Architecture of Necessity
The city’s inhabitants are aware of their real needs, driven by the inevitable, they transform their city under a new order: The Moral Modulor. He embodies the human potential to understand urgency and inscribe it in space. He adds, to the order established by human dimensions, the moral dimension that necessity recovers. Urgency provides for the individual a foundational alibi. Every sexual or physiological impulse, every birth and even death, will provoke the appearance of new walls, columns, stairways, new windows or plumbing and electrical systems.
Form follows Necessity. The modified houses of Havana express this relationship.  It’s an Architecture of Necessity.

Open my blog www.architectureofnecessity.com/in a new window.

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"Since necessity plays a central role in the generation and regulation of this kind of architecture, I associate it with natural forms known as stalactites and stalagmites, where the shape is the result of a fluid movement of materials attracted by gravitational force. In this popular architecture, the irrepressible movement of materials also produces a grid of lines and holes, a superimposition of layers and structures that, just as in the natural process of sedimentation, are supported one over the other. This fluid movement responds to a strength as powerful and unavoidable as gravity, the force of necessity.”
Ernesto Oroza from For an Architecture of Necessity and Disobedience, 2006.

He lived with his mother in a space that was so small that it couldn’t legally be considered a house. He expanded into the hallway, built a kitchen and refurbished the bathroom. He changed the status of the property and acquired a title for it. He got his hands on a permit to build on the roof, as he thought about moving out on his own. In order to do this he had to build an exterior stairway. He set to work on the structure indoors and started the paperwork to divide the property. The appearance of an exterior stairway before the process of dividing the house was finished could be considered a violation, and he could be fined or even lose all property rights to the house he had built.

He understood that the description of the house and its parts depends on the cultural understanding that we have of it, that laws depend on this understanding.

Then, what is a stairway? How does one describe it? Could he build a structure in front of his doorway that looks nothing like a stairway but serves the same function? Maybe just objects stacked in such a way that one can climb and descend them? Or an object by Ettore Sottsass, a stack that includes all of Feijóo’s books, a Franz West sculpture, anything?

He decided on a conceptual shortcut: he built the stairway and waited to be fined. In this way, he gained time. The Law demanded that he cease building the stairway until the paperwork needed to divide the property was finalized.

Years went by. He used the unfinished stairway.

What’s a finished stairway?

Vivía con su madre en un espacio tan pequeño que no podía considerarse, legalmente, una casa. Amplió hacia el pasillo, construyó una cocina y mejoró el baño. Cambió el estatus del espacio y obtuvo un título de propiedad. Consiguió un permiso para ampliar la vivienda en la azotea pensando independizarse. Al hacerlo debió construir una escalera interior y comenzar los trámites para el desglose de la propiedad. La aparición de una escalera exterior antes de tiempo podía considerarse una infracción y podía ser multado o perder el derecho a la propiedad de la vivienda que había construido.

Entendió que la descripción de la vivienda y de sus partes depende del concepto cultural que tenemos de ellas, que la aplicación de la ley depende de dicho concepto.

Entonces, ¿Qué es una escalera? ¿Cómo se describe? ¿Podía construir delante de su puerta un objeto diverso de lo que creemos es una escalera, pero capaz de brindar la misma función? ¿Algo cómo... materiales almacenados de tal manera que puedes ascender y descender sobre ellos? ¿Un objeto de Ettore Sottsass, todos los libros de Samuel Feijóo, una escultura de Franz West, cualquier otra cosa?

Decidió tomar otro atajo conceptual: empezó a construir la escalera y esperó ser multado, ganó tiempo, la ley le exigió detener inmediatamente la construcción del objeto hasta que legalice el desglose. Pasarán años. Mientras usará una escalera inacabada.

¿Qué es una escalera acabada?

Editing Havana- Stories of Popular Housing
Maja Asaa, Mira Kongstein and Ernesto Oroza
with photographs by Frederikke Friderichsen
ISBN: 9788791984174
Published by Aristo Bogforlag 2011
17x24 cm, 224p

RÉACTIONS EN CHAÎNE

Interview with Ernesto Oroza
By Baptiste Menu

(The english version of this interview was published in the special tabloid printed for the exhibition Ernesto Oroza. Architecture of Necesitty, INOVA, 2011) (French version)

Baptiste Menu What you call “technological disobedience” is questioning the life cycle of western products, by multiplying the industrial objects’ length of use up to the limit of their possibilities of use. This system is now possible thanks to the reconsideration of the industrial object under the hand-craft aspect.
Which forms of organization does this creative re-conquest of industrial objects take?

