Cultura y coaliciones de poder y dinero en las nuevas gestiones urbanas

Este volumen contiene una comunicación y dos ensayos de Otilia Arantes, publicados en México y Argentina, respectivamente, sobre conceptos y estrategias de intervención en las ciudades con miras a 'regenerarlas' como 'lugares' debidamente 'animados' por la reactivación de sus centros históricos y valor simbólico, es decir, debido a su "sesgo cultural". Un programa de 'regreso a la ciudad' después de los Modernos que pretendía restaurar a sus poblaciones a una vida pública obstaculizada por los planes regulatorios de la ciudad funcional. El tema central de la ponencia presentada en 1995, en un Coloquio de Arte y Espacio de la UNAM, la Autora cuestiona hasta qué punto tales intervenciones, que pretenden ser conservacionistas y modestas, apuntando a la restauración de lugares llenos de significados colectivos, acaban convirtiéndose en lo que parece su exacto contrario: la causa sorprendente de un urbanismo anárquico de apología de la ciudad caótica, plural, fragmentada, soft etc. donde los conflictos serían escamoteados por una especie de estetización de lo heterogéneo, recubierto por la transformación en escenarios comandados por la lógica de la fascinación. O sea que, el lugar, inviable por las propias condiciones objetivas, materiales, fue convirtiéndose, de a poco, en su opuesto, el no-lugar de los espacios virtuales de una vida pública definitivamente transformada en un repertorio de representaciones simbólicas. El énfasis ya no es predominantemente técnico, como en el período anterior, para recurrir al vasto dominio de paspartú de lo "cultural". Cuando las ciudades empezaron a verse como un repertorio de símbolos, todo se convirtió en cultura. Este es el eje de los dos ensayos que siguen (publicados en 2000 en dos revistas argentinas, Punto de Vista y Block): en un mundo, al mismo tiempo dominado por el mercado, la cultura y el dinero terminan uniéndose: la centralidad de la cultura en el capitalismo avanzado, como enfatiza Fredric Jameson, y, al mismo tiempo, una superposición paradójica entre dos instancias que, en principio, deberían ser antagónicas. Simultáneamente, el proceso inducido de 'gentrificación' adquiere la forma más flexible de algo que se aproxima a lo que los viejos 'propagandistas' de la identidad - referidos en esa comunicación - llegan a defender como atributos fluctuantes, derogaciones, deconstrucciones, derivas. En esta fase (especialmente en la década de los 90), se produce un retorno reactivo a la planificación, pero luego, designada como estratégica, donde la 'racionalidad' pasa a ser principalmente la de la economía, apuntando a la inserción de las ciudades en el circuito global de las grandes empresas, lo que agravará aún más la expansión cultural, que ha prevalecido desde que los gobiernos y los inversores comenzaron a abrir una nueva frontera de acumulación de poder y dinero: el negocio de las imágenes. Palabras clave: Arquitectura del lugar, Atopia, Barcelona, Berlin, Christopher Lash, City-Marketing, Ciudad-empresa, Ciudades ocasionales, Cultura de imágenes, David Harvey, Desconstrucción, Espacio público, Expo 98, Frank Gehry, Fredric Jameson, Fundación Guggenheim, Gentrificación, Jordi Borja, Manuel Castells, Marc Augé, Megaeventos, Memoria, No-lugares, Olimpíadas, Patrimonio, Peter Hall, Planeamiento estratégico, Potsdamer Platz, Recalificación, Richard Sennet, Sharon Zukin, Venturi, Virilio.

Re-imagining the museum

<p>Twentieth-century museums have become more than displays of art and history. Unlike their nineteenth century origins, museums today are a centre of culture, education and entertainment. Designing a circulation system that connects the transitions between exhibits is like forming a riddle for a visitor to enter, experience, solve and remember. The museum reflects every asset, flaw, scar, crease, emotion, and sole of whom has time to stand and observe. For one to observe, one has to navigate. Seeking the key principles into designing a successful circulation between architecture and visitor will allow a large-scale building to be read effortlessly and seamlessly like a well-written novel. In the late 1980’s a design brief was revealed to the public requesting proposals for a National Museum of New Zealand. 10 years later the doors opened to Te Papa Tongarewa on Wellington’s waterfront. Among the submitted proposals, was a concept design by Ian Athfield and Frank Gehry. Their proposal did not make it past the conceptual stage, thus offering the opportunity to explore its potential interiority and circulation. This thesis engages with the great museums that initiated 21st Century architecture such as the Guggenheim of Bilbao, the Jewish Museum of Berlin and most importantly, investigation into the design of Te Papa Tongarewa to analyse their method of circulation. For these museums both encapsulate the heritage of their location as well as defining future possibilities for museum architecture. This thesis re-imagines the possibilities of the National Museum of New Zealand. This will be investigated through the tools of circulation and the experiential qualities that the architecture initiates as our bodies and the way we move are in continuous dialogue with our architecture. This thesis investigates the importance and functionality of atrium designs, as well as the influence it has on the structures circulatory system. Exploring the potential of an Athfield / Gehry design will inspire an alternate reality to what could have been.</p>

