201707 thesis report

AFFECT-DENCE in the reconfiguration of public space

NATALIA MATESANZ VENTURA

DIRECTORS: FEDERICO SORIANO PELÁEZ JUAN MIGUEL HERNÁNDEZ LEÓN

The strobo

Whiz Bang Quick City 1971

Kaliflower commune San Francisco

Exploding Plastic Inevitable

USCO Colllectif

My name is Natalia Matesanz Ventura, I am an architect, graduated in 2011 from the Alcalá de Henares school of Architecture in Madrid. In 2013, I completed an MA course in Advanced Architectural Projects at the Madrid School of Architecture, ETSAM, specializing in landscape architecture and urbanism. My master proyect was supervised by Professor Concepción Lapayese within GIP or Cultural Landscape research group, Experience and Knowledge: Strategies and Project Approach in Contemporary Landscape. I have worked for architectural firms such as Carlos Arroyo, Jaramillo & Kreisler, Ángel Verdasco Architects and EAS Estudio Álvarez-Sala architects. Due to my interest for the city, from 2010 to 2012, I collaborated with different Spanish collectives such as Basurama, Zuloark or Paisaje Transversal or Pez Estudio in different participative urban projects. I have an special bond with El campo de Cebada project, as one of the co-founders of this social and multidisciplinary urban project in Madrid born in 2011.

AFFECT-DENCE in the reconfiguration of public space

KEYWORDS: Affect, dissidence, technical, codified, connected, public

AFFECT AND DISSIDENCE AS ARCHITECTURAL CONTEMPORARY TOOLS

This PHD research aims to define and understand Affectdence as an architectural concept resulting from the combination of two specific and usually independent conditions: affect and dissidence within a spatial contemporary framework. The concept, as if it were the result of an alloy, does not represent the addition of the caracteristics of both affect and dissidence separately, but acquires new special properties which don’t exist in either affective or in dissident spaces.

We will clarify first the meaning of affective space, which evolution and transformations depends on users interaction, and secondly what is meant by dissident space, a delocalised unplaned and normally hided space. Thus, the specific parameters and potential of affectdent spaces is what the PHD mostly develops, their capacities to be inter-connected in a net, to generate own technical and technological innovations and tools and particularly, the capacity to transform contemporary public space from parallel, non hegemonic, and even private territories.

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Many bars kept extra liquor in a secret panel behind the bar, or in a car down the block, to facilitate resuming business as quickly as possible if alcohol was seized.

the only bar for gay men in New York City where dancing was allowed

The Snake Pit Greenwich

Bar Restaurant Hotel Shop Disco Sauna Cinema

The Stonewall Inn Greenwich 1968 police Raids

I have been a teaching assistant since 2012 in two Architectural Projects Teaching Units: José González Gallegos (from 2012 to 2013) and Federico Soriano Peláez (from 2014 to 2016). The last is currently co-directing my PhD International thesis, together with Professor Juan Miguel Hernández León at Madrid School of Architecture, ETSAM. The research is condensed within urban framework, specifically in the relation between physical environment and its inhabitants. Entitled Affectdent spaces, the PHD aims to define how spatial conditions are inferred by affects, dissent, and ownership relations in contemporary architecture and urban space. Study cases are related to unconventional or out of the standard spaces, that are generated by the affective and dissident relations that take place in them, understood as modifiers of architectures, but specially of public space.

Some of the Affectdent space conditions refers to: ( In process )

-A space that is created by the users, spontaneous emergence. Not planified.

-Not marginalised but distant, phisically or virtually, from the intitutions an others official agents in city generation. Far away from hegemony and other forms of traditional power.

-The affectdent creates news links in between the users and the spaces. Alternative nets of communication and interconnected signs, gesture, or behavior are settled in public space.

-Affectdent spaces leads to the generation of innovation, technologies and specific relational tools.

In 2000, the Harvard Project on the City, directed by Rem Koolhaas, presented Shopping, a research that highlighted the unstoppable transfer to the private of the public activity. Globalization, commercial strategies and the media were already contributing to “colonize” squares, streets, museums, churches and hospitals, benefiting consumerism1.