Ernesto Oroza I think the fact of reconsidering the industrial product from a hand-craft perspective encourages shrewd practices in contrast with the artificial voracity and activates more human temporary relations, like the repair, can authorize questions about the obtuse nature of the contemporaneous industrial object. When you open an object to fix it, there is a crack in the authority system which is set up. We see the internal organs of an authoritarian logic that imposes itself not only through a product but also through a system sequence : the objects integrate authoritarian families, share an infinite succession of reinforced generations. And this domination even precedes the arrival of the object at home; indeed its first domination takes place in the mass media. That’s why I used, in the ‹Rikimbili. Une étude sur la désobéissance technologique en quelques formes de réinvention› book, the image of Fidel Castro on the national television selling to Cubans a Chinese product used to boil water. The image couldn’t be much redundant and excessive in terms of imposition. When I talk about authority, I want to link it with all the logics these products induct, starting with the imposition of their scheduled life cycle.
Concerning your question about the forms of organization that qualify and diversify the hand-craft revision of the industrial in Cuba, I would comment one of them, which is fundamental to me: the accumulation. It seems to be a passive act, not creative, but it is literally the organizational starting point of the phenomenon. I grew up in a family where we kept everything and everything seems to have a potential. Each object accumulated by my mother can perfectly be useful in a situation of future shortage. The accumulation is in fact an emergency exit from an inopportune crisis, but it becomes a habit, because of distrust. The accumulation is regularly the first gesture in the production process and it has an absolute manual nature. That is to say that from the accumulation yet, you begin from a hand-craft point of view to be disrespectful to the life cycle integrated in the western industrial object. You infinitely postpone the moment of its waste by separating it from its assigned route. I think that the fact of accumulating things inserts an alteration, a notion of time, in the Cuban vernacular practices and this new own time organize them, give them the form of a parallel and productive phenomenon. I also said that the fact of accumulating is not only the suspicious fact of piling up objects. Well, when you do that you accumulate ideas of use, constructive solutions, technical systems and archetypes in general that can flourish when the situation gets worse.

Illustrations from: Con nuestros propios esfuerzos. Editorial Verde Olivo, 1992

BM I have the sensation that an important concept runs through your work, the material-object notion. Can you develop this idea, please?

EO I’ ve been writing recently on the issue related the re-use of generic objects as buckets or milk crates in precarious contexts like in Little Haiti, in Miami. Even if the situations are different, Cuba is characterized by a profound shortage and the US by an excess of products. In each case, there are social groups living in bad conditions. I met in each territory similar patterns of behaviour. It seems that people in these circumstances generally perceive their material universe in a discriminative way. They are just interested in the physical qualities of the objects that surround them. It’ s a diary process, an appropriate activity. When we look at the object from the exterior, we can understand it as the potential and real re-conversion in raw material of all the elements that integrate the environment of the individual. This process begins by erasing the objects’ and parts’ meanings present in our culture. That is to say that an individual recognizes in a bucket a kind of cultural profundity. But, when he is in a situation of need, he will just perceive it like an abstract compilation of materials with forms, edges, weight, structures. We can make a very familiar parallel with the relation of use we have with the natural world. It is normal to take a stone to hold a door or a branch to reach a fruit. The rhetorical or historical value of the stone won’ t be important when you need to let the door open, only its weight. A bucket full of water can only be used to block a door. The relation we maintain with things in both universes (natural and generic) comes from a unique condition: the two objects, the branch and the milk crate, suffer from identity. They seem to be foreign to the system of sense production, foreign to the culture. A plastic box to distribute milk is an abstract and autistic object, dumped through a circle of very specific requirements and that’ s why an object is accessible thanks to its excessive production. I wonder if the description fits with the branch or the stones’ one. For sure, the box has a social function, but its conception has been so much optimized that the human aspect has just become a value, a dimensional data within the plastic surface of the object, as it is for the weight of a litre of milk or the storage capacity of the truck that supplies it. The milk crate is a field sown with physical qualities, potentialities that will become more visible as far as we will have more needs, and it is also a field empty of sense. Its figure is so quiet in terms of image that its indifference and the indifference of the system producing it overwhelm us. Everyday the box travels full and comes back empty. It takes parts in a loop that could remain active for the eternity. If a box goes out the loop, lost or damaged, another one will replace it. If the world suddenly halts, the circle made by the boxes of milk in the city would continue to flow. We would be frightened by its social indifference, its pensiveness, the silence its centripetal move produces. But, around this circle or in a tangential scheme, there are circles of human activities eroding the perfection of the rational system where the milk crate subsists, splintering. The surrounding zones of the markets where milk is distributed are full of milk crates used like urban seats or used for other activities like car washing or water selling. In order to explain you how this occurs in Havana, we can use the example of the fan repaired thanks to a telephone. A quick glance to the object will carry us away from the art field of senses, from the readymade and from the index of associative resources of the Dada where the humour articulated with the image takes our look and our understandings. Nevertheless, for the repairman, the telephone is the unique form, similar to the original prismatic base, he could access to. When the telephone broke, he didn’ t throw it, the necessity made him suspicious. This telephone had been made in the ex-German Democratic Republic as it seems it stayed ten years under the bed or in a wardrobe. When the body of the fan broke, perhaps because of a fall, the family should be worried. A temperature of forty five degrees centigrade is a very difficult situation, the impossibility of replacing the object, because of the excessive disparity of wage, closes the debate. He has to assume the repair ; the accumulation he continued for years has a parallel existence in his memory. He remembers the old telephone. He only takes into account the physical attributes of the object. The angles and the internal plastic nerves that shape this prism with rectangular base assure the stability of the fan. The symbolic association that could appear after the repair are invisible for him. The pragmatism makes the reconstructed body of the object avoid any kind of symbolic construction intent. In Cuba, the process looks more severe as it begins with the flattening of the object’ s identity. In the US, the generic object seems to hide its identity, it yet comes flattened. From this, for the people of the Havana and from Little Haiti, a new field to pick physical virtues is open. Finally, I recently begin to associate this phenomenon to the ideas of Oswald de Andrade, specifically to his Cannibalistic Manifest (one thousand, nine hundred twenty eight). Helio Oiticica uses it to elaborate the “Super-cannibalism” concept considering an “immediate reduction of all the influences exterior to the national model”. By focusing the process on the productive universe and on the Cuban material culture, I can’t stop seeing it, literally like a super chewing, a super riding. It’s a violent action, in cultural terms, against the colonial material universe that surrounds us and which seems to be unable to solve the people life. But it is, over all, a foundation gesture to implement practices of disobedience from which it is impossible to evacuate ideological components around a culture of resistance.

