City cultures on Display

City Cultures on Display a Discourse on Urban Studies Theodora Maria Pyrogianni

“The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Much of the 21st century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay.”1 Mike Davis

The history of architecture is full of idealistic visions of the urban environment, while the image of the urban present fails to resemble them. Moreover, according to some of the contemporary projections of the future cities, a great deterioration of the urban environment and well-being of its citizens is to be expected. The modernist conception of a utopic world, along with the tendency for total control, irrevocably fades out when postmodern thought takes its place. Accordingly, the postmodern notion of what the urban fabric is, cultivates a sensitivity towards the local traditions and the vernacular, bottom-up, spontaneous and informal architectural expressions. 2 Urbanism has been operating through this notion ever since. This conception has extensively influenced education and research, together with the architectural profession and production. That includes exhibitions, academic publications, literature, cinematic spaces and others, with exhibitionism being the most dominant as a way of self-fashioning and promoting architectural manifestations. This essay criticizes the themes of exhibitionism and the contemporary urban design discourse through the prism of a postmodern setting.

Despite their correlation, the two themes can be also understood separately as the byproducts of contemporary ideas on the role of exhibitions and the image of the future cities. Theoretical debate and exhibitionism create an oscillating cycle, which will be examined through the paradigm of a very recent show - created for the 13th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia titled “Common Ground” that was curated by David Chipperfield – that was the Golden Lion Award winning participation: “Torre David/Gran Horizonte.”

Origins of a discourse on urbanism Apart from a temporary exhibition at the Biennale, Torre David is the third tallest building in Venezuela and the biggest vertical slum in the world. Abandoned at the final stage of construction in the 1990s, the tower was a symbol of decay for Caracas until 2007 when,

Mike Davis’ talks about the dimensions of the world wide slum phenomenon to Nathan Gardels for NPQ magazine, spring 2006, available online: http://www.scribd.com/doc/109108098/NPQ-InterviewWith-Mike-Davis-Planet-of-Slums 2 Harvey, “The Condition of Postmodernity”, p. 66 1

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during a stormy night, it became a shelter to 3,000 squatters. The story of the tower is remarkable not only in itself but also as an on-going theme of discussion that was first encountered by architects and then by international media, such as Der Spiegel, the New York Times, the BBC and Domus. However, the greater issue of informal settlements, communities, economies and all other things informality has been associated with, has recently become prevalent in all sorts of media; Torre David is merely the last of this series of projects. 3 Urban Think Tank – the name of the architecture studio that initiated a field research on the tower - does not perceive the issue of informality as a problem on the contrary, it presents it as a dogma that is welcomed, learning from it instead of being opposed to it. “What we can possibly learn from informal settlements”, say the founders of U-TT, Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumper, “is that architecture should not be stagnant but adaptable, resilient, transformative and open to modification”. The way to reach a better understanding of this contemporary phenomenon is through “looking and listening closely, describing literally what we see and hear, visualizing how things came to be, talking and arguing about ideas.” 4 Learning from existing structures and networks, and through experimentation, the postmodern tradition survives through time, even though theorists rushed to declare its death.

1. The Elements of Change, “Housing by People”, John Turner.

The above diagram depicts the elements of change, “which whether explicit or implicit, action generates and is generated by the experience of previous action and administration, information, theory, and norms.” 5 The importance of this illustration does not lie on its meaning - not at least in this context – but on the date that it was published: 1976. Towards autonomy in building environments has been the motto of architects and urbanists since then; a statement that proves that this discourse is a second account and can be traced back to the era that postmodern thought emerged upon a ground prone to change. During the late 1960s a number of transformations in economic and political segments followed by

Recent projects on the issue of informality include a number of popular books and films and works of contemporary artists. The most indicative are: “Planet of Slums,” “Shadow cities,” “Arrival city,” “City of God,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Women are Heroes.”

4 Urban think Tank, “Informal city: Caracas case”, p. 251 5 Turner, “Housing by people”, p. 160 3

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major cultural shifts begin to shape the present-day world. In response to these changes, the IMF and the World Bank stopped providing financial support to Social Housing Programmes and came up with an agenda towards restructuring the economies of the developing world.6 In addition to that, the rise of population and extreme poverty in the South, were flourishing phenomena at that point and continue to intensify till the present day, making the urbanist discourse more prominent than ever.

