Parliament of nature is an open research that focuses on doing an ecosistemic review of landscapes belonging to the Iberian Peninsula on the Anthopocene age.
The way of presenting this study cases is not chronological, but as Selma Lagerlöf on her book "The wonderful trip of Nils Holgersson" made Nils travel on top of a goose sweeping through the Sweden landscapes to explain the geography of her country, we travel alongside the fishing eagle in its migration from north Africa to north Europe, since it was the first extinct vertebrate in the Iberian Peninsula in the 70's and it is an indicator species.
We will travel through the costa del sol, the Cádiz swamps, and we will cross the bordering limits to Morocco for then changing directions following the electric highways to Sierra de Guadarrama in Madrid.
ARE WE DESIGNING URBAN PLANS THAT ARE CAPABLE OF EMBRACING WITH CONTINGENCY THE SPEED AT WHICH THE CITY GROWS AND ASUMING UNPLANNED FUTURE SITUATIONS? HOW ARE CONTINGENCY LEVELS BEING MANAGED?
COEXISTENCE AND MANAGEMENT BETWEEN HUMAN AND NOT HUMAN AGENTS IN THE SAME TERRITORY MUST BE DESIGNED. ARCHITECTONIC DEVICES BECOME UNAVOIDABLE AND NECESSARY AS MATERIAL BEINGS INSIDE ECOSYSTEMS ITSELVES. ARCHITECTURE MUST BREAK THIS DICHOTMY! THE TIME HAS COME.
Camilo García Barona
co-founder of Husos Arquitectos
professor at IE School of Architecture and Design
The direct, visible and close coexistence of human and non-human agents radically changed in the Western world with industrialization and the ensuing division of labor. Modern urban planning, the design of our cities, territorial policies, colonial extractivism and the capitalist model of production in general have contributed to maintin and even enhance this situation through immaterial and material mechanisms, such as regulations and the shape of the territory and the cities themselves, respectively.
Architecture operates on and is part of the everyday life of people, and given its immersive nature, it has the unique capability of both influencing our collective imagination and configuring the spaces we inhabit on a daily basis. Sensible and responsible environmental agendas often suffer from a lack of sufficient resources, and this is also the case of architectural practices that tackle these issues. However, these architectures have the potential to work as catalysts or detonators of actions that can transcend their own spaces, which, in most cases, are small. These architectures can operate as Trojan horses as they insert themselves in everyday situations, and, for example, also introduce actions that are environmentally responsible.
The issues put forward by Alvaro Carrillo's The Parliament of Nature and the situations he describes are based on a detailed gaze, on micro-observation. This approximation already played a crucial role in his project Castizo Urban Politics, carried out in the PFC-LAB teaching unit organized between 2010 and 2014 at the UEM. Even though that proposal was located within a dense block in the center of Madrid's old quarter, methodologically, Alvaro's project took a stance that was quite similar to the descriptions and studies that appear in The Parliament of Nature.
In this sense, in my opinion, the development of methodological approaches that incorporate critical and exhaustive observation is crucial. In these two examples of Alvaro's work, environmental and social issues, cultural and material matters as well as economic and political factors are all tackled at the same time, a strategy that necessarily has leads to tearing down the compartmentalization between disciplines. In fact, this attempt to understand the network of ecosystemic connections by means of systematic and everyday micro-observations may well be the first step in the direction of undoing, among others, simplistic human/nature binary understandings.
DESCRIBING AND REREADING PRESENT AND FUTURE TERRITORIES AS METABOLIC PARTS OF STABLISHED ECOSYSTEMS UNDERSTANDING ITS FUNCTIONING, INCIDENCE AND SPECIFICITIES IN THE MULTIPLE RELATIONSHIPS IN WHICH THEY PARTICIPATE AND GENERATE. THIS WAY WE CAN MAKE A CONTEMPORARY READING OF WHAT WE CALL TERRITORY.
SOCIETY AND TECHNOLOGY CAN'T BE THOUGHT IN SEPARATE WAYS. CONSIDERING THEM IN THEIR WHOLE DIMENSION LEADS US TO TACKLE URBAN DESIGN AS A TECHNO-SOCIAL REALITY.
ASUMING ARCHITECTONIC PRODUCTION FROM THE DELIVERATION AND THE SPECIFICITY WHERE LABORATORIZATION AND TIME FACTOR ARE CONTEMPORARY CONSTRUCTION MATERIALS. FROM THESE POSITIONS WE CAN UNMASK AND ANALIZE PRODUCTIVE PROCESSES, STERILE ANALYSIS. EMPTY OF CONTENT AND UNCRITICAL.
Francisco González de Canales
Design Director - Canales & Lombardero
https://canales-lombardero.com/
There are few cases in which the modernization that has taken place in the form of the insatiable expansion of urbanized territory has not unfolded by absolutely obliterating reality, operating on the assumption of the tabula rasa magically supported by the moral authority of the future. But this was not always the case. In the context of the allegedly underdeveloped periphery, there was once space for possible alternatives. There, on the margin, a space that was ignored, other sensibilities arose, other modernities that could have led to alternative forms of modernization. Among these, standing out for its uniqueness, is the poetic legacy of Federico García Lorca, which was not only a cultural project, but a questioning of what otherwise was unquestionable for modernity. For some, it is surprising to see, for example, Lorca's battle against imagination, as surrealism's favorite theme, and its industrial production of dreams. This might not surprise us nowadays, after its postmodern victory. Lorca said that "imagination is poor, and the poetic imagination more so. Visible reality, the facts of the world and of the human body, are much more full of subtle nuances, and are much more poetic than what imagination discovers." (Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion, 1928). Lorca had a special sensitivity towards things, towards the rich material systems that coexisted in the world he lived in. His revolution consisted in not erasing the material expressions that were already there, in the land itself, from the perspective of vertically managed culture (that of the intellectual avant-garde he himself belonged to). For him, the challenge was to join the dots. However, the modern process of urbanization has operated on the basis of an imagination that designs worlds, and this image of the world has been superimposed upon the land over and over again, to the point of annulment. To travel along the coast of Andalusia is often a bitter reminder of the consequences of this process, of the impoverished dreams of global vacationing spread over kilometