moderno

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"those of us who are most critical of modern life need modernism most"

marshall berman

muschamp, loos, george michael

"even if architecture cannot reform society, it can clarify our vision of the status quo."
herbert muschamp

fact hunting on the subject of adolf loos's three-year stay in the u.s. of a. i found this charming (i daresay retro) little muschamp piece, called "austro turf." try to pay as little attention as possible to the fact that he quotes george michael.

debris

bas princen, future harbor III. van kranendok gallery

standing out among the many fascinating bits of informal flair on display at barcelona's centre de cultura contemporània as part of the post-it city : occasional urbanities show, curated by martí peran, filippo poli, giovanni la varra and federico zanfimarti, were the massive prints of bas princen. in due time i'll do a brief review of the entire show, but for now i want to concentrate on princen's utopian debris series, which documents various public works projects in china.

in princen's photographs, we are confronted by vastness devoid of romanticism. one particularly beautiful shot has workers digging a future cruiseship harbor into the earth. a hill is perforated by a highway bridge, cuts etched into its sides, poured with concrete, trees left in random patches. an unfinished skyscraper peeks behind the hill like a fairytale monster. on the skirts of the hill a "floating population" of workers are having a jumbo impromptu campout. a closer look brings out little scenes of everyday: showering, eating, cooking, resting.

princen's china pictures bring to mind the lavish absurdity of d.w griffith's babylon set for intolerance. despite the seeming grandeur of the interventions, these are landscapes maimed by insignificance. there is little of the proud, viril dominance of technology over nature. princen's vision is dour. in his work, monumental progress offers little solace. these scenes of the almighty man and his brave attempts at terraforming are a withered déjà-vu of the grand infrastructural photography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. princen himself mentions asahel curtis, in particular a photo of his depicting the regrading of denny hill in seattle, in the early 1900's, as a reference for his work. the feel of princen's photos is full of doubt more than awe at the scale of the enterprise. in a sense, he has reversed the spirit of curtis's photography. before he left mountaneering and treehugging for boostering and promoting the tourist development of mt. rainer national park, curtis said in face of the summit:

"the trivial things of life; the petty cares that to us seem so great slink back in the presence of this majestic mountain."

in bas's work, on the contrary, it is this human "pettiness" that exudes a strange power. these little ant people, going about their everyday business, have a particular resonance, not in the sense of progress and success, but of our own misplaced power that we misunderstand as helplessness.

nycorbusier

le corb sailed towards manhattan and:

"saw a fantastic, almost mystic city rising up in the mist. there is the temple of the new world. but the ship moves forward and the apparition is transformed into an image of incredible brutality and savagery. here is certainly the most prominent manifestation of the power of modern times."

he named nyc the catastrophe féerique, the great enchanted catastrophe.

now reading : bayley

"the very many awful modern buildings that scar the towns and the countryside are not awful because they are modern. they are awful because they are...awful. simply, bad architecture: badly briefed, poorly conceived, badly proportioned, poorly excecuted, badly maintained."

stephen bayley, general knowledge
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. . . > (welsh)(1951)(likes manchester)(and tom wolfe)

coldwar contempo

from russia with love. panayiotis loukas
spotted @ angelosays

what next

a collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity and modernization. what makes this experience disconcerting and (for architects) humiliating is the city's defiant persistence and apparent vigor, in spite of the collective failure of all agencies that act on it or try to influence it – creatively, logistically, politically.

yours, rem

tower and heritage

revolution baking, vladimir kaspé popped out of the oven. it was 1910, mexico was overthrowing a modernist dictator and russia was getting ready for a second shot at revolution. the countries' paths would cross intensely in the next couple of decades, and major soviet figures would flock to mexico for whatever reason (be it communist intrigue, cultural fascination or running away from stalin; from trotsky and alexandra kollontai to maiakovsky and einsenstein). kaspé came after the big soviet infiltration fuss was about over (around 1942), and mexico's own version of revolution was well on its way to being "institutionalized" (that is, neutralized) through single-party corporate authoritarianism. it was also around this time that the base values of the struggle (popular, agrarian reform, social equality, wealth redistribution, etc.) were belied into those of the "peaceful revolution", or "constructive period" (urban, modernizing, industrial, middle-class, state-control, etc).

