IaaC Bit Extra 1.2

Implementing Advanced Knowledge

bits Extra Edition: Piso Piloto

1.2 Weak Infrastructure Jaime Coll

Weak Infrastructure “Every operation must be reversible, incomplete, elastic, because all that is “definitive” is dangerous”. Andrea Branzi, 2010

1. Weak Urbanism”, 2010

This statement exposed by Andrea Branzi at the 2010 Biennale, illustrated a manifesto titled “Per una Nuova Carta di Atene”. It started: “in recent years my work has been mainly concentrated on the search for new “weak models of urbanization”, theoretical models that try to interpret the social and functional conditions of the Twenty-first century”.1 Le Corbusier’s Map of Athens of 1933 defined a city with a specialized zoning, with clear borders and limits between the urban city and the agricultural world. At the XXIst century the different categories merge. The New Map of Athens is a manifesto that recognizes the contemporary city, with all its contradictions a city that must be constantly “rethought, readapted, and replanted”.

What could be called a Manifesto, is introduced as Ten Recommendations: 1. Consider the city as a “high-tech favelas”.

2. Consider the city as a “personal computer every twenty square meters” 3. Consider the city as a place of “cosmic hospitality” 4. Consider new models of “weak urbanization” 5. Consider blurred and accessible confines and foundations 6. Design “light, temporary, reversible, infrastructure” 7. Consider the city as being “micro conditioned all-full” 8. Consider the big transformations as the “result of micro operations” 9. Consider the city as a “genetic laboratory” 10. Consider the city as a “living plankton” Only the names of the projects presented at Venice shows this merge of categories: Agronica (1995), Architecture-Agriculture (2005), Forest of Architecture (2007), Residential Agriculture (2008).

Cover - Alba Alsina, Gemma Guitart, Arnau Sumalla, Torre Baró “Picturesc Catalog” Figure 1 - Andrea Branzi, Forest of Architecture, 2007 2

2. “Weak Architecture”, 1987

In his essay from 1987, at the same moment of 1988 Moma’s Deconstructivist Architecture Exhibition, Ignasi de Solà-Morales writes “weak Architecture” in allusion to the term “weak thought” by Gianni Vattimo. Instead of synchronic or diachronic interpretations of history, he proposes diagonal or oblique incisions on a heterogeneous artistic universe. Weak architecture is more based in temporality, in the notion of event, than in the immutability and permanence of the Modern Movement architecture or ‘70s historic revival.

Decoration and monumentality are again considered in contemporary architecture. Monumentality referred to the pleasure of “architecture once it has been seen”.

“This is the force of weakness. That which art and architecture are capable of producing precisely when they are neither aggressive nor domineering, but rather tangential and weak” Richard Serra, Josep Maria Jujol, Konstantin Melnikov or Marcel Duchamp illustrates the essay with works whose concepts are parallel to what he has labeled weak architecture.

3. “Weak infrastructure”, 1977.

Alvaro Siza has to develop the Malagueira social housing neighborhood close to the city of Evora in Portugal in 1977. There are some pictures showing Siza walking around the agricultural fields, and taking notes. There, he draws some of his most famous sketches. Instead of imposing an artificial, geometric pattern, he studies carefully the historic traces, the agricultural channels, the vineyards, the old aqueduct, the water drainage and the rural paths.

Starting from his observation and taking the aqueduct as a useful infrastructural element, he proposes a natural urban patter based on three different traces in order to re-naturalize and regenerate the site. The aqueduct is not only used as a conduct for services, but is also a passage and a territorial infrastructural device that allows the development of houses.

The new social housing will remain incomplete and will be based on growth and change parameters. The architect makes minimum intervention, being the user and the territory the main characters of this “definitely unfinished” work.

Figure 2 - Konstantin Melnikov, Sukhareva Market 1924 Figure 3 - Alvaro Siza, Malagueira. Courtyard studies Figure 4 - Alba Alsina, Gemma Guitart, Arnau Sumalla, Torre Baró “Prototype proposal” 4

4. Torre Baró

Torre Baró is a neighborhood developed as a shanty town between ‘40s and ‘70s, by the same workers that were constructing the post-rationalistic Ciutat Meridiana neighborhood. Fifty years later, the environmental quality of Torre Baró, despite all its social and urban problems (unemployment, aged people, lack of accessibility and public transport…) is much higher than that of its neighbor: Torre Baró is sunny, well oriented and ventilated, with a good natural environment being part of a natural corridor Collserola - Besos, with low density and a hybrid natural-artificial urban fabric. Maybe some traces of a previous failed garden-city urban planning, helped to improve this improvised settlement. Maybe the innate, natural mind logic of the workers gifted this spontaneous urban organization with an internal logic. Recent studies carried out by the City Department on Urban Planning, recognized the peculiarity of Torre Baró ad-hoc urban setting, with a special qualification: isolated housing with a shared wall.

Habitat Urbà proposed in 2014 a collaborative work to several schools of architecture. It consisted on implementing a self-sufficient prototype, a research laboratory for students of architecture on zero energy buildings. The ETSAB used the full potential of the Diploma Studio to work on a project that used the big scale of the city and the same time small constructive details on bioclimatic architecture.

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The hypothesis that we proposed was: a prototype is an object or a test building, something that sooner o later will be serial produced. We thought that the site could be a specific parcel or any other site in Torre Baró. That is the quality that should have a prototype: it could be assembled or disassembled and resituated in any other place. It is like testing the potential of something that is industrial, standardized and at the same time should be adaptable to circumstances. It is because of this ubiquity of the prototype that it should be contaminated by the specific conditions of this place, a very fragile place that we should respect and where students will go to learn and not to impose and architectural thought.

The methodology used on the previous urban studies were specific cartographies (the physical description of the place, anything that belong to this place but is not described in a map (environment, social and infrastructural specific conditions), a picturesque catalog of local typologies (because there is also architecture in self-construction, spontaneity and randomness) and fields of opportunity (where there are problems but also dream and desire, places that we will improve if we apply our design strategies).

The workshop worked with this hypothesis that we called “weak infrastructure” and we proposed to develop ten different situations, for a specific prototype.

The students have been working with systems more that with objects, defining a set or rules, trying to find and testing situations. All this configuring a “weak infrastructure”: temporary, incomplete, elastic and reversible

Copyright Š 2014 Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia All rights Reserved.

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IAAC BIT FIELDS: 1. Theory for Advanced Knowledge 2. Advanced Cities and Territories 3. Advanced Architecture 4. Digital Design and Fabrication 5. Interactive Societies and Technologies 6. Self-Sufficient Lands

Nader Tehrani, Architect, Director MIT School Architecture, Boston Juan Herreros, Architect, Professor ETSAM, Madrid Neil Gershenfeld, Physic, Director CBA MIT, Boston Hanif Kara, Engineer, Director AKT, London Vicente Guallart, Architect, Chief City Arquitect of Barcelona Willy Muller, Director of Barcelona Regional Aaron Betsky, Architect & Art Critic, Director Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati Hugh Whitehead, Engineer, Director Foster+ Partners technology, London Nikos A. Salingaros, Professor at the University of Texas, San Antonio Salvador Rueda, Ecologist, Director Agencia Ecologia Urbana, Barcelona Artur Serra, Anthropologist, Director I2CAT, Barcelona

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