Illustrations from: Con nuestros propios esfuerzos. Editorial Verde Olivo, 1992

BM In this context, you study the way Cubans have been able to re-appropriate the means of production and to develop what you call “the vernacular industrial production”. What is this?

EO I consider it like an appropriation of the productive management, but not of the productive system. The State means have been idle for a long time. The industry paralyzed. There was no raw material and the government had lost its markets.
The Cubans created a parallel productive space, constructed machines in their houses, workshops, tools. In some cases, they parasitized the State industry where they were working; creating productions on the sly, with illegal timetables, but it is not the most usual method. The lamp of extracted acrylic we showed in the book ‹Objets réinventés› connects the two variants: the appropriation of State productive means and the creation of parallel means of production.
It was discovered by some workers during a power cut in the nineties. When the blackout occurred, the Japanese machine used to produce rods for artificial insemination remained full of acrylic in its pipes of extrusion. So, it was necessary to drain it manually and in emergency. The acrylic expelled drew in the room elliptic lines and came tough, forming a complete figure and decorated by the gravity. With their gloves put on, they began to model in the air and to experiment forms that resulted ashtrays, centrepieces... I think that the workers had been waiting with joy and for a long time the forthcoming power cut. They had a legal protection to produce: they just had to save the machine from an obstruction and this liberation allowed they to produce something they could conserve, the expelled material was considered as a waste. One of them thought he could create such a machine at home; the device used to produce fritters was an analogous model. Since then, they did not need the State productive space anymore. They did not need either the Japanese machine that was ordered a power cut each three days. The access to the acrylic was the most complicated thing, but a black market appeared for this product. There were warehouses with immobile raw materials. The State had remained paralyzed, shocked by the crisis impact and he didn’ t react. The individuals found very quickly the responsibility in them for the productive management. The implementation of a familial industry in the ninety’ s, still active, is bound to the production of plastic and aluminium objects. The scale of the productions was so big and visible that they needed a patronage, a legal source of income and support. It is not the same thing to sell illegally ten lamps of kerosene made with beer tins and to sell three thousand plastic glasses. Indeed what was called “the local industries” came on stage. It was a State institution that gave job opportunities to some craftsmen and workers. It was unifying small workshops spread all over the city a long time before the revolution: printers of Linotype, workshops of sewing, of cobblers, workshops to produce craftworks. When the crisis appeared, the local industry was the unique skilled model the State had to regulate the vernacular productive torrent. It was used as a mediator to access to the raw materials, to distribute goods and later as a controller of the tax paying, to keep an eye on the illegal practices and appropriate the inventiveness and the popular effort.
The workshops in houses turned into living systems in the centre of the city. They employed young people of the area. Sometimes you could see them enter stealthily behind a tree: it was the thin access to an improvised cellar where there were two or three machines of plastic injection. The mechanisms were incredible, they produced them by themselves. Also the moulds. The need for raw materials converts these places into very selective “black hollows”. All the plastic objects from the surroundings were absorbed by the mechanism, a kind of industrial cannibalism. Hordes of plastic prospectors were collecting containers from everywhere to feed the monster that was expelling little heads of Batman at the other side. Sometimes families were living with the machines inside the house, not in a patio or a cellar. A room during the day can transform itself into a plant to produce electric switches, pipes or hoses. Photos of children on the wall of the house and a small bedside table now used as a toolbox reappraised the past of the space. I can’ t stop using these examples to answer you. In the order of the definitions, I think that the words “domestic or familial industrial production”, allow determine a more complete form of production that holds an implicit increase of the series characteristic and of the volume of production, but that remains especially associated to the house and that mixes its activities with the domestic tasks of the family. Other vernacular and familiar features in these productions, responding to appropriation gestures, can be found in the elaboration of the designs and in the inspiration sources. In a certain way, the objects present in the house before the crisis supplied a guide to get some values by appropriating the form of a glass. They used its dimensions, decorations, ergonomic values. The family recycled the formal universe coming from the exchanges of Cuba with the communist Europe. It had a second life embodied in the multicolour plastic or aluminium.

Illustrations from: Con nuestros propios esfuerzos. Editorial Verde Olivo, 1992

BM In front of a perpetual emergency, these practices of reinvention extend themselves to all fields of the everyday life. You say that “the city takes place at the biological rhythm of the house”, a strong image you employ is the potential house. Would you please tell us more about this thin link between the Human and its constructed environment?