kaspé had gone to school in paris with mario pani, the pet architect of the developmentalist regime (the hand behind the unam and tlatelolco). pani invited him to mexico to be editor of arquitectura méxico, local modernist bible. kaspé also started building: the lycée franco-mexicain, the centro deportivo israelita, the economics faculty at the unam, the roussell labs. quite the hardcore functionalist, kaspé thought architecture should "furnish the country with that which is necessary and sufficient." his legacy has been kept by a private trust, that recently got its own cultural center by BH architects.


kaspé's first mexican project (1946-1948) was a multi-use, multi-function, "ahead of it's time" bulding: the super servicio lomas, now slated for demolition to open the way for oma's torre bicentenario, intended to occupy the same site. in its day, the super servicio included a gas station, a car dealership, a minimart and the ciro's de las lomas nightclub, where everett hoagland played and boppy starlets such as as los hooligans, julissa, los jiggers and enrique guzmán fought the 1960 "radio exitos" duel (apparently fans who got left outside of the packed event trashed the place). only five years ago, the super servicio lomas was trashed again ("refurbished", as they say), this time by matthai architects.

the building was hardly noticed before the tower was anounced. it wasn't listed as heritage (only a provisional "building of exceptional value" decree was anounced by the national fine arts institute in the midst of the bicentenario scandal). i heard somewhere that louise noelle, a relatively well-known architecture historian who happens to be the authority on both pani and kaspé, and who has become very outspoken against the tower, is also gabriela cuevas's (the miguel hidalgo delegada heading the snob résistance against oma and the city government, see older post) mother-in-law.

personally, i don't get this whole preservationist appeal biz. first of all, the building is not the original, it has suffered various major alterations (including to the beautiful concrete nautilus garage). moreover, its razing could actually culminate the building's pseudo-revolutionary vocation. considering the regime and culture that brought it to being, the demise of the super servicio lomas would close a mini-circle of extinguishing dissent and upheaval, the turnover to reactionary consumerism, the ultimate lasting heritage of postrevolutionary mexico. a living testimony to our failed (and still failing) path to revolution.

split

"architecture was deeply affected by the separation of surface and substance. up until the nineteenth century, formal architecture made regular use of ‘load-bearing walls’, walls that –in addition to any decorative motif they might have–provided the support system of the building, held the building up. even though it was common to apply neoclassical or other facades to brick wall surfaces throughout the eighteenth century, walls served an important structural function. in designing them, an architect had to combine purposes of engineering and ornamentation simultaneously… there was a connection, a symbiosis, between the intricacy of the image and the method of craft being used to fashion that image...(by the nineteenth century) there was an intrinsic tension between the look of a building—which attempted to reproduce a style originally achieved by the chisel of the preindustrial craftsman—and a method of construction which was only hastening the degradation or annihilation of the decorative crafts. style architecture was becoming a matter of pure appearance..."

stuart ewen, all consuming images. the politics of style in contemporary culture

for sale : maison tropicale

one of the 3 existing maisons tropicales by jean prouvé will soon be auctioned by chrisitie's. an article in the nytimes describes the house's trip from congo to paris to queens (where it has been installed for viewing at a vacant lot on vernon blvd in long island city). i wish i had the 4 to 6 estimated million dollars the house is supposed to go for. not only is the house 50s and tropical and pretty to look at at the same time, but it's actually a fascinating piece of history: an artefact of dead modernism, colonialism, utopianism, protoprefabrication, pop culture and politics.

prouvé designed the house as a nomadic structure:

"while his compatriot le corbusier sculpted forms inspirad by evocative mud-packed buildings that he discovered in saharan africa, prouvé was advocating nomadic architecture for African states, modular houses that could be shipped, erected, dismantled, and shipped again like so many tinker toys. prouvé manufactured the components of his furniture and houses from a detailed understanding of fit, connections, materials, and the conveyor belt."

the times describes it as "plug and play" architecture:

"it’s cash and carry. the structure is a kit of metal parts, like an ikea piece, but bigger...the maison is also plug-and-play: there was never any plumbing, and it is wired for electricity. it ships in six containers. christie’s is compiling a short list of potential bidders with substantial properties in mustique, antigua, the hamptons — name your playground — who might like a 59-foot-by-32-foot--by-16-foot-tall folly/outdoor sculpture/guesthouse/vintage metal toy to park on the lawn, with a designer label attached."

so the house has been rebuilt in l.a. and on the roof of the pompidou. so it's become fetish and frivolous. that's our fault. and it doesn't make it any less fascinating. this particular house was "rescued" from distress in brazzavile, the capital of the republic of congo (built to compete with its belgian counterpart, léopoldville/kinshasa across from the river, now capital of the democratic republic of congo, formerly zaire...see heart of darkness). the house has been wiped of blood and bullets (its former location has been stage for a series of gruesome civil conflict, guerrilla clashes and political rivalries), but despite the revamping and the glitz surrounding it, it is still a powerful and quiet testimony of failure (of the colonial project, of the modernist project, of the funcionalist utopian project, etc):

"what went wrong? well, it turned out that, despite its clever engineering, the house was not cheap to build. how efficiently did the brightly colored, well-insulated and ventilated metal box keep its inhabitants from baking? what does it sound like inside a metal hut when it rains? who finds multiple portholes a plus and not prisonlike? indeed, there is photographic evidence that the tenants cut rectangular windows into the panels... it is also worthwhile to place the house in a broader context: after gaining its independence in 1960, congo by 1963 became a marxist republic supported by the soviet union. with the collapse of the USSR, congo drifted into a democracy that was shattered in 1997 by civil war and the return of marxist leadership. at that time, several parties in france located prouve's battered and bullet-riddled building, bought it, and arranged for it to be dismantled, packed, and shipped back to france, a final, enfeebled symbol of the end of the colonial moment. there, it was substantially reconstructed and renovated so that today's version, now on world tour, is largely cleansed of its past. somewhat akin to the "current reissues" available at such stores as design within reach, this is vintage modernism presented in a new, replicant version, untarnished and sturdy, ready to support the fantasy of a better modern life."

too bad the sanitized house isn't understood as what it is: a sign of us fucking up again.

reyes

if ever méxicocity decides to go back to the days of monster projects and city-head-architects, my pick would go to pedro reyes.


this young quirky nerdy bearded fellow is probably my favorite contemporary mexican architect, especially because he isn't really an architect. "he perceives buildings as skeletons in which we live and interact." i love this simple, neat, and open definition. his work is just as simple, neat and open.


he's behind the most astounding building project for mexico city in recent years (by now it's pretty clear that it will never actually be built): the parque vertical, or vertical park, set for one of the city's amazing and much over-looked modernist ruins, the "torre insignia" or "torre banobras", designed as the iconic building of mario pani's 1964 tlatelolco housing megaproject.


the tower has remained empty since it was abandoned after suffering structural damage after the tragic 1985 earthquake (a couple of pani's housing megablocks didn't withstand, and dozens of people died amidst the rubble leftover from the authoritarian mexican developmentalist state's dreams of modernist grandeur.


his work also includes a pink moebius strip acapulco style woven plastic chair.


the carpenter center recently showed a retrospective of his work.

(star)dust

when my grandmother died i scavenged her closet for a piece of her i could keep. as a kid i loved digging in the hat boxes and the dust-covered fur coats, finding all sorts of little treasures: ancient portable kodak cameras and polaroids from the sixties, silver-framed tinted blue bug-eye sunglasses, fake jewelry, bottles of fermented sparkling wine, unopened decks of playing cards, cigarette holders and the most incredible collection of hotel souvenir ashtrays and matchboxes you could imagine. hawaii, fort worth, veracruz, needles, rio de janeiro, ottawa, monterrey, nice… i was always amazed at how my grandma had managed to put together this wacky world itinerary for herself.

