Monthly Archive for May, 2011

From Misha Lepetic at 3quarksdaily.com…

What is the responsibility of the architect or designer within the contemporary context of urbanism? If we’re to begin with the preceding quote, taken from an interview with an astonishingly anti-urbanist Frank Lloyd Wright, it is an unconditional, Roarkian supremacy. If these sentiments had prevailed, of course, Le Corbusier would have ensured that today’s Paris would look very different.

Wright, his avatar Howard Roark, and Le Corbusier exemplify extreme, or perhaps extremely self-aware, instances of one of the great struggles in architecture: the uncomfortable fact that the world is full of people, and that architects are primarily educated in the total discourse of buildings. However, the increasing urbanization of the human race relegates the efficacy of architecting individual buildings as, at best, proofs-of-concept and as, at worst, vanity projects. And many such buildings placed in proximity to one another do not add up to a coherent urban solution. More…

From Dezeen…

Day by day we pass by vacant lots downtown. Just like an invisible metastasis generated in the heart of the city and extending to all its arteries. Neighbourhoods that, although having a huge potential, have more and more unused spaces, a fact that does not at all promote a correct sustainable development. Years have made us immune to this problem. It’s a landscape we already recognise as typical of the central neighbourhoods in Valencia.

Sometimes, the tourists are the ones who open our eyes by mentioning or questioning whether this situation is normal. On other occasions, we pay attention to it for a moment only because the secondary problems that those spaces imply affect us directly. But in most of the cases, they are only a part of our way. Like a gruyere cheese where the rats block any possibilities of reconstruction, while staring at us, far away from its holes.

This photographic work aims at calling people’s attention, just like painting those isolated walls yellow would. It demands the recreational use of those vacant lots through the eyes of a child, by filling them with impossible constructions, surrealistic installations in line with the problem. A children’s game as a neighbour’s shout, demanding the right to take part in their city. More…