In this issue of Dearq we set out to study openness in architecture (understood as a measure of indeterminacy, ambiguity or relative lack of plan or project) and its effects on the democratic life of societies.1
This is not an original topic. For decades, many researchers have studied the possibility of open architectures, understood in many ways. For instance, Richard Sennett (2006) recently promoted the construction of porous territories, indeterminate narratives, and incomplete forms as means to generate more diverse and fertile cities for their inhabitants. Since the seventies the Danish architect Jan Gehl (2006) brought to the fore the space between buildings as a place for social life. That same decade, at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, the historian Stanford Anderson (1971) defined the built environment as an artifact produced by the actions of many people, whose formal and functional results are therefore unforeseeable.2 Anderson concluded that the resilience of cities — their ability to accommodate and adapt to change — depends largely on this indeterminacy, taken for potential.3 Similarly, Alberto Saldarriaga Roa suggested that “the functionalist rationality of the orthodox discipline of planning does not accommodate the heterogeneous and diverse reality of social life that bustles in (Latin American) cities” (1994, 64); a conclusion shared by Silvia Arango and Rogelio Salmona, who claimed that “the urban is not the agglomeration of buildings but the spaces between the buildings […] What is really public is open space” (2000, 150).
We see how these and other readings of the role played by openness in architecture and the city are closely linked to democratic values such as individual freedom, tolerance, and the pursuit of progress through gradual, piecemeal change. To a large extent citizenship founded on these values and the rights and duties that derive from them depend on our ability as individuals to find meaning, project our hopes and feelings, and integrate with others through the environment we inhabit. On the contrary spaces that are totally prescribed by design and planning oftentimes determine and impose narrow uses and interpretations, or limit our ability to understand, empathise and integrate with the architecture that surrounds us. The exercise of freedom requires its own space; not a space that someone gives or determines in advance for us, but one which, barely suggested, remains latent – an opportunity that must be taken.
With Writing Urban Places, — a research network focused on the use of narrative methods for urban development in mid-sized European cities — we are interested in architectures that seem to give meaning to their inhabitants’ lives, in the different ways in which citizens appropriate them, and in the ways in which jointly meaning and appropriation favour integration between individuals.4 By addressing these issues in urban places we have noticed that openness in programmatic, spatial or procedural terms is always at stake. Although most of our research so far has been developed in mid-sized European cities — observed from an eminently interdisciplinary perspective — we are interested in examining and evaluating our ideas elsewhere, as we strive for new discoveries. An active collaboration between the University of Los Andes, the National University of Colombia, and Delft University of Technology allowed us to study this topic from a Latin American perspective.5
To speak of a Latin American city in generic terms will always be paradoxical, and yet we chose to narrow down our search; not in order to reduce or simplify the context, but wanting instead to explore its exuberance and consequent potential. Both in their configuration and in their performance many Latin American cities articulate quite different (even contradictory) architectures and urban structures. Colonial grids, modernist layouts and informal settlements converge in complex networks, making them extremely difficult to evaluate. Habitually this complexity and the tensions it reveals and generates are viewed by architects and urban planners with suspicion. We believe however that the relative lack of planning in these cities can also be seen as a virtue.
Among the many variables that inform the prodigality of this context we paid special attention to one particular aspect that appeared useful to envision different possible futures for the type of architectures and cities that interest us; namely, that relative vacuum in which the competences and ambitions, or the contributions and demands of different individuals are integrated. When our surroundings are more possibility than prescription, awareness of our rights and duties as citizens is heightened.
Based on these premises we invited researchers and architects to tell us what they think and know about different built spaces in different Latin American cities whose open nature constitutes an opportunity for democratic life. Their answers reveal important, and in many cases unexpected aspects of openness in architecture, which clearly offer us new and better disciplinary knowledge.