the one i kept was a sober black ashtray with white lettering that read : stardust las vegas. i didn’t smoke back then, but i was well on my way to developing my groping addiction to 50s and 60s americana. i still had to discover doowop and douglas sirk and duckass and develop a crush on james dean, but even at this tender age i was drawn to the dirty delight of this useless piece and the careless age it encapsuled. or so i thought.

i somehow missed the stardust’s implosion. watching the little youtube screen has sent shivers down my everything. i still have to connect tons of dots accumulated in my personal history and my personal tastes and my personal fantasies and wakings. finding this is just another reminder of how everything is tied, how we’re happy little victims of things that stand for nothing and mean everything.

the melody haunts my reverie

touring the bush (17) : caribbean, tropical nonplace (castro)

on new year’s 1959 a different rumble shook havana. it wasn’t the usual stompin’ and rompin’ at the tropicana. it wasn’t the roar of hot-rods around the capri or the glitterati gushing drinks down at the nacional. this time, it was la revolución.

havana was done with the gilded days. done with the fierce batista dictatorship. done with dirty business with the miami mafias and santo trafficante. done with being the continental whorehouse of the rich and famous.


batista fled havana for spain (he died comfortably in mallorca) as castro and his guerrilla troupes marched in. cuba finally had a chance to break with being the sparkling outhouse for the worldpower in turn –first spain, then the u.s. architecture played a key role in building a face for the island in the (modern) world arena. until the fifties, this face was meant to seduce. havana became a very concrete (poured concrete, to be exact) rendering of the tropical arcadia, paradise lost and found. it was a mix of tijuana in the twenties and acapulco in the sixties, or in mtv-realworld-generation terms, what you’d get if vegas and miami decided to have a baby-city. havana was to be a tropical mistress, a western-hemisphere take on honkytonkhongkong.



the castrists must’ve looked (and felt) somewhat out of place in havana, with their ugly commando suits and their unshaved faces, looking like bushmen and smelling of wilderness. they didn’t fit in with the vaults and arches and lounge furniture of the gorgeous max borges addition to the tropicana, or in the supercosmopolitan glass lobby of the riviera hotel. not with the shiny creped silk of the local pop idols like celia cruz and her sonora matancera. havana needed a new face. and castro would make sure she got one.



architecture would join the revolutionary mission. cuba needed an architecture of solidarity, architecture for the dispossessed. in cuba just like everywhere else revolutions sparked in the xxth-century (be it mexico or russia), the first years after the break were times of ferment and rich experimentation –economic, political and certainly in terms of cultural production. and like elsewhere, as revolution turned to regime, these active forces would be subjected and tempered (in mexico the wild and amazing architectural diversity of the 30’s would be substituted by the ugly and poor official architecture of the “institutionalized revolution,” in the former soviet union, stalinism would suppress not only political dissonance, but it would also put out the architectural avant-garde in favor of state-glorifying kitsch.)


cuba’s revolutionary modernism was a relatively late arrival, and it already had a sturdy modernist heritage, basically the canons of international style. the modernist road seemed a bit narrowed compared to the early-xxth-century. still, in these early years, the quest for a new architecture seemed viable. a great example of the (eventually) trampled energies and the failed architectures of the early revolution is the national art schools. in this set of buildings, ricardo porro, the architect for the project, said he wanted to capture a “sensation of explosion.” the school was set on the now-abandoned havana country club, an absolute symbol of pre-revolutionary excess. legend goes that castro thought of building a school at the site playing a round of golf with el che in the months following his rise to power.


the architecture for the art schools was passionate, eloquent, strong, experimental. it was an architecture of search and ideals and hope. it was an architecture that couldn’t last. buried under financial burdens, political doubt and cries against the tinges of bourgeois, the project remained unfinished, and later abandoned.


the same would be the fate of other projects stemming from this brief gap of creative, flourishing architectures, which produced everything from stadiums to innovative housing projects to ice-cream parlors "for the people". architects in cuba were left with one sole client: the castro regime, the became “operatives of the state”. a new set of values and priorities were established : simplistic “rationalism,” prefabricated structures, minimal-resource construction, and standardized architectures.