What changed in the 1970s and in Turner’s perception of the issue is that architects dissociated themselves from the concept of “habitat”, since it limited the "human being" to a handful of basic acts: eating, sleeping, and reproducing.7 Instead, the verb and adverb “housing” was used in order to denote a far more complex thought; a multipart equation where “lived experience” could no longer be enclosed in a “dwelling machine” in the outskirts of the city.8 Following Turner’s paradigm since then, scholars have been taught to think in terms of the interdependent relation of man and his environment and have moved away from the notion of how things ought to be. To that effect, researchers try to involve themselves to the lives of the people concerned - they give them “control over major decisions and allow them to participate and contribute” in the design and construction of the improvements that are meant for them - which is the case with many contemporary urban design projects.9 That said, we have reached to a realization that architecture cannot be practiced as if it is an independent variable. Due to that, the departments of urbanism moved to interdisciplinary research and started producing a discourse, which is mediated to the public through several modes of display.10 Many art institutions started to exhibit architecture in the 1950s-60s following the paradigm of MOMA, which had been far more radical from the 1930s. Architecture on display becomes popular and architecture exhibition centres, biennales and festivals start popping up like mushrooms after a rain. The emergence of institutions dedicated to architecture during the 1970s is the outcome of many variables and cultural shifts that happened at the time. Due to a chain of events and advances of technology, that Léa-Catherine Szacka explains in the following sequence, a phenomenon arises. First and foremost, resources for cultural development were finally available since the post-war reconstruction had been concluded by that time. Thence, the arrival of Boeing 747, encouraged the development of a leisure culture where institutions became attractions to tourists. Ultimately, Situationists and May ‘68 brought the question of accessibility and objectivity of culture into everyday life into perspective.11 Thus, both the theme and the nature of the project on Torre David have their origins in the era marked as the turn from modernism to postmodernism. However, what is essential at this point is to perceive the way this second-hand debate appears today and what it disseminates. Therefore, the paradigm of an exhibition, “Torre David/Gran Horizonte”, is discussed for both its impact on visitors and theoretical conversations on the contemporary city cultures.

Davis, “Planet of Slums”, p. 153 Lefebvre, “The Urban Revolution”, p. 81 8 Turner, “Freedom to Build”, p. 241 9 The Metro Cable Project, which was realized in 2010 in San Agustin, Caracas, Venezuela, epitomizes this revolutionary approach to urban design. More information available at: http://utt.com/projects_Metrocable.html 10 Lefebvre was one of the first theorists to propose the creation of a interdisciplinary department for the study of contemporary urban phenomena in 1970 in his work “The Urban Revolution”.

11 Szacka, “Exhibiting the Postmodern”, p. 63 6 7

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Gran Horizonte/Exhibitionism Unveiling the Postmodern-ity

2. Torre David / Gran Horizonte, 2012. Urban-Think Tank: Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner and Justin McGuirk

“The show’s coup de théâtre is by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner of Urban-Think Tank, in concert with Justin McGuirk, the architecture critic for The Guardian newspaper in London, and the intrepid architectural photographer Iwan Baan. Their subject is the well-known but endlessly fascinating Torre de David in Caracas, an unfinished 45-story ruin from the early 1990s, built (as it happens, by a relative of Mr. Brillembourg’s, now dead) to be a bank headquarters, abandoned when a financial crisis hit Venezuela in 1993, and lately appropriated by squatters who have improvised apartments, shops, bodegas and gyms on 20-odd floors and who have in essence created a vertical slum.”12 The New York Times

“This controversial icon to the serious lack of housing in Caracas has been radically transformed, in the Corderie dell'Arsenale, into an experimental platform exploring "informal" housing. Sounds, videos and pictures on the walls and, more importantly, the spontaneous participation of the Biennale public who invited to consume arepas and other Venezuelan culinary delights, introduce visitors, with no filters, to the lively and chaotic atmosphere of the slum.”13 Domus