Today the disciplinary and control society2 is being surpassed by a performance society, as Byung-Chul Han puts3. Architecture is no longer a tool for controlling bodies and reproduction. Emotional capitalism goes beyond Guy Debord’s worst expectations4. Today, people is controlled by social networks and personal data, supervising our ways of living and relating to the Polis. Public space seems to disappear.5

However, understanding the public as a relational and political space of the common6, we could state like Stefano Boeri did, that public space is not disappearing but just mutating its shape, into a diffuse net of emergent “molecular” capitalism of small actors who are taking the lead7.

Beatriz Preciado posed in 2014, that we are facing a pharmacopornographic society. Throught different techniques of subjectivation, tools and dispositifs our bodies are monitorised throught architecture. A “ new kind of capitalism that is hot, psycotropic, and punk” manifests, a post-democratic space where public and private categories are being alterated.8

“The apartment is now a peepshow and a gallery, where inhabiting means broadcasting a fiction of interiority that is publicly construdted as intimate and private”9 1 KOOLHAAS, Rem, et al. Mutations. Actar, 2000.p.124 2 FOUCAULT, Michel. Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. Vintage, 2012.

3 HAN, Byung-Chul. La sociedad de la transparencia. Herder Editorial, 2013.

4 GUY, Debord. La sociedad del espectáculo. Valencia: Editorial Pre-textos, 2003 5 INABA, Jeffrey; KOOLHAAS, Rem; LEONG, Sze Tsung. Harvard Design School guide to shopping.

Edited by Chuihua Judy Chung. Kln: Taschen, 2001.

6 SCHMITT, Carl. The concept of the political: Expanded edition. University of Chicago Press, 2008 7 BOERI, Stefano; LANZANI, Arturo. Gli orizzonti della città diffusa. Casabella, 1992, vol. 588, p. 4459.

8 PRECIADO, Beatriz. Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience. Log, 2012, no 25, p.

121-134.

9 ibid.

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Autogerated gardens in New York

TOP MANTA Nomad sellers

Nevertheless, certain citizen dynamics demonstrate that public space remains alive, although restructured and in a diffuse form. It no longer has to do with the traditional representation or monumentality, but with relational qualities framed by the affective spatial and critical turn of the 1990s.

Some ordinary, organised informal spatial practices, based on affects and dissidence, are already generating a paralel architecture that actually builds a neo-public space, “where rules are set according to its users”10 and that contributes to transform public space from a displaced, virtual or phisical, space thourght an connected interdependent communication network.

The communal gardens of New York, the distribution and sale system of the top manta in Barcelona, the networks of self-organized urban orchards in Madrid, or the alternative LGTB community and spaces like saunas, dark rooms, bars in San Francisco, once oppressed movements, or the new cybernetic forms of relation, production and learning, are examples that redraw public space by relocating it, reconnecting it, reframing it.

Architecture is not disapearing but public space, at least as we know it tradicionaly, may be. ¿How architecture thinking and practice should change to adapt to those new circunstances? The research studies a series of examples that actually are permanently adapting to the fluxes of a liquid society11, and that can contribute to prove that Affectdent spaces are the ones that nowadays are regenerating the public.

A neThe protagonism of counterculture and its spatial consecuences in the research, from the antecedent of the 70’s hippie communes and alternatifs movements in San Francisco and New York, to the current punk, DIY and queer struggles, demands a more detailed study and deep bibliographic development from an architectural perspective in american universities such as Columbia or Berkeley.

What can be learned about the Stonewall revolts, hence what can be learned about the LGTB community in El Castro, San Francisco or Greenwich in New York city? Ironically it seems that what has been repressed is now what architecture should learn from, instead of keeping ignoring it, as all the others queer, transgender and crip movements.

The research aims to define differents forms os application and alternative spatial tools that allows the architect to take part in the generation and design of these spaces. Finding out how this kind of space works and how to aplly it within an academic or professional framework represents an important goal to achieve.

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MUMFORD, Lewis. The Case Against” modern Architecture.”. 1962.

BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Liquid times: Living in an age of uncertainty. John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

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