A FIELD OF OBJECTS

Le Corbusier - “La Ville Radieuse” - 1924

The modernist utopia of decongestion and homogeneity was built in two beliefs: crowded spaces are always negative, and every man should be the same, have the same. These assumptions were based on a socialist view of society, in a Marxist understand of production and labor as the basis of life.

The result was a concept to make open, accessible spaces to nature, nature which needs to be controlled and molded to the interests of human beings. This disconnection established what I think was the reason to the failure of the modernist utopia: the blandness of the landscape of events, where the joyful play of light and shadows and masses are less relevant than the machine to live in.

In this very assumption, architecture lost its meaning, and became engineering. Forms of social control through space were developed as the formal basis of architecture. The shift from man’s spirit to the object’s efficiency change what architecture was, and in turn, relegated generations to not know (and in turn, understand and respect) architecture. The effects of these actions are felt even today: apart from a small number of visionaries, architecture is understood at large as a service, to provide a cheap roof, more or less healthy according to the budget. 

To quote Moneo, "The architectural object can no longer be considered as a single, isolated event because it is bounded by the world that surrounds it as well as by its history. It extends life to other objects by virtue of its specific architectural condition, thereby establishing a chain of related events in which it is possible to find common formal structures.” (On Typology - Oppositions, 1978).

It is easy for us to get trapped in academia, starchitects and flashy competitionsand think that this is the whole concept of architecture and its production. But in the real world, as Gehry put, only has 2% of this architecture. So, from the idea that architecture is a tool to the uniformity of conditions, I propose that we should aim to understand architecture by what it is (its formal and spatial qualities, distancing it from other disciplines) and what it could do, and use our buildings as a way to bring playfulness and joy again to the cities. Let’s leave the engineering concerns to the engineers.