Re-imagining the museum

<p>Twentieth-century museums have become more than displays of art and history. Unlike their nineteenth century origins, museums today are a centre of culture, education and entertainment. Designing a circulation system that connects the transitions between exhibits is like forming a riddle for a visitor to enter, experience, solve and remember. The museum reflects every asset, flaw, scar, crease, emotion, and sole of whom has time to stand and observe. For one to observe, one has to navigate. Seeking the key principles into designing a successful circulation between architecture and visitor will allow a large-scale building to be read effortlessly and seamlessly like a well-written novel. In the late 1980’s a design brief was revealed to the public requesting proposals for a National Museum of New Zealand. 10 years later the doors opened to Te Papa Tongarewa on Wellington’s waterfront. Among the submitted proposals, was a concept design by Ian Athfield and Frank Gehry. Their proposal did not make it past the conceptual stage, thus offering the opportunity to explore its potential interiority and circulation. This thesis engages with the great museums that initiated 21st Century architecture such as the Guggenheim of Bilbao, the Jewish Museum of Berlin and most importantly, investigation into the design of Te Papa Tongarewa to analyse their method of circulation. For these museums both encapsulate the heritage of their location as well as defining future possibilities for museum architecture. This thesis re-imagines the possibilities of the National Museum of New Zealand. This will be investigated through the tools of circulation and the experiential qualities that the architecture initiates as our bodies and the way we move are in continuous dialogue with our architecture. This thesis investigates the importance and functionality of atrium designs, as well as the influence it has on the structures circulatory system. Exploring the potential of an Athfield / Gehry design will inspire an alternate reality to what could have been.</p>

AS MUDANÇAS NA GÊNESE DA FORMA CONTEMPORÂNEA: ANÁLISE DO PROCESSO DE PROJETO NA OBRA DE FRANK GEHRY

O artigo apresenta uma reflexão sobre a definição de modernidade líquida de Zygmunt Bauman e a conceituação de arquitetura líquida de Ignasi de Solà-Morales. O texto também relaciona os conceitos de Vilém Flusser e o artigo de Rafael Moneo, que trata da fragmentação e da desconstrução em arquitetura. A metodologia de projeto de Gehry revela que o arquiteto integra as lógicas projetuais analógicas e as digitais. Seu trabalho inclui tendências artísticas transpostas em sua essência formal nos croquis iniciais e exequíveis através de softwares de última geração. O aporte teórico é fundamental para compreender as alterações na gênese das formas possibilitadas pela tecnologia na produção arquitetônica contemporânea, através da análise da obra de Frank Gehry.Palavras-chave: práticas discursivas, tecnologia, processo de projeto, Frank Gehry .

Frank Gehry’s Self-Twisting Uninterrupted Line: Gesture-Drawings as Indexes

The article analyses Frank Gehry’s insistence on the use of self-twisting uninterrupted line in his sketches. Its main objectives are first, to render explicit how this tendency of Gehry is related to how the architect conceives form-making, and second, to explain how Gehry reinvents the tension between graphic composition and the translation of spatial relations into built form. A key reference for the article is Marco Frascari’s ‘Lines as Architectural Thinking’ and, more specifically, his conceptualisation of Leon Battista Alberti’s term lineamenta in order to illuminate in which sense architectural drawings should be understood as essential architectural factures and not merely as visualisations. Frascari, in Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architects’s Imagination, after having drawn a distinction between what he calls ‘trivial’ and ‘non-trivial’ drawings—that is to say between communication drawings and conceptual drawings, or drawings serving to transmit ideas and drawings serving to their own designer to grasp ideas during the process of their genesis—unfolds his thoughts regarding the latter. The article focuses on how the ‘non-trivial’ drawings of Frank Gehry enhance a kinaesthetic relationship between action and thought. It pays special attention to the ways in which Frank Gehrys’ sketches function as instantaneous concretisations of a continuous process of transformation. Its main argument is that the affective capacity of Gehry’s ‘drawdlings’ lies in their interpretation as successive concretisations of a reiterative process. The affectivity of their abstract and single-gesture pictoriality is closely connected to their interpretation as components of a single dynamic system. As key issues of Frank Gehry’s use of uninterrupted line, the article identifies: the enhancement of a straightforward relationship between the gesture and the decision-making regarding the form of the building; its capacity to render possible the perception of the evolution of the process of form-making; and the way the use of uninterrupted line is related to the function of Gehry’s sketches as indexes referring to Charles Sanders Peirce’s conception of the notion of ‘index’.

ACERCA DEL DISEÑO ESPECULATIVO DEL ESPACIO ARQUITECTONICO: EXPERIENCIAS, METAFORAS Y ABSTRACCION

Los actos de imaginar, crear y proyectar son conceptos de especulación pura, ya que, al inicio del proceso, arquitectos con conciencia, no saben con certeza lo que se va a lograr, pero con el objetivo siempre de mejorar lo existente. Arquitectos como Peter Eisenmann, Frank Gehry, Mies van der Rohe y Peter Zumthor tienen como meta proponer especulativamente en sus proyectos soluciones formales basados en conceptos abstractos, metafóricos y experienciales.