andamios
When I visited Havana in 2000 I was fascinated by the andaminos, the scaffolding that populated the city, particularly in old Havana. Locals then used to call Havana “La Ciudad de San Lázaro” (St. Lazarus’ City), because of all the crutches supporting its buildings preventing them from falling. Behind this ruinous reality hid the barbacoas, which for many were but a continuation of the rotting condition of the city. I take issue with this interpretation and instead think they represent not a decaying city but on the contrary manifest a force of growth and vitality.
barbacoas on fire
In 2000 I became interested in contemporary vernacular building practices in Havana, Cuba, known as barbacoas. Since then I have been slowly researching them and developing a theoretical position on these experiences. One can find these types of interventions just about anywhere in the world. I’m interest in the Cuban case because these are set within a Socialist context were the idea of “proper housing” is a right guaranteed under the 1976 Constitution. The first opportunity I had to present my research in Cuba, was at the 2002 International Architecture Biennial . There I presented some initial theoretical positions that attempted to circumscribed these structures within contemporary forms of expression/resistance. This presentation got picked up in La Jiribilla, and I published it in essay form under the title: Huecos: discursos y prácticas espaciales en la Habana in Pasajes de Arquitectura y Crítica (Madrid, 2002). A year later, I had the opportunity to present this research at the Import/Export: Latin American Urbanities International Conference at Harvard University. A revised version titled: “Ingrown Disorders: the barbacoa structures and the interior city of Havana,” appeared in AULA/ Architecture and Urbanism in La Americas (2003). In 2005 I was involved in building a barbacoa. I presented this experience at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) International Conference in Mexico City (proceedings), the Royal College of Art, London and at the Camp for Oppositional Architecture in Berlin. In 2008, in collaboration with Anthropologist Anna Cristina Pertierra, I wrote a piece published in Buildings & Landscapes/The Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. I continue to engage this important question, and remain committed to this research.
One of the primary objectives of the program of the Cuban Revolution was to solve once and for all the housing problem in Cuba. To attain this goal the Revolution established a series of laws and institutions that, through the early convulsive period of the Revolution (also known as the “Heroic Period”), would change and transform until their final solidification and bureaucratization in the 1970s. In this early period the Revolution fomented local organizations and grassroots practices that would mark and condition the housing question and would survive its subsequent institutionalization.
slum bricolage
Anthony Burdin’s installation (pictured left) for the 2006 Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, once again opened the question of using building practices found in slums as part of art installations in museum and art gallery spaces. I addressed this question by examining the work of Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc and that of Spanish artists Jesús Palomino through theories of bricolage. At the same time I was in contact with Judith Rodenbeck, who had recently been made editor of Art Journal. I worked on a piece for a theme issue on Assemblage and Bricolage, which was eventually published in Art Journal in 2008.
As a symptom of a heterogeneous world, the term bricolagc suffers from semantic instability. Simply stated, however, bricolage is the construction of something from whatever comes at hand. Since its introduction by Claude Levi-Strauss in La Pensée Sauvage (The Savage Mind) in 1962, it has appeared across disciplines and discourses as part of the revolution that structuralism posed for critical and creative projects, from poetry to architecture. Levi-Strauss’s examination of bricolage is an attempt to challenge the generalized notion of the “intellectual poverty of Savages,” their lack of conceptual thinking, their “ineptitude for abstract thought.” Abstraction, as he further states, “is not the monopoly of civilization.” However, Levi Stratiss goes a step further, since with bricolage he is not only presenting the “thinking of the savages,” but more importantly “savage thinking” or, better yet, to use Dan Sperber’s term, “untamed thinking,” a thinking other than science—analogic, perhaps, rather than analytic—that, in our contemporary experience, grows out of the void spaces of capital.
Camp for Oppositional Architecture
Barbacoas Research
The study of informal constructions such as the Brazilian favelas, Spanish chabolas or South African shantytowns, is framed by architecture’s complicity with power, by society’s surrender of space and its abandonment of the tools of building place to architects. While it seems that capitalism has conquered the built environment and co-opted all actions to it, these local practices reveal a viable form of resistance to commodified spaces. Informal constructions challenge the established order because the act of building performed by their inhabitants gives them a right over the space intervened. The difference between ownership of space and the right to a space opens the question for new social and production forms. This activity is one centered not on abstract formulations such as the law, the market or other forms of textual contracts, but on spatial occupations that inscribe abstract space through personal actions and communal narratives. It is this active transformation of space that creates place. (more…)