EO The crisis persistence and the hope loss in the socialist government productivity generated a mentality, a social being that I called, revisiting Le Corbusier: the Moral Modulor. I talk about an individual or a family pushed in some circumstances under the poverty line (below zero would say Glauber Rocha).They can proceed to a moral reinvention. Their actions will occur in a threshold or a moral frequency where you can’t see old historical and esthetical values, social status, urban standards and codes of citizen behavior in general. That is to say, all these conventions relative to an order now hostile and restrictive of the family survival will be questioned. The individual will register this freedom in his spaces and objects, next to the order of his foot; he will set up an unknown moral dimension. The house, and the city by extension, becomes a continuous diagram of the shrewd relations of the individual with his needs, the contextual limits and the available resources. I told in other occasions that the facades are like films displayed from the middle of the house to the exterior. They talk about the past and the recent life of the family. Indeed, they announce plans, threaten of invasions or inform on future metamorphosis and fusions: staircases which don’ t fit to any side, walls that figure expanding to all interstices, baths open to the public sight, terrace roofs invaded by materials and heterogeneous accumulations. The house like a finished entity doesn’t exist anymore. The house is like an organism that auto-constructs itself in time to the human rhythms living in it. What I call Potential House, or more recently Convergent House, is a way to live in the process (of living). I think there is no better diagram to explain the relations you ask me than the houses themselves, their surfaces, spaces and structures.

Stills from Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011

Curated by Nicholas Frank
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts
Curator's Statement
Download Tabloid (special issue) printed for the exhibition.

Ernesto Oroza’s “Architecture of Necessity” chronicles the inventive solutions that arise under conditions of severe economic limitations, such as those in his native Havana. The island nation of Cuba has been embargoed and isolated for decades and restricted by an authoritarian government, and deprivation is the norm. Though private production is illegal under the current system, people invent the things they need, and make changes to their built environment as necessary.
Oroza’s work (in essays, photographs, collected and reconstructed objects) documents the range of inventive solutions borne out of these conditions, while charting a moral course for social discourse and development.
The exhibition at Inova will feature a combination of interior design and architectural elements, along with documentary photographs of architectural modifications in Havana, and video detailing various household inventions. Inova will publish an edition of Oroza’s Tabloids, an ongoing project that conveys ideas and visual information in an inexpensive and widely distributable format. The Inova tabloid will act as the exhibition publication for the concurrent shows (Matthew Girson and Jeanne Dunning), and contain information specific to the Milwaukee community. We are grateful for the support of the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts and Aprenda Invertir (Miami).
This is Oroza’s first exhibition in the Midwest.

"The need for raw materials converts these places into very selective “black hollows”. All the plastic objects from the surroundings were absorbed by the mechanism, a kind of industrial cannibalism. Hordes of plastic prospectors were collecting containers from everywhere to feed the monster that was expelling little heads of Batman at the other side. Sometimes families were living with the machines inside the house, not in a patio or a cellar. A room during the day can transform itself into a plant to produce electric switches, pipes or hoses. Photos of children on the wall of the house and a small bedside table now used as a toolbox reappraised the past of the space."
From: Menu, Baptiste. Réactions en chaine Interview with Ernesto Oroza. Azimuts 35, Cite du design, 2010.

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{besps_c}0|G orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H1 orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H2 orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|H3 orozainova.jpg|Untitled (cabaret a la deriva), 2011|Video installation, details. Marble plastic surface from plastic cups, jewels, toys made by families at home, using reinvented injection machines. Row material: scavenged plastic around the city: discarded auto pieces, stolen trash urban cans, plastic bottles.{/besps_c}
{besps_c}0|I orozainova.jpg|Architecture of Necessity|General view{/besps_c}
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Cintas Foundation Finalists Exhibition for the Emilio Sanchez Award in the Visual Arts, Miami, US.

Moral Modulor (from Architecture of Necessity: 1997-2008). 120 slides and cut, 2008
Updating City (theorem). Miami, 2008. Founded metal bars chairs and monobloc plastic chairs.

Statement of Necessity 2008
Ernesto Oroza  

Foreword: Gean Moreno
Paperback
Publisher: Alonso Art and BookSurge Publishing (November 11, 2008)
ISBN-10: 1439216657
ISBN-13: 978-1439216651

Book documenting the exhibition Statement of Necessity by Ernesto Oroza, at Alonso Art in November-December, 2008. The book features the 20 color photographs exhibited. www.alonsoart.com

Updating City (theorem). 2000-2010
Founded metal bars chairs, monobloc plastic chairs, metal bars.

Objects of necessity
In certain contemporary urban areas the necessity generates objects that look more the result of an unavoidable sedimentation of materials cornered by the wind into the shapes of the city than the result of a productive activity.
Broken metal chairs loosen from a school and plastic chairs, also broken, expelled from a cafeteria, nearly one piece each month, they ramble around the neighborhood until they get tangentially trapped inside a human activity: a security guard, a street vendor, a ruined bus stop, a mechanic having his business on the sidewalk. It happens everywhere at the same time, as if a hypothetical grid formed by all the broken plastic seats in the city fit by gravity with the gridded field of metal broken chairs spread years ago around Havana. The necessity generates a fatal equation that, under similar circumstances, produces the same results. The individual in need will focus exclusively the repertoire of the usefulness, propitiating a conjunction, a harvest time.