but most importantly, the productive engine of the cultural revolution had to shift its energies from the revolutionary questioning to the promotion and adoration of the revolutionary regime. havana changed her face, she grew a beard. now she would cater to a different set of just as avid consumers : the fans of enduring state communism. in the end things didn't even change that much : tourists are again getting the special treatment in their own resort microislands, off-limits for cubans; and now they come, skip the cocktails and the bow ties and go straight to the prostitute. the only “democratization” going on is making all these special little treats super-accessible (to dollar bearers), dirt cheap.



next : tropical nonplace (echeverría)

touring the bush (16) : caribbean, tropical nonplace (smithson)

our tour of the caribbean begins a bit off the actual caribbean. this is perfectly legitimate, given our (consciously) slanted search for the tropical nonplace. april 15, 1969. robert smithson is boarding a pan am flight from new york to mexico, headed for the yucatán, not excactly on vacation. he is on a half-mission, a blurry expedition. he carries a beautiful book under his arm. the book is full of pictures of ancient ruins devoured by the jungle.


the book itself feels ancient and exotic. it’s written by this guy named john lloyd stephens, a reknown explorer / anthropologist from the 1800s. stephens had also gone to yucatán, a hundred and something years before. but smithson was determind to make his the inverse of stephens’s classic voyage that stunk of colonialism and historical prejudice. in smithson’s version of the stephens expedtion, the grand, dead ruins of chichen itzá and palenque en up being dumped for pictures of “displaced” mirrors and the ungreat living ruins of an unfinished cheap roadside motel.


stephens’s travelogue includes exquisite meticulous drawings of mayan architectural relics. in a very xixth-century fashion, stephens resented the abandonment of the monumental remnants to the wild and oblivion, he felt contemporary descendants of the maya had discarded their heritage, erased tracks of memory and identity due to careless disregard, fallen victims to their own cultural disorder and indifference. civilization (or culture relevance, historical time) in yucatán had run its course, it was a site of cultural has-beens, devoid of a current and living sense of meaning. a place and people overwhelmed and left numb by their own fallen greatness.


the same primitive slabs and stone idols that stephens brought back to new york, smithson saw in the american natural history museum when he was a kid (the museum would remain his favorite). eventually he got his own mayan (anti)expedition. stephens’s 1848 travelogue was named "incidents of travel in yucatan,” and smithson played with this tile in his own “incidents of mirror-travel in yucatan.”


in an essay titled "landscapes of indifference", jennifer roberts draws this twisted spiral relation between the two:

"perhaps smithson's most conspicuous inversion of stephens's precedent derives from the fact that none of the famous maya ruins appears in any of his illustrations, even though several of the photographs were taken within eyeshot of the major archaeological sites. dispersed and half-covered by sediment or branches, the blocky mirrors of the displacements suggest the ruins, but their empty reference to the desired historical spectacle proposes a systematic erasure of stephens's visionary enterprise. this refusal to see the maya ruins amounts in many ways to their paradoxical re-covering--to their removal from the conditions of archaeology that, over the past century and a half, had endorsed their use as imperialist trophies or their recontextualization as art objects"


smithson in his ambitions of being a "blind traveler," of doing away with the purpose and the prejudice of the classic archeological enterprise, and stepping away from stephens's faults, ends up falling in a neighboring and even deeper pit:

"the collapse of the visual field in yucatan is attended in smithson's narrative by the collapse of the historical field. smithson's mirror displacements function as models of passive memory as well as passive vision."

futher down his tropical trail, smithson reached antiarchitectural heaven and turned things up a notch. the shitty little hotel palenque (still standing, still growing, and still unfinished today) would be the subject of a smithson slideshow/standup-performance offered at the university of utah in 1972 (only one year before his premature death). part art, part irony, part architectural scam, the hotel palenque piece became mythic.


in the end, smithson fell short of his intentions and his proclamations. hotel palenque is little more than highbrow mexican curios:

