Docomomo Journal
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Introduction
Get PDFIn this issue, the parameters for the conservation and documentation of the city are defined through multiple lenses of economy, culture, politics and history reflecting critical and acute positions within the 2014 global hegemony. Following docomomo’s focus, this issue expands the Modern Movement legacy by advocating that the holistic understanding of architecture must include the study of urbanism. Unlike architecture, urbanism is an open-ended organism and its raison d’être is reinforced through layers of history. It is through these layers that we advocate for conservation and documentation
Modern Housing Envisaged as a Patrimonio Vivo (Living Heritage)
Get PDFTo analyze the life and transformation of modern housing is a key subject for architectural knowledge. There are very positive cases of evolution, such as Casa Bloc in Barcelona, Spain, by GATCPAC architects, which still functions as living patrimony after two architectural rehabilitations; and disastrous, such as Robin Hood Gardens in London by Alison and Peter Smithson. The article explains why some cases are very alive while others have suffered progressive degradation and will be demolished. A key and decisive element is the design of the corridors, which due to their forms and sizes might be positive. And one of the reasons why these complexes have become obsolete has been the excessive architectural definition of both the exterior and the interior. Also the heritage of the Villes Nouvelles in France has been disastrous and, in response to the policy of demolition, architects such as Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, Roland Castro and Sophie Denissof, or Paul Chemetov, have defended the logic of redoing, remodeling and metamorphosing. The challenge is to project and to build collective housing capable of absorbing transformations
Old Ditch — New Water
Get PDFThe following keynote was presented at the 12th International docomomo Conference that took place in Espoo, Finland, in August 2012. The title refers to the lecture given by an American artist James Turrell at the symposium Permanence in Architecture organized by Virginia Tech in 1998. In architecture and in all arts the new is eroding the old earth and slowly reforming tradition. “Survival of Modern” could be seen as an effort to use the built “modern” environment in a sustainable way. Mikko Heikkinen believes that our challenge is not only to make iconic masterpieces of the Modern Masters to survive but even more what to do with the vast mass of contemporary buildings not found in the architectural guide books. In his presentation, Mikko Heikkinen listed five different cases – five different strategies to make modern to survive: 1) recycling, 2) preserving and restoring the historical milieu, 3) creating a historical and functional collage, 4) preserving a historical fragment and 5) contradiction
Robin Hood Gardens and the Rehabilitation of Post-War Mass Housing in London
Get PDFIn London, in the context of a shortfall of homes that has achieved the status of “housing crisis”, the replacement of obsolete social housing stock, inherited from the post-war period of mass production, for housing that satisfies the demands of the private market and the need for more sustainable cities is one of the main issues for the 21st century. Robin Hood Gardens’ demolition will become a paradigm for the positions to be taken respecting urban obsolescence. Across London, one can see examples that show how, by the criteria of contemporary urban planning, the domestic and urban potential of much of the post-war social housing stock makes it difficult for the current owner, the local government, to invest in its refurbishment and to keep its status as social housing
Two Mexican Housing Units developed by the Social Security Institute
Get PDFIn the mid–20th century in Mexico there was a close link between collective housing production and the most important welfare state in the country. IMSS commenced its brief but active program of housing provision with its 1956 complex of almost 500 apartments, followed by its emblematic projects: the Santa Fe Unit (1957) and the Independence Unit (1960), with around 2,200 dwellings, each one placed among gardens. The agency’s apogee was ruled by a social justice mandate that contributed to having high quality living standards in its complexes
High Density and the Investigations in Collective Form
Get PDFThe debates that followed the World Design Conference (WoDeCo, Tokyo, 1960) on the search for a “total Image for the 20th Century” pointed out among worldwide designers, architects and planners, viewpoints and intellectual ideas concerning the future of the city, particularly in the wake of technological and scientific advancement in industry. At the time of the WoDeCo, progressive architects formed the “Metabolism” group and proposed their concepts for dealing with the increasing complexity of the cities rising. Debating over the ideal city and promoting a kind of experimental architecture based on ideas of life styles and communities for a new era, its biological name suggests that buildings and cities should be designed in the same organic way that the material substance of a natural organism propagates adapting to its environment by changing its forms in rapid succession
Post-Global? Fantasy and Crisis during the First Decade of the Global Era
Get PDF“Post-global” is a coined word signifying a chaotic state or a transitional period after the violent gale of globalism that created a large gap between the new and the old. Reproving the global power game for having created evil paradises that repress individual evolutions and highest value of lives, the essay attempts to refute the historic and cultural agenda in global standard propagating them as a new paradigm that holds the key to accomplish the global mission, and to conjecture that small plans toward local community would offer guidelines to recur gradually to the state of “milieu”, a collective balance
The House, the Home and the Housing Question
Get PDFHousing is a central program in contemporary architectural production. Incorporating civilizing values of 19th century culture, the house arrives in the 20th century at the time notions of private space and domestic comfort come to the fore in Western Culture as values inseparable from the emergence of the family in domestic space: the home. In 1951 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), in his Darmstader sprache, “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken”, relates the word building (bau) with the verb “to be” and the action of “being” (bin), to conclude that dwelling is the fundamental trait of being, the mortals’ living condition. Looking to reframe the sense of construction and to identify the meaning of “being”, Heidegger’s criticism is moved by the failure of the so-called rational materialistic solution, and opens the discussion up to the re-evaluation of the design action as a unique, magical and creative action
Modern Housing: Heritage and Vitality
Get PDFOne of the main subjects in contemporary architecture is how to deal with the physical and intellectual requirements of transforming modern housing. Joan Busquets points out in his contribution to this issue, that the special effort made by modern architects and progressive housing politics during the 20th century must be reinterpreted and followed today. Intentionally, this issue brings a special focus on the Iberoamerican world, specifically Spain, Portugal and Latin America, with the aim of relocating it in a cultural world of predominantly Anglo-American historiography. In any case, it presents a very wide spectrum, including North America, Switzerland and Great Britain. For this reason the projects are presented as case studies, both housing politics in different countries, and paradigmatic architectural examples, either positive or negative
Social Housing in the 60s in São Paulo
Get PDFThe 60s was a decade of profound change in Brazil. The federal capital was transferred to Brasília, which represented the realization of the ideal of the modern city envisaged at CIAM IV. Modern architecture, which in its Brazilian version, was characterized by the Escola Carioca (Rio de Janeiro School), gave way to the São Paulo avant-garde, concerned with truth to materials and social aspirations. In politics we saw the shift from a democratic government to a military dictatorship, which sought to legitimize itself through the creation of a state funding system to solve the nation’s housing deficit. These factors created the conditions for the development of a series of housing projects, including the exemplary project discussed in this paper