Updating City (theorem). 2009
Founded metal bars chairs and monobloc plastic chairs, tube.
<<click on the image for more views>>
{slimbox single images/objects/ernesto-oroza-canape-provisional-b.jpg,images/objects/ernesto-oroza-canape-provisional-b.jpg, Updating City (theorem). 2009; images/objects/ernesto-oroza-canape-provisional-2009.jpg,images/objects/ernesto-oroza-canape-provisional-2009.jpg, Updating City (theorem). 2009; images/objects/arteamerica1.jpg,images/objects/arteamerica1.jpg, Updating City (theorem). 2009}

Improvising Architectures Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Ernesto Oroza, Viking Funeral, Graham Hudson, Felipe Arturo, Heather Rowe and Carlos Sandoval de León

Curated by Gean Moreno
Project opening January 13th 2011

Improvising Architectures

Over the last decade there have a been a number of exhibitions dedicated to Miami artists. These have been excellent at presenting a generation of homegrown artists, and explaining its internal dynamics and its relationship to previous generations that migrated to, and continue to work in the city. What these exhibitions haven’t done as consistently is place the work of Miami artists alongside that of their international generational peers in a concrete way–that is, by literally presenting the work side-by-side, on equal footing.

It is only by doing this that we can begin to gauge how these artists fare in an international context. One the one hand, the similarities that Miami artist may share with their international counterparts will surface, disclosing how their work fits within international trends. On the other hand, their differences will also shine through to reveal what new positions they bring to an international dialogue. One of the goals of Improvising Architectures is to begin this process of presenting Miami artists within a larger context in a systematic way. It will showcase the work of five Miami artists–Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Ernesto Oroza and Viking Funeral–along side that of artists who live in London (Graham Hudson), Bogotá (Felipe Arturo), and New York (Heather Rowe and Carlos Sandoval de León).

Another goal of the exhibition is to take improvised architectural spaces as figures through which to think a world of globalized networks. What is the relationship between “nomadic” structures or improvised buildings and a world that is, at once, more connected and more disconnected, more prone to swift changes precisely because it is a world of expanding horizons? What happens when a sense of the precarious begins to be felt everywhere? Of course we need not think of all this so literally. What of discursive or mental architectures–ways of seeing the world–that need to be improvised to keep up with the velocities and changes that cut right through our everyday lives? The improvised dwelling site is a metaphor for ways of thinking that need to be light enough to change quickly as disruptions and alteration continue to reorganize the world for us. The sculptures and installations in this exhibition allude to the informal architectural structure as a double metaphor. On the one hand, as the trope for a type of building that recognizes the world as a series of forces that can change everything in an instant. And, on the other hand, as a metaphor for the kind of thinking that is necessary in a world that is increasingly characterized by erratic shifts, proliferating information, and expanding vistas.

-Gean Moreno

ENTER THE DRAGON Pop-up shop, Ernesto Oroza, 2010
Customized vinyl adhesives tiles, fluorescent lamps, prints.

ENTER THE DRAGON

Hay imágenes que tienen la capacidad de cambiar el sentido de una práctica. Una de ellas es No-Stop City, fue elaborada por Archizoom in 1969.

El grupo creó y divulgó decenas de dibujos, fotomontajes y fotografías de modelos que diagramaban este fatalismo urbano que es la ciudad genérica. Su propuesta interpretaba y anunciaba en los nuevos espacios de producción y consumo (fábricas, supermercados y grandes mall), un modelo real para urbanizaciones interiores totales, espacios fluidos con capacidad infraestructural para atender a todas las necesidades de los habitantes. Si bien la tesis de Archizoom iniciaba con un análisis crítico-realista al sistema capitalista y específicamente al estado de hyper consumismo, sus creaciones se enfocaron en mostrar paisajes premonitorios en los cuales quedaríamos habitando, obligatoriamente y quizás acosados por un espacio exterior árido y contaminado, reductos interiores ambientados y normalizados por una incipiente, en aquel entonces, burocracia global capitalista.

Entre 1970 y 1972 el colectivo da a conocer un conjunto de nuevas fotografías de maquetas realizadas al centro de una estructura prismática formada por cuatro espejos. Cada set acogía un mini universo modélico y lo expandía por medio de la percepción fotográfica hacia un sinnúmero de reflexiones. Una palma, unas columnas metálicas, una alfombra, una moto, una cocina, una casa de campaña, algunas rocas se usaron indistinta o conjuntamente para crear los paisajes interiores de No-Stop City. Los únicos límites visibles en la perspectiva se lograban con las representaciones de pisos alfombrados y pavimentados, falsos techos reticulados iluminados, paredes de panelería metálica o plástica modulares.

Un ambiente micro climatizado y alumbrado artificialmente es la condición perpetua de estos modelos que devoran nuestra mirada, repetición tras repetición, en una perspectiva sin fin. Aun aquellos que representan un paisaje exterior con zonas de césped, e incluso árboles y edificios, parecen producirse en un interior con luces y clima controlados hasta la infinitud. Y es que las distinciones efectivas entre áreas y funciones, entre exteriores e interiores, espacios de producción y consumo (y desecho), entre sitios de trabajo y descanso o recreación parecían colapsar una y otra vez en cada célula especular. Es posible que las funciones enmarcadas y la especialización de áreas hubieran producido interrupciones en la perspectiva deseada para esta metrópolis fluida. Al suprimirlas, apostando por un imperativo visual que favorecía la indiferenciación de zonas de uso, predijeron la condición invasiva, desparramada y ubicua (en términos funcionales, métricos y logísticos) de la materia genérica contemporánea.