Michael Kimmelman, “Projects Without Architects Steal the Show”, The New York Times. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/arts/design/13th-venice-architecture-biennale-the-usualhagiography.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=design 13 Fabrizia Vecchione, “Torre David/Gran Horizonte”, Domus. Available at: http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2012/08/30/torre-david-gran-horizonte.html 12

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3. Torre David / Gran Horizonte, 2012. Urban-Think Tank: Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner and Justin McGuirk

The exhibition surpassed the problem of representation by displaying some re-composed fragments of the tower and exposing the density of content found inside the squatter community. U-TT transferred a piece of Venezuelan culture into the Arsenale in the form an unfinished project bringing together a crude materiality, food and several illustrations of the tower. The installation was not supposed to be a didactic space but an affective one. The concept of creating a traditional Venezuelan restaurant and forming a community, resembling the one created in the tower by its inhabitants, in the exhibition space of the Biennale is an attempt to generate the ability to affect and be affected. The everyday life of the squatters and the presence of the visitors got tangled, engendering a situation of amplified experience. Hence, the exhibition works primarily on two levels; both as a channel of promoting the urbanist discourse to the public and as an affective space on its own. It becomes a ‘spectacle’, putting an emphasis on an experience originating from a social relation among people mediated by images; a thought that Debord expressed in his work on the “Society of the spectacle.” 14 Furthermore it becomes a space indicative of a “phantasmagoria of textures, tones, and sensual pleasure” where minor objects of everyday life are celebrated by “anaesthetizing” the visitor by flooding his senses.15 Nonetheless, the exhibition is imposing two different patterns, since it is the outcome of the collaboration between the architects of U-TT and the curator Justin McGuirk.16

Debord, “Society of the spectacle”, chapter 1, thesis no. 4 Suzan Buck Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics”, p. 22 16 Justin McGuirk explains how the example of the tower provides a pattern for bottom-up development of the society through a selection of photographs from the exhibition and the tower.

Available at: http://www.dezeen.com/2012/09/01/why-should-the-poor-live-in-the-slums-if-there-areempty-office-towers-in-the-city-asks-justin-mcguirk/ 14 15

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4. pages from the publication Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities

Consequently, the book that was published later on tells a slightly different story from the exhibition. “Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities” is an amalgamation of several visualizations of urban conditions and stories of the Tower, along with a proposal for sustainable design improvements covering topics such as water management, waste recycling, slum morphology, and economic development - problems that the squatters encounter in their everyday life. The complexity of this project is captured through various means of communication that comprise the book; photography, architectural drawings, diagrams, texts and a graphic novel. Altogether, these elements compose the project, but also a thorough and detailed archive of a unique urban situation. The material presented, especially the photographs by Iwan Bann, show how the building is occupied and how the occupiers have built a whole infrastructure and city for themselves. First and foremost, the book is the product of an architectural research project and not merely the exhibition catalogue. But even if the exhibited work has a different angle from the published one, both of them mediate, in a certain way, the social role of architecture; the chapters on possibility and potential that appear in the book, although absent from the show, were somehow embodied in the curated space. Both projects rather explicitly transmit that there is creativity, potential, originality and an alternative option by moving away from stagnant architectural manifestations that were imposed on the cities in the past. Learning from the informal is the ever-present challenge for an architect who needs to stop “assuming that he knows more that the uneducated by virtue of his schooling.”17 One can assume that the exhibition operates in the same manner and discloses a methodology; the one of learning how to recognise and employ the unexplored seeds that are found on the existing urban fabric.

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Turner, “Freedom to Build”, p. 146

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Nevertheless, exhibitionism is still the principal method of promoting things; the question is why? As Szacka stresses in her recent publication “Exhibiting the Postmodern”, “exhibitions have a long tradition” and a great significance “in relation to architecture; be it as publicity apparatus, testing grounds, sites for confrontation and polemical debate, places of innovation, ways of documenting history, constructing narratives or promoting new trends.”18 Thus, to this effect, the role of institutions has been extremely vital; after all, it is the very space where theory and practice interact. That is to say, scholars, students and theorists set up a platform for an on-going debate on the role of architecture in relation to society and the future of the urban environment. Schools of Architecture have been participating in this debate on possibility and potential, as in the exemplar of Urban Think Tank whose practice and research had been supported by Columbia University and ETH Zurich. Another example is “Lagos: wide and close”, which is a documentary but also a research project initiated by Rem Koolhaas in the late 1990s with the Harvard Project on the City and Lagos University.