In his research article, for example, William García Ramírez synthesises the results of his research on civic centres in Colombian cities, via a historiographical revision akin to well-known histories of the decline of Modern Movement. Although civic centres were originally conceived as programmatically open, and therefore poly- or multifunctional spaces; García Ramírez describes how several of them were eventually transformed into something entirely different: administrative centres based on the idea that civic activity boils down to the relationship between citizens and institutionalised governments. Besides inviting us to reflect upon possible relations between open spaces and officially sanctioned publicness, the article identifies a primordial aspect of civic centres: the duality of being both centrifugal (as a proliferation of urban centralities) and centripetal, by concentrating attention and local activity as primary elements of the city, according to Rossi (1982).
In their research article Katherin Triana Urrego and Diego Romero Sánchez examine how the city is generated beyond normative principles. Their account points to an architecture of process – a way of building the city that feeds on latency and opportunity rather than on the design of concrete objects. Cooperative architecture as described by Triana Urrego and Romero Sánchez does not assume a fixed place, a specific use, or a static morphology. On the contrary, it evolves as opportunities and resources become available, attaining what we have elsewhere taken for elementary. 6 The article also criticises informality as an insufficient notion to explain the genesis of most Latin American cities. Informal, though, is understood here as that which goes beyond the norm. If we elaborate further on the notion based on Zaera-Polo’s (2009) assumption that informality is not only lack of adherence to the norm, but rather the influence of a considerable number of variables in the constitution of complex realities, we see that the Provivienda urban model and the planned city epitomize different theories of architecture. One of these theories understands architecture as the pursuit of abstraction, in the sense of rationalising the different variables (formal, technological, functional, or symbolic) considered in its development; while the other speaks of an architecture that is fundamentally proliferative, and therefore based on an economic rather than on an artistic logic.
Alejandro Peimbert Duarte exemplifies the ways in which the abovementioned formalisation has issued in the collapse of an urban area, as he takes us on a journey through a series of empty, almost dystopian spaces. In doing so he also shows us how a shift in our theoretical focus could reveal potential even in built environments that we would otherwise take for dead. A civic centre built according to post-war American blueprints is used here to exemplify the arbitrariness and sterility of imposed urban models. It is on those grounds that Peimbert Duarte hints at versatility — understood as our ability to imagine architecture beyond conventional theories — could explain why those parts of Mexicali that have been cut off from urban life can suddenly appear to come back to life. The article also hints at a more radical kind of openness, beyond the urban, in which borders between nations-states cease to separate ideas and people forcibly, and become instead places of opportunity for the generation of architectural forms and languages, vitalised by contact.7
So far we have discussed openness as a process, or in relation to programme and meaning. There is, of course, the more obvious kind openness which has to do with form. Antonio José Salvador reflects upon this type of openness in his review of the history and recent development of a great urban void in the city of Quito. What happens when, instead of activity and built objects, a city’s authorities understand the value of inaction, the power of voids, the importance of spontaneity? What transformations become possible when governments operate on the sphere of latency rather than on the tangible? Besides these concerns the text makes us wonder if a large urban project is indeed possible, even desirable. Would it not be more interesting instead to appraise the city as a series of individual projects that add up in unforeseen ways, and therefore generate unforeseeable results? (Anderson 1971).8
In the closing research article of this issue Mariana Wilderom draws interesting parallels between two conurbations that share the vitality that is characteristic of second cities in many countries. Rather than tackling openness directly, the article deals with the infrastructural conditions that make it possible. Like in the previous example from Quito, but now in disperse or atomized form, Wilderom shows us how several urban interventions in São Paulo and Medellín feed on the urban void, taking advantage of previously ignored potential in order to nurture the vital process of both cities.
Following these research articles the creation article written and beautifully illustrated by Diego Buitrago Ruiz uses literary narratives as a method, in order to explain a living artery in the urban fabric. Buitrago Ruiz’s journey along Caracas Avenue in Bogotá is not limited to his own experience; it is also a journey through the history of the city, in which he follows a theatrical structure to account for the experiences of many others which are also integral to the avenue.
