Denison, MCHAP Director

Kenneth Frampton, Ware Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Reed Kroloff, Principal, Jones/Kroloff

Jorge Francisco Liernur, Professor, Torcuato di Tella University, and Researcher, National Scientific and Technical Research Council, Argentina

Robert McCarter, Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis

Vedran Mimica, Associate Dean for Research, Council Chair

Dominique Perrault, Founding Principal, Dominique Perrault Architecture

Martino Stierli, Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Museum of Modern Art, New York

Sarah Whiting, Dean and William Ward Watkin Professor, School of Architecture, Rice University

Mirko Zardini, Director, Canadian Centre for Architecture

CHICAGO COMMITTEE

Zurich Esposito, American Institute of Architects, Chicago Chapter

Sarah Herda, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

Mark Kelly, Department of Cultural Affairs and Special

Events, City of Chicago

Lynn Osmond, Chicago Architecture Foundation

Zoë Ryan, Department of Architecture and Design, Art Institute of Chicago

Pauline Saliga, Society of Architectural Historians

Jonathan Solomon, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Edward Uhlir, Millennium Park Foundation

Steven F. Weiss, Mies van der Rohe Society

Antony Wood, Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat

IIT FACULTY COMMITTEE

Carlos Bedoya Ikeda

Thomas Brock

Marshall Brown

Susan Conger-Austin

Keefer Dunn

Paul Endres

Martin Felsen

Frank Flury

Ron Henderson

Leslie Johnson

Sean Keller

Robert Krawczyk

Eva Kultermann

Peter Land

Richard E. Nelson

Lluis Ortega

Paul Pettigrew

Mauricio Pezo

John Ronan

Michelangelo Sabatino

Andrew Schachman

Agata Mierzwa Siemionow

Sofia von Ellrichshausen

Antony Wood

IIT STUDENT COMMITTEE

Saly Alzraikat

John Baldwin

William Carlson

Louise Leite

Brianda Mireles

Rolando Rodiguez

Jorge Serra de Freitas

Daniela Sesma Espinoza

Jenna Staff

Cosette To

Alina Tompert

PUBLISHED BY IIT Architecture Chicago IIT College of Architecture Chicago, Illinois, USA www.arch.iit.edu

-NESS

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ISBN: 978-1-63840-014-1

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