“my feeling is that this hotel is built with the same spirit that the mayans built their temples…the structure has all of the convolution and terror, in a sense, that you would find in a typical mayan temple…of serpentine facades loaded with spirals and rocks carved in the shape of woven twigs and things; it's quite nice. do that to me this window, this seemingly useless window really called forth all sorts of truths about the mexican temperament… one can't figure out why they put that door there but it seems to belong, it seems to have some incredible sort of mayan necessity. it just grew up sort of like a tropical growth, a sort of mexican geologic, man-made wonder."


smithson falls prey to the same (albeit ultra-refined) western(izing) b.s. essentialism:

"for all his inversions of stephens's narrative, smithson perpetuates, even amplifies, stephens's belief in yucatecan amnesia, indifference, and myopia. and although he hopes to inhabit this status instead of performing corrective surgery on it, his work maintains much of stephens's imperialist violence. both smithson and stephens picture the yucatan peninsula as indifferent in order to extract from it a heritage. for stephens, the contemporary idleness of the maya authorizes his appropriation of the region's archaeological artifacts. for smithson, the idleness, now seen as eternal, is itself the artifact."

kai vöckler writes that in the scattered mirrors of yucatán (and the soft-glow slides of palenque) “the virtual can be intersected with the real…smithson allows time and space to collapse, opposing the apathy of the material to identity and existence.” withouth knowing it, or with the same self-effacing intentions many avant-garde works share, smithson's non-sites picture, plant and play echoes of the future contemporary superconsumption patterns and economies of the region that render new voids and stylized images of a reality that isn't there, and never was.

next : tropical nonplace (castro)

touring the bush (12) : caracas carcass

a carcass might look dead, but it’s not. i mean, it’s dead, but not dead-dead. did you know after you die your hair and fingernails keep growing? o.k., that’s not exactly true, it’s just an illusory effect of skin retraction due to body dehydration. but still... how about the chicken running after having its head cut-off? headless poultry can still run and its heart still beat as active reflexes stemming from the intact spinal chord for several seconds after decapitation. there are even accounts of miraculous .beheaded birds that went on living for months.



anyway, what I’m really talking about is living corpses, not the living dead : the dead body as a life locus, a breading field for bacteria and maggots and all that icky stuff. well, it happens to cities. cities die, layer after layer. but the dead layers aren’t dead-dead. dead city-layers aren’t as meaningful and functional and obviously active as when they are alive. but usually it takes time before the traces of a dead layer are lost, and in the meantime they prove to be excellent sites for parasitic developments. call it whatever you want: informality, appropriation, temporal use of spaces… it’s the icky stuff in our cities we don’t necessarily like or understand or find “healthy” or “normal.” but in the underdeveloping cities of latinoamérica (and elsewhere), this animate rankness is thriving.

caracas might just be the crown jewel of our sub-continental modern-city carcass collection. after the chavista revolution, the dead modernist layer of the venezuelan capital is host to the most intense and exquisite necrotrophic urban phenomena in the region.



caracas was a teen casualty, caught in the failure and fall of local modernismos almost still in bloom. celeste olalquiaga tells it like the plot of an urban telenovela:

"between the 1940s and the 1970s, the placid city of santiago de león de caracas inhaled the air of modernization, developing into a full-blown metropolis. its daring architecture and raging urbanism left many of its inhabitants breathless, amazed by the ongoing transformation of their hometown into a burgeoning center of international commerce and foreign pop culture. skyscrapers and highways were the signs of a blossoming adolescence that turned caracas into a world capital (paris-new york-caracas, an affluent gallery boasted under its name), which the rest of the americas looked to with envy or greed. perhaps it was the venezuelans' passion for melodrama, but so much abundance just couldn't last. doomed by the same black gold that had given it such vibrant energy, the country that had cheerfully danced in oil-money suddenly found itself catching up with all it had ignored; unfinished projects, overwhelming misery and an enormous national debt adding up to a huge bill for a party that was definitely over. like an orchid left in the sun, the modern caracas withered, its remarkable structures buried under the weight of forgetfulness and disrepair, its vitality sinking into a benign apathy."



pobre niña rica (y moderna)

this is were the story starts and ends at the same time, and starts again, and everything gets fabulously gross. i wish blogger came with odorama.

next : caracas chavista y revolucionaria