Siempre he creído que la imagen de No-Stop City, como un modelo de expansión solo pudo ser imaginado sobre otra figura de invasión: la de la Roma imperial. Aunque la tipología fluida y la escala mega estructural de este proyecto urbano pudiera tener antecedentes formales en la New Babylon de Constant y comparte esos mismos rasgos con el Monumento Continuo de Superstudio, las urbes conectadas de Archigram y la ciudad espacial de Yona Friedman, entre otros proyectos de la época, se distingue de estos al colocar como energía generativa al capital, los modelos económicos transnacionales, el lenguaje convencional de lo genérico, las normas y su instrumentación.

Las maquetas y diagramas usados en prácticas proyectuales como la arquitectura, el diseño y el urbanismo se comportan como caballos de Troya. Son, frecuentemente, objetos de traición y decepción. Lo que parece ocurrir es que por mediación de su capacidad anunciadora estos modelos promueven también, sin que esto sea un propósito, las realidades de su propio tiempo. Es decir, albergan en su cuerpo de madera, cartón y plástico las realidades tecnológicas, ideológicas y económicas que el arquitecto radical está criticando y pretende superar. Estas realidades no solo se asientan en las materias del modelo sino que parasitan inequívocamente los vehículos para la trascendencia del mismo. Viajan en el tiempo, la realidad y su crítica, hasta derretirse en un solo cuerpo.

Cada hito intelectual está constreñido, atrapado en el lenguaje proyectual de su tiempo y en muchas de aquellas visionarias propuestas de los 70´ se transpira hoy la presencia de afectadas ideologías tecnológicas, las ineficiencias para trascender de las técnicas y formas de comunicación de su tiempo y esa incapacidad que tiene el imaginario tecnológico para adelantarse al futuro.

Un año atrás, mirando fotografías de los modelos de No-Stop City en el último libro publicado sobre el grupo, descubrí pequeños accidentes en los bordes de las maquetas, restos de pegamento, desniveles, polvo, manchas, fisuras. Creo que estas intrusiones no fueron producto del envejecimiento, pues las fotos debieron tomarse inmediatamente tras la fabricación de los modelos, sino que -formaron parte del proceso constructivo mismo. Noté después que estas minúsculas imperfecciones y las costras se multiplicaban también en los espejos creando un nuevo patrón de repeticiones que una vez visto no puede ser obviado.

En la nueva imagen (ya no puedo recuperar la anterior) cohabitan la palma (recurrente en los proyectos de Archizoom) con cúmulos de basura y arañazos. En la unión entre el falso techo y las columnas abunda la entidad amorfa, el resto de pegamento, que en el ámbito de la representación del modelo parece baba chorreada, una y otra vez hasta el colapso del horizonte, por algún -monstruo que habita el exterior de No-Stop City. Sobre la superficie pulida de columnas y volúmenes multi-funcionales de acabados genéricos (Formica, Abet Laminati) se deja ver una capa de polvo con una escala y cantidad tal que asusta: el polvo devino una inagotable escombrera. Los espejos devinieron un medio viral insuperable, un surtidor de eczemas, un sistema reproductivo artificial que nunca antes alojó mejor la metáfora de la metrópolis genética autogenerativa que Branzi, hasta hoy, propone.

Expandiéndose perennemente a lo largo de este paisaje urbanístico, las manchas y errores también han trascendido en el tiempo. Quizás en las maquetas, que hoy conservan colecciones como la del Centre Pompidou, se ha complicado el asunto de estas manchas. Quizás ya produjeron sus propios mohos y hongos, unos minúsculos ecosistemas. Puedo imaginar esas entropías intrusas consolidándose con un aburrimiento especular. Células voraces reproduciéndose, o batallando por sobrevivir como Bruce Lee en Enter the Dragon (1973), alimentándose de los ácidos y otras materias orgánicas de la cola, las tintas y el papel. Y cada célula feroz repitiéndose miles de veces más, de verdad y en los espejos. Habitando un modelo para hacerlo mas eficiente en su carácter pedagógico y representacional, afinando su premonición de la metrópolis no figurativa constituida y normada por las reglas métricas y morales que impone la sobrevivencia, por las convenciones sociales, por astucias tan inevitables que recurren hasta devenir patrones de comportamiento previsibles y por tanto débiles y necesariamente reemplazados por otras nuevas astucias.