Others’ experiences are also intertwined in a faraway context, in our conversation with the historian Esra Akcan, who takes us on several journeys throughout the recent history of European architecture and into the intimacy of several individuals whose fate has temporarily or permanently taken to a neighbourhood in Berlin. Akcan concludes that besides the different ways in which we have been describing it, openness is essentially a form of hospitality. Rather than understanding architecture as downstream from culture, her texts makes a solid case for architecture as an instrument for the construction of more just societies, free from the borders we mentioned above.
Together, these texts suggest that the study of openness demands a heterodox approach to architectural research and practice. As we’ve seen, openness overarches various scales (from the civic centre to large urban spaces and infrastructures), and can be seen as both process or program. Against this breadth, inter-disciplinary methods such as literary urban narratives appear to be able to capture experiential, historical and social aspects of open architecture. Such realizations are evident in the three projects we have chosen to exemplify openness in the Latin American city. Before we describe them with more detail further on, we can already mention a few relevant features. Together these three architectures suggest that a project’s time can be extended way beyond the design process. They also hint at contingency and obstruction as creative opportunities, rather than as problems to be solved. Finally, these three projects allow us to understand architecture as a series of decisions which are tightly intertwined within the many variables that constitute every context.9 Without a doubt these are all bona-fide architecture, thoroughly developed, and yet we notice that their openness somehow makes them difficult to grasp.
When reviewing this remarkable collection — all contributions being so different and yet somehow complementary — we must recognise that our initial definition of openness has been substantially expanded as a result of this editorial process. Now, for example, it encompasses scalar extremes that range from individual housing and intimate spaces to urban places and infrastructure. Conceptually, the notion has also become more sophisticated, in order to account for spaces, programs, and processes at once; as we have learned from the study of the limits and potential of civic centres, of projects conceived and developed collectively, or in the design of deliberately unfinished structures.
We started by saying that in this issue of Dearq we strove to study those spaces that, due to their openness, appear to favour urban life, especially from a democratic perspective. It becomes clear to us know that this kind of spaces take on many forms, even within the same city. Rival species coexist sympatrically in every city, which is therefore the sum total of many different, even opposing visions of architecture;10 each of them catering to very different uses, performances, appropriations, and meanings; each of them carrying its own formal, material, technical and aesthetic repertoires; each of them using different resources and identifying different potentialities. Mediating between radical differences, even oppositions, open spaces can be seen as that elementary form of tolerance which is able to resolve friction; or as the instruments that allow us to turn conflict into construction. It is in this sense that the diverse, and sometimes paradoxical conditions that define many Latin American cities offer us a fertile vision of openness — an opportunity to glimpse a world with fewer borders through which we could move more freely.
It is clear that we haven’t found a conclusive answer to our initial questions. But rather than a theory of open spaces, what seems to be at stake here is an opening up to various theories at once. We have not failed to notice a certain degree of ideological affinity among our contributors. Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Harvey, Lefebvre and Tafuri point at a theoretical framework that is common to most contributions. In other words, we see a degree of orthodoxy in current academic research regarding this topic. Despite this coincidence — observed in the recurrence of ideologically aligned theoretical references — the primary sources and local historiographies used by these authors offer us very different insights. We have learned about the construction of the city as a collective project with Esra Akcan’s interview and Katherin Triana Urrego and Diego Romero Sánchez’s article; but we have also seen attempts to redefine or subvert conventional theories in Alejandro Peimbert Duarte’s contribution, for example.
On these grounds, rather than talking about a univocal or homogeneous discipline we can now talk about the coexistence or complementarity of several theories of architecture — all useful and valid. Perhaps this is the most important lesson we can learned from this collection of articles: that a good challenge for the contemporary architect is to learn to operate productively using several different theories — to be theoretically versatile. Even if we started thinking about openness in spatial and functional terms, through this editing process we came to the insight that it is crucial to approach architecture with an open mind; interrelating different theoretical perspectives with genuine curiosity rather than sticking to univocal, dogmatic, or orthodox vantage points. Perhaps a degree of theoretical openness will allow us see architecture with less prejudice, and keep our understanding open to more and better forms of the built environment.