Habitat
Modern architecture was to change life. It was the utopian promise of the builders of rationalism that imbued much of the 20th century, for which the future was to be the destination of wellbeing, equality and progress that humanity would unfailingly reach. From urban space to the more intimate scene of our home, regulation of social life formed part of a plan to make our surroundings a healthy environment. The hygienism of the 19th century had managed to transform the dark and labyrinthine city, through an effect of spontaneous growth, into a socially controlled, clean and normalized space. To curb infestation, reduce street violence, chase out bandits, make the abnormal invisible. To build in order to progress, to grow in order to expand, to outdo oneself in order to triumph. Such would be the tone of new states at the start of the 20th century tasked with founding a new tradition, which would look to the future with the eagerness of novelty.
A world regulated by deft builders who would make our lives a mathematical-statistical model, as expressed in the seriality and uniformity of dwellings whose building principle would be compositional purity and the resulting absence of detail and ornamentation. A simple plan with no detours or distractions, with no errors or noise.
Le Corbusier came up with the perfect metaphor when he defined the house as a machine à habiter, a machine for living in, and displayed his ideas systematically in the document "five points for a new architecture" (1926). In this way, the daily experience of many men and women was transformed into one more mechanism in the continuum of productive alienation. The alliance with capital and its reproductive logic marked a trap difficult for critical thinking to circumvent.
Yet, neither the cities nor our houses were transformed enough to make either the civic landscape or our intimate settings a space fully regulated by uniformity and rigidity. There still remained places to lose oneself in and to be able to have some sort of experience away from the public view, to practice disregard, disobedience. The unfortunate thing is that the disasters of war (the "world war" that lashed Europe between 1939 and 1945) left behind it a devastated and collapsed world in its positivistic faith. Chaos prevailed over order and irrationality over functionalist orthodoxy.
Ultimately, modern doctrine would enter into crisis around the mid-1950s, sinking under its own weight in the face of the reigning instability and the transformation of economic, political and social structures. And while some lost their faith, other renewed their hopes in an updating of the more radical avant-garde strategies from the early 20th century. A new generation of artists once more pondered the relations between art and life, taking up the urgencies of the present and the critical potentiality of those practices.
The authoritarian régimes, the cold war which divided the world into two halves, nuclear threat, the advance of the lefts that were refounding a new utopian horizon, the imminence of social revolution, the new youth and sexual liberation were acting to modify the experience of the contemporary subject. The cities (some of them under reconstruction after the outrages of war occupation) were transformed in barricaded and guerrilla territory, with furtive encounters and driftings, dérives, in the sense Situationism gave to that term, of libertarian bodies with rebellious spirits and longing for transformation.
Traditional institutions could no longer give quarter to the new demands of artists. In this context of deep changes produced between the '60s and '70s in the social field, and most specifically in art, political discourse would strengthen the bonds with artistic practices starting from a new matrix. Conceptual logic took charge of artistic activity, dismantling any lingering residue of the old system of the plastic arts.
A dislocated art, one without a material doctrine to regulate its practice, allowed usurpation of other disciplinary fields as forms of disobeying order and orders. In this way, the technical language of architecture was transformed into artistic materiality. Art's new imaginary of project-making, which presupposed displacement of the object by the idea, found, in the graphic convention of architectural design, an ally able to supply techniques and procedures on a high level of abstraction and conceptual speculation. It is thus that artists appeared on the scene, both in Argentina and in other art centers that used conceptual strategies. The simultaneity of these developments turned Buenos Aires into an artistic and cultural hub, highly attractive on an international level yet with easily distinguishable local marks.
A group of young artists, among them Clorindo Testa (Naples, 1923 – Buenos Aires, 2013), Luis F. Benedit (Buenos Aires, 1937 – 2011), Horacio Zabala (Buenos Aires, 1943) and Jacques Bedel (Buenos Aires, 1947), were all architects dividing their time between a professional practice and art production; and others, such as Alejandro Puente (La Plata, 1933 – Buenos Aires, 2013) and Elda Cerrato (Asti, Italy, 1930), took part in the generational renewal that marked the start of 1970s under the influence of the conceptual tendency, making use of the project sketch and of the graphic conventions of architectural representation. They used these references to architecture, however, challenging its principle of authority through procedures that imitated its work methods while completely inverting its logic. As saboteurs of language, these artists signaled, through their works, the project of modernity as a failed enterprise, which found in architecture one of its most voluble standards.
In all these artists there coexists a will to insurrection, expressed in the way they force the cohabitation of contradictory situations at the very core of representation. The register of construction, with its pure line, its technical knowledge and its apparent objectivity is at odds with the trauma its images stage.
From the series Apuntalamientos [Proppings Up] that Testa first presented in 1968 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and later replicated in other spaces, as if they were some prosthesis to sustain the art institution in its out-and-out life crisis; to the series by Elda Cerrato Sueño de la casa propia [Dream of a House of One's Own] (1976) which thematizes the social conflict of large sectors who lived like okupas, squatters, of history, or never had a place in it; the architectural language used in their works expresses a slippage from its original form and function.
This set of “hypotheses for destruction” that are part of this show, as Bedel incorporates them into his work; or of studies of animal behavior in artificial habitats such as Benedit designed in his plans and installations, searching for analogies with the human; as well as the catastrophes that Zabala represents, endemic to a world under permanent threat; together with the denied identities that Puente suggests through his hybrid constructions, in which he fuses American traditions under an imaginary of canonic abstraction - all these may be thought of as graphic reflections on distopia. This concept, which Ana Longoni used to analyze Horacio Zabala's work from the '70s, starting with his multiple forms of intervening in geographic maps of the southern part of the American continent, allows us to point out the counter-utopian component this set of images conveys.
The attacks (atentados) on Saint Peter's Basilica, which Bedel fictionalizes (1973/2005), which grow like some cancer destroying it, at a fast pace, in all its immensity; as well as the mobilized masses resisting being buried by gentrification and the unequal growth of cities, which Cerrato invokes; together with the Refugios anti-atómicos [Anti-Atomic Shelters] (1983) Zabala ironically recreates as a naively cozy bourgeois living room, in contrast to the image of the nuclear mushroom cloud, all are put before our gaze like traces of a present in ruins.
In 2002 Benedit produced a set of Ranchos, which recreated the lines of the popular steep-roofed dwellings. Mute and insurmountable objects modeled in stone and perfectly polished. These massive, impenetrable blocks generated a new paradox for the critical evolution of architecture at the close of the 20th century, in an especially critical context such as the crisis in Argentina in 2001. These constructions already seemed to offer no refuge and, absurdly, presented themselves as fetishized objects: like a cold house that is a purely outdoor setting.
Perhaps our habitat is more an effect of the contingencies of the present than of the capacity of the imagination and the optimistic projection with which the future was thought in the past, when utopia was a place you could actually get to.
Jimena Ferreiro
Jimena Ferreiro has a master's in visual arts curating, and is a freelance researcher and professor.