Pero hay una condición de tiempo fundamental en estas maquetas y sus fotos. Cuando fueron tomadas las fotografías los elementos extraños ya habían invadido el espacio aséptico de la maqueta utópica y le acusaron una mayor dosis de realidad, de presente. Es decir, que los borrones, el polvo, las células muertas y los cabellos de Branzi, Corretti y Deganello, al traernos de vuelta el plano de realidad que ellos habitaron nos remiten igualmente al contexto cultural y social de su tiempo, a las ansiedades y energías que nutrieron a No-Stop City. Sin embargo la utopía inscrita en el manifiesto que se conoce, en las decenas de fotos de estas maquetas publicadas por tantos años, irradia una luz que ciega, hace invisible y pospone la realidad del modelo: el presente, que cohabita con la utopía. Es decir, la lucidez e imaginación del proyecto, la fe inyectada por Branzi y sus colegas en su programa y visión crítica de futuro esconde al observador la realidad de la maqueta, que es la suya. La utopía no deja ver la fatalidad de la materia que la forma: la vieja ideología se amarillea como el cartón. “La utopía no está en el fin, sino en lo real. No hay en ella motivación moral, sino un puro proceso de liberación inmediata. No hay en ella alegoría, sino un fenómeno natural…” nos recuerda Branzi¹

Morocco Slate, Senegal Burnt Almond y Regal Wood

Como el moho en los modelos de No-Stop City, en las ciudades contemporáneas recurren una y otra vez ciertas tácticas de parasitación e inserción en infraestructuras productivas y comerciales. El hecho no está lejos del centro crítico del proyecto de Archizoom, el cual enunciaba que “en un mundo sin calidad el individuo solo puede satisfacerse mediante su propio -esfuerzo y actividad creativa”.

Nunca antes, como en su estadio genérico, tuvo la cultura material tanta potencialidad para la injerencia, nunca antes pudo ser considerado un sistema tan abierto o de participación como puede ser apreciado ahora. Y es paradójico porque a la producción genérica y la súper normalización hay que reconocerle también una sórdida indiferencia hacia lo doméstico y por tanto al individuo y sus necesidades. La condición autista del universo natural en relación a las problemáticas humanas parece inherente también a lo genérico. Si el sistema se ha abierto no es por empatía social, todo lo contrario, es por indiferencia hacia lo humano, ya no hay interés en cerrarse, en sacar provecho del secreto técnico. Sin embargo el objeto industrial pre-genérico parece más dado a lo hermético, a esconder los principios patentados, a hacerse extraño, inaccesible (a cambio de esto aparece en el objeto un plano que se responsabiliza por la interface, una superficie amigable.)

Si un ventilador reparado sigue pareciéndonos una sorpresa folclórica es porque por mucho tiempo el sistema industrial capitalista se valió de cierta inviolabilidad del cuerpo del producto. Quizás se trata de algo tan básico como que al ocultar las vísceras del objeto se potencie el deseo de poseerlo. Quizás, también, al asegurar el perímetro cuantificable del objeto, al hacerlo una porción nombrable e indisoluble este se constituya una mercancía. Una entidad igualada a una cantidad especifica de valor monetario. El objeto industrial contemporáneo -y al diseño hay que reconocerle su participación activa en ese proceso- puede ser entendido, además, como una representación de cierto valor cambiario, como aquel trozo de metal usado como patrón de masa en las básculas tradicionales.

El universo genérico, sin embargo, parece favorecer más el fragmento y no al objeto, la nueva mercancía es semifinish, innombrable en la forma tradicional de silla, mesa, radio. Ahora un recubrimiento para pisos en vinyl adhesivo puede llamarse Morocco Slate, una tabla de bagazo con un acabado plástico puede ser encontrada en ferreterías, como Home Depot, bajo el nombre de Cancún. Muchos de los productos actuales no pueden ser nombrados en el término tradicional de objeto, pero tampoco en el de materias primas. Sin embargo el individuo esta accediendo cada vez mas a la mercancía genérica cuando aun esta conserva su nomenclatura comercial o el código que la organiza durante la producción. Aun con todo el esfuerzo del productor o comerciante por abrir en esta tabla de bagazo un umbral afectivo o de significados tropicales bajo el nombre de Cancún esta adolece de memoria, no puede asociarse a ningún sistema de objetos conocido, no existe ritual de uso relativo a esta tabla en la cultura. Es una materia cruda en términos productivos pero también en términos culturales.

Lo que esta ocurriendo es una inundación incontrolable a escala urbana de materia neutral. Un tsunami de lo genérico ha cubierto la ciudad mientras dormíamos. Los propios comerciantes y productores no reconocen aun el cambio de paradigma. Sin embargo el uso de nombres paradisíacos remite al modelo de hábitat y confort precedente lo que hace pensar que reconocen estar tratando con mercancías sin memoria social.

Esta situación remite parcialmente a proyectos como los de Gaetano Pesce y Global Tools. El acceso actual por los individuos a medios productivos y materiales diversificados, parecía utópico hace 40 años. Los habitantes de los edificios de Pesce podían definir por ellos mismos los espacios interiores y fachadas de sus apartamentos restringidos únicamente por su estructura física y la llegada de sistemas técnicos como agua y electricidad. Pero el individuo en los modelos de Pesce necesita hoy de habilidades para tratar con otras fuerzas infraestructurales: las regulaciones legales comunales, las imposiciones urbanísticas, de seguridad y constructivas. Estaría bien pasar uno de esos edificios de Pesce por la comisión de aprobación constructiva en Little Haiti. Una fuerza regulatoria tan poderosa como el tsunami que surte materia genérica en la urbe le daría posiblemente la forma que hoy tiene ese vecindario.
Sin embargo parece que en el campo restringido de las normas ocurren ciertos desajustes, desacomodos. Entre esos pliegues se filtran riachuelos intermitentes de prácticas individuales, astucias, entendimientos.

