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metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture |
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 M. Gausa, V. Guallart, W. Müller, F. Soriano, F. Porras, J. Morales "The metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture. City, technology, society in the information age" Actar, Barcelona, 2003 pp688, €65,00 buy the book online and save! |
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| [in italiano] | Those
who are seeking an architect's biography or the description of a particular
project or building will most certainly be disappointed. Notwithstanding
the books encyclopaedic appearance, The Metapolis Dictionary of Advanced
Architecture. City, Technology, Society In The Information Age (by
M. Gausa, V. Guallart, W. Müller, F. Soriano, F. Porras and J. Morales,
Actar, pp. 688, Euro 65,00) is not a compendium of contemporary architects
and architecture. The peculiar and, all things considered, familiar
dictionary-like form is more the container of a strategy for ordering
and structuring a large quantity of definitions and quotations, set
against the backdrop of the urban, technological and information based
dimensions of contemporary society; it helps to describe a particular
approach to architecture, seen as an instrument of research, more than
a process aimed at the production of built works. "We have so many projects
that are worth building -the authors state-. We have so many words in
hand that together they constitute a dictionary." The first word is precisely that which defines a new concept of architecture. Advanced architecture wishes to be, for contemporary digital society, that which modern architecture was for its industrial counterpart: "an architecture bound up with interchange and information. With the dynamic evolution of processes and their associated spatial definitions." The images however, which show both buildings and projects, some less well known than others, play an exclusively supporting role to a selection of terms which register a series of conditions which are particular to contemporary space ('artificial', 'hybrid', 'nomad', 'precarious', 'sustainability', 'temporary', 'void'); they identify the new processes operating in the production of architecture ('client', 'collaging', 'devices', 'diagrams', 'fold', 'interactivity', 'layers', 'manipulate', 'recycling'); or they lead us back to some of the communicative codes and keywords of Modernism ('abstract', 'architecture', 'form', 'history', 'housing', 'section') with which many elements of the works confront themselves, in an often poorly veiled manner. It is no surprise in fact that behind this complex architectural manifesto, articulated and "horizontal", though –as any manifesto which is to be respected– with a combative and operative intention, we find, for the most part, a group of practicing architects; the entire work feels like a "call to architects", clearly identifiable in the two red pages dedicated to the "slogans", where chaos is defined as "a potentially profitable state", architecture as the exclusive fruit of "the interaction between the natural, the artificial and the digital", a project as something which is no longer to be designed at a table, but "negotiated", and where architects are invited "to not remain seated" in front of all of this. A seductive and apparently pretentious collection of definitions, more or less related to the traditional questions raised by architecture, this book is in reality the ultimate product of a much broader project activated some years ago, involving many of the authors of the projects featured, the writers of the texts, the graphic artists and in the end, the entire editorial structure. These languages and themes of research began to be explored at the beginning of the 1990's when a group of young Catalonian architects came together under the name Actar ("action" in Catalan). They took over the reigns of the magazine «Quaderns», published by the local professional association and the Collegi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya, transforming it into a forum for the promotion of experimental architecture, both Spanish and international. At the same time, the homonymous publishing house was created which, initially with the magazine, and later with catalogues and monographs of architecture, art, design and photography, quickly became one of the most interesting names in European independent publishing. When «Quaderns» changed direction, editor and format in 2000, the group which orbited around Actar re-launched their strategy by organising an encounter with 50 groups of Spanish architects in Barcelona. The selection was determined by a common approach to the theme of the Metapolis: a condition –in the definition of the French philosopher François Asher– which transcends but includes the metropolis as we know it, and which configures itself in new urban agglomerates, composed of multiple spaces and relationships, both heterogeneous and discontinuous. The document-manifesto which was produced is in reality a list of definitions whose aim is to highlight an operative strategy for this new post-urban condition. The manifesto of advanced architecture, successively enriched by a series of international contributions, assumes here the definitive editorial form of the Dictionary. The result of ten years of research, cultivated in magazines, exhibitions, catalogues and monographs, within a growing network of contacts, often interdisciplinary, the Dictionary appears as a sort of form-limit of architectural communication. It chooses to sacrifice the description of the built work in favour of a more ambitious objective. Here architecture tends to dematerialise into continually more synthetic and diagrammatic codes, becoming a sort of palimpsest able to contain a potentially infinite number of design solutions. More so than following the form of the image –while the illustrations in this volume are many, their dimensions are reduced and charts and diagrams prevail over images of buildings– this work seeks to identify a possible new form of discourse. An open and collective form, though perhaps too articulate, though sufficiently precise for favouring that climate of involvement upon which to found both the contexts in which to work, as well as the design interventions themselves. For the Modern architects the construction of a specific language was quintessential to the definition of the very meaning of architecture –it is enough to think of the rhetoric of the avant-garde, the didactic lexicon of Gropius, or even of Le Corbusier, who went so far as to add the word "writer" to his identity card– the same is true for the "advanced" architect, where words are the privileged instrument for formalising common architectural strategies. Here however, the specificity of each individual contribution is fused in the construction of a grid of relationships between subjects and events; in the connections between one concept and another; in the infinite network of ties between projects, diagrams, definitions and images of built works, the structures of which constitute the true space of advanced architecture, and at the same time the editorial structure of the book itself. |
[01feb2004] | ||
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Finally, something must be said about the book's cover: the book is
wrapped in red plastic, thick, shiny and a little bit soft to the touch,
upon which the eye and the hand cannot but stop to look/touch. Once
again for Actar the book is the realisation of a project, where they
not only define the contents and how to express them, but also their
material representation. "Plastic –as Roland Barthes writes in his Mythologies–
more than a substance, is the very idea of its infinite transformation;
more than an object, it is the evidence of movement". Within the Dictionary,
an elementary matrix of terms, open to infinite superimpositions and
configurations, plastic, an artificial material which "dominates the
very invention of forms", becomes the perfect metaphor for the progressive
movement of an architecture which "advances", according to its inevitable
modern presuppositions, through the continually mutating territories
of the contemporary condition. Gabriele Mastrigli gabriele.mastrigli@iol.it |
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