Similarly, what one can learn from Lagos’ informality is that “it is a territory with an astronomical number of possible interventions.” In places like these “there is no choice, but there are countless ways to articulate the condition of no choice.”19 Naturally, this skepticism about the value of planning contributes to this on-going debate that takes place in the domains of education and culture. Architects are looking at existing situations, collecting documents, evidence and material; building an archive from scratch and combining it with newly and formerly established ideas, attempting an ‘operative criticism’, as Manfredo Tafuri would say. What postmodern thought has achieved is to affect the international architectural debate in the same way modernity affected architectural production in the 1920s and 1930s.

Architecture is no longer a matter of organization but re-organization. Operating on this tradition of historicism and operative criticism, the –ism in the postmodern vanishes; representation gives way to systems of thought that constantly formulate new narratives of the same history and present.

Szacka, “Exhibiting the Postmodern”, p.61 Rem Koolhaas talking about the Harvard Project on the City of Lagos to Bregtje van der Haak in Rotterdam, Interview 03 in “Lagos: wide and close”.

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Bibliography Buck Morss, Suzan, 1992. “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered”, October, Vol. 62, pp. 3-41, The MIT Press.

Davis, Mike, 2007. “Planet of Slums”, paperback ed. London: Verso.

Debord, Guy, 1983. “Society of the spectacle”, Detroit: Black & Red. Harvey, David, 1990. “The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change”, Oxford: Blackwell.

Lefebvre, Henri, 2003. “ The Urban Revolution”, Translation from: “La Revolution Urbaine”, 1970. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Turner, John F.C. and Fichter, Robert., 1972. “Freedom to Build”, London: The Macmillan Company.

Turner, John F.C., 1991. “Housing by people: Towards Environments”, 3rd ed. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.

Autonomy

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Urban think Tank, 2005. “Informal city: Caracas case”, Munich: Prestel Publishing Ltd. Urban Think Tank, 2013. “Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities”, Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers.

Theses Szacka, Léa-Catherine. “Exhibiting the Postmodern: Three Narratives for a history of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale”, University College London (unpublished Ph.D. thesis)

Web Pages Mike Davis interviewed by Nathan Gardels for NPQ magazine, spring 2006. Available online: http://www.scribd.com/doc/109108098/NPQ-Interview-With-Mike-Davis-Planet-of-Slums The Metro Cable Project, 2007-2010, San Agustin, Caracas, Venezuela. Available at: http://utt.com/projects_Metrocable.html Michael Kimmelman, “Projects Without Architects Steal the Show”, The New York Times.

Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/arts/design/13th-venice-architecturebiennale-the-usual-hagiography.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=design Fabrizia Vecchione, “Torre David/Gran Horizonte”, Domus. Available at: http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2012/08/30/torre-david-gran-horizonte.html

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Justin McGuirk, "Why should the poor live in slums if there are empty offices in the city?", DeZeen. Available at: http://www.dezeen.com/2012/09/01/why-should-the-poor-live-in-theslums-if-there-are-empty-office-towers-in-the-city-asks-justin-mcguirk/

Documentaries Rem Koolhaas, “Lagos Wide & Close: Interactive Journey Into an Exploding City”, Rem Koolhaas voice (Actor), Bregtje van der Haak (Director) | DVD Release 2002

Illustrations 1. The Elements of Change.

Image source: John Turner, “Housing by People”, p. 160 2. Torre David/Gran Horizonte.

Image source: http://torredavid.com, posted on 14/09/2012 3. Torre David/Gran Horizonte.

Image source: http://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2012/08/30/torre-davidgran-horizonte.html 4. pages from the publication “Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities”: cover, contents, quote, circulation diagram p.179, pages from Torre: A graphic novella by Andre Kitagawa and Urban Think Tank p. 53-68.

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