Pop-up store "Enter The Dragon"

Pienso que los cuerpos invasivos, que he creído ver, en los modelos de No-Stop City han aguzado su pronóstico. La urbe prevista por Archizoom alcanza con estos elementos intrusos una vigencia notoria. Ciertas prácticas vernáculas intrusivas, improvisadas, provisionales empiezan a ser recurrentes en determinados sectores urbanos acosados por condiciones económicas difíciles. Allí donde las regulaciones dejan vacíos legales se derraman gestos oportunistas, pragmáticos, en ocasiones parásitos². Los individuos en crisis tienen una conciencia de lo infraestructural, reconocen los torrentes donde es beneficioso meter un dedo para provocar un pequeño y momentáneo desvío.

Si el universo natural y el universo artificial genérico se parecen cada vez más. Si ambos pueden ser considerados torrentes productivos autónomos (la esfera de lo genérico parece auto generar y estructurar sus propias reglas, indiferentes del campo social inmediato.) Si ha ese caudal productivo que es la naturaleza fuimos capaces de entenderle sus ritmos, sus energías y la agricultura devino una sistematización de ese entendimiento, lo mismo podemos hacer con la producción genérica. Hay un tipo de diseño, que puede valerse de tácticas agrarias, una agricultura del campo genérico puede ser implementada.

El producto que he escogido para comenzar este proyecto de pop-up store y de una "agricultura" de lo genérico es la losa de vinyl adhesivo suministrada en Home Depot. En conjunto con otros recubrimientos, ya sean de pisos paredes o techos, albergan como muchas otras materias contemporáneas los signos de un sistema de valor que ha priorizado las métricas normalizadas, lo genérico y el tan cuestionado imperio de la homogenización industrial global.

El valor importante de esta materia es su carácter modular. Por el efecto de multiplicación, la producción seriada hace de la losa un vehículo de repetición y por tanto de expansión importantísimo, así como lo hacen los espejos en los proyectos de Archizoom. Aceptando este principio de expansión, e infiltrando la lógica reproductiva del patrón y para proveer esa ilusión expansiva, podemos, en lugar de aplicar un esperado recurso decorativo aplicar una conducta, una astucia, un gesto. En este caso estaremos dando la capacidad a ese gesto, a esa astucia, o a esa conducta de multiplicarse y extenderse hacia el infinito. O al menos, estaremos habilitando la potencialidad para esa expansión. Para alterar nuestras losas adhesivas compradas en Home Depot se pueden usar técnicas de graffiti y emplear métodos reproductivos paramétricos. Con el nuevo patrón estaremos creando un plano "decorativo" paralelo con nuevas implicaciones morales, un plano de decoración forajida. Y es que el método infiltra y parásita un lenguaje tecnológico, una lógica económica y un plano de expresión que parece cerrado y excluyente.

Este proyecto se auto declara temporal. Entiende que en el paisaje infinito de lo genérico los gestos vernáculos se disuelven, ruedan minúsculos hasta desaparecer, como los huesos de possum en la carretera interestatal I-95.

Ernesto Oroza Nov/2010

¹Andrea Branzi, La arquitectura soy yo, Architecture Radicale, Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne, France, 2001

² Para una extensión de estas ideas ver: Gean Moreno, -Ernesto Oroza, Learning from Little Haiti. E-flux Journal #6, May, 2009. Para una lectura de otros textos asociados visite: www.thetabloid.org

Updating City (theorem). Miami, 2008.
Founded metal bars chairs and monobloc plastic chairs.
<<click on image for more views>>

{slimbox single images/objects/ernesto-oroza-updating-city-theorem-2008.jpg,images/objects/ernesto-oroza-updating-city-theorem-2008.jpg, Updating City (theorem) 2008; images/objects/oroza-sofa-dibujo.jpg,images/objects/oroza-sofa-dibujo.jpg, Updating City (theorem). Drawing 2008}

Hoy en "Habalndo de Espacio" y para hablar, entre otros temas de: "arquitectura de la necesidad" estará como invitado Ernesto Oroza. A partir de las 10:00am hasta la 1:00pm en "Habana Radio". March 23

The Cuba Collection
Curated by Claudia Miyar & Liz Dimmitt

Editing Havana- Stories of Popular Housing

Maja Asaa, Mira Kongstein and Ernesto Oroza
with photographs by Frederikke Friderichsen
ISBN: 9788791984174
Published by Aristo Bogforlag July 2011
17x24 cm, 224p

Architecture of Necessity at INOVA
Curated by Nicholas Frank (press release)
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts
Jan 21 2011 - Mar 13 2011, Opening reception on 1/21 from 5-8pm.
Exhibition's views

INOVA/Kenilworth
2155 North Prospect Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53202

Improvising Architectures Christy Gast, Adler Guerrier, Nicolas Lobo, Ernesto Oroza, Viking Funeral, Graham Hudson, Felipe Arturo, Heather Rowe and Carlos Sandoval de León
Curated by Gean Moreno
Project opening January 13th 2011


ENTER THE DRAGON Pop-up shop, Ernesto Oroza, 2010

PROYECTO HABITAR

Spanish Cultural Center Montevideo.
Curated by Luisa Espino
February 10th - April 10th 2010