With his renown installation One and Three Chairs (1965) the artist Joseph Kosuth invites us to reflect on the ways in which different aspects of reality intertwine to shape our perception and thinking. Together with the physical presence of a chair, its textual definition and photo show us that many of the things that we take for granted are actually made up of countless variables which interact in different ways.
The artwork’s configuration and the demands it imposes on the viewer, especially regarding interpretation and the construction of meaning, conform to the parameters used by Umberto Eco (1992) to define an “open work;” including a degree of indeterminacy, certain ambiguity, and the impression that the work remains unfinished until the viewer completes it both physically and conceptually.
The three projects presented here allow us to understand the extent to which architecture, as currently practised in Latin America, often celebrates the same wealth of interrelations that we find in Kosuth’s work. Like three chairs that are actually one we can understand these projects as different realities that confront and reaffirm each other in order to achieve joint sense.
In order to catch a glimpse of this joint sense we must recognise that by dissecting a chair into three versions Kosuth dismissed any binary reduction outright. Similarly, these three projects suggest that we mustn’t understand the architecture of our time in terms of oppositions, reducing the built environment’s complexity to a conflict between form and function or – a popular interpretation these days – to a supposed tension between structure and agency (Schneider and Till 2009). It seems pointless to speak here of the real or the abstract, the objective or the subjective. Akin to Kosuth’s chairs, in all three projects additional determinants impose themselves for consideration, whose mere presence dilutes any possible dichotomy.
None of these architectures is univocal. None admits easy classification, nor can be seen as fundamentally anchored in a formal or technological concern. None can be assumed solely as the materialisation of a purpose or a predictable performance. We cannot speak here of concrete objects, inert or concluded, alien to human activity and the natural phenomena that generate and vitalise them. Nor could we say that these activities and phenomena take place on their own, as in a vacuum, free from a diverse and intricate material context.
In the words of the Venezuelan architect Marcos Novak, it would seem as if in all three cases “the architect is called upon to design not the object but the principles by which the object is generated and varied in time.” (2002, 154)
And what are these principles? What do they suggest and what lessons do they offer us? The three works presented here address the architectural project vis-à-vis a multiplicity of meanings, flexibility and adaptability of form, collective and collaborative practices, plurality, hospitality, and solidarity (Akcan 2018). Each of them departs from a specific temporal and spatial context; a problematic field that requires specific actions in order to deal with economic development, plurality, memory, conservation, and ecology, among many other variables.
Each project starts by recognizing a problematic field, and in one way or another restructures those initial conditions by exploring and identifying their hidden potentials. Thus, these architectures are subtracted from reductive representations and cease to impose themselves on the site and its inhabitants (Corner 2014). Instead, they establish a critical position regarding the context and are therefore able to determine appropriate principles to confront those aspects that have been problematised. Transferred to design, these principles are concrete project strategies that operate at the formal, programmatic, technical, and material levels of architecture.
Comunal is a collaboration initiated by architects Mariana Ordóñez Grajales and Jesica Amescua Carrera, who strive to improve the living conditions of rural communities in Mexico by developing participatory design processes. According to them, an architectural project is not limited to the formal and functional organization of domestic space; but also incorporates processes of critical reflection and self-production aimed towards social and democratic transformation.
The “Social Reconstruction of Habitat” program takes place in the city of Ixtepec, Oaxaca, the most diverse but also the most unequal state in Mexico. After the 2017 and 2018 earthquakes many families lost not only their homes, but also their natural and cultural productive environment.
Hannah Arendt (1974) reminds us that the first thing lost by those pushed outside an established order is their home; inevitably leading to the loss of the social fabric in which they were born, live, and on which they managed to establish a distinct place in the world for themselves.
With their Self-Construction Manual, Comunal’s ambitions go well beyond the physical reconstruction of space, and also encourage collective action as indispensable means for the reconstruction of socio-spatial environments. In their view, architecture transcends the formal organization of collective and private built space; it must also promote people as active subjects. Both conditions occur simultaneously during the design process, which is developed with communities through workshops, research, and collective sessions in which the architects accompany each self-production process. Planning and shaping each home remains in the hands of its inhabitants, who use an open spatial unit system that ensures flexibility throughout the building’s design and lifetime. For Comunal, the inhabitability of each building must be considered from the vantage points of community and individual alike, as two distinct fields of action. Resulting from the Manual and the use of other participatory tools, each house is imagined and configured according to the wishes and possibilities of its inhabitants; it can be modified and transformed throughout time in terms of conception, development, self-construction, and use.
Colab-19 emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic as a laboratory for architecture with no fixed headquarters. Since then, the architects Alejandro Saldarriaga and Germán Bahamón have carried out several projects in Bogotá, including an ephemeral chapel La Cruz de la Alhambra, an installation in the market square of La Perseverancia, and the intervention of the Amphitheatre of La Concordia, published below. Common to all these projects are a multiplicity of meanings, flexibility and formal adaptability. By referring to their work as installations rather than as buildings the architects point to the creation of an aesthetic or sensory experience in a particular environment, which often invites active participation or viewer’s immersion.1
La Concordia market was built in 1933 on a site used for meeting and exchange (a condition that remains unchanged) since the colonial period. The original building was restored and refurbished in 2020. In its current state it continues to house the market, which is now next to a gallery and a space for artistic performance. Its location makes this a very active space, both crossroads and final destination for diverse communities.
Colab-19 uses a scaffolding system for this installation, an almost anodyne objet trouvé which, when isolated from its ordinary context, acquires a new meaning given its plastic qualities; or it could also be seen as a “kit of parts,” as defined by Cedric Price in his proposal for the Fun Palace; a system that can be configured and modified without affecting the building’s structure or organisation (Herdt 2017). The Amphitheatre of La Concordia can be used as both a horseshoe theatre and as a balcony over the city. By being transparent and light the structure remains ambiguous and unfinished, at once concave and convex.
The third project published below is the work of Connatural, a studio of architecture in the landscape directed from Medellín by Édgar Mazo and Sebastián Mejía. Both architects work towards sustainable relationships at the local level between human beings and nature, trying to preserve the places where they situate their work while improving the quality of their inhabitants’ lives.
Prado Centro Park is located in Aranjuez, a neighbourhood founded in 1919 in northeastern Medellín, and developed on a plot-by-plot basis by its mid-income inhabitants. The sector is renowned for its order and contains some emblematic buildings. The park is implanted in a block with a moderate slope. Before its construction the place was in a deplorable state, with a few structures still standing albeit invaded by vegetation on the south side, next to empty properties and fragments of scattered debris.
Rather than taking a clean slate approach and establishing a completely new order, the architects inferred an organisational principle in this apparently disorganized and degraded space. As Rudolph Arnheim (1995) stated, a homogeneous disorder can also be a principle of order if one recongises a greater number of elements or variables are at play. As we noted in the introduction to this issue regarding informality, disorder is not merely the absence of order but the clash of uncoordinated orders.
The sort of openness we see in Prado Centro Park strengthens the ecological and landscape structure of the site (each with their own order) by planting trees, but also modifies those architectural remnants that still inhabit the place (also with their own order) in order to consolidate their decline. Vegetation invades the ruins as they dissolve with their own geometry over nature. The procedure is pure entropy, from the Greek entropḗ, meaning “to turn around or return” (Aguilar 2021). The result is complex, blurry: a square, a garden, fragments of a city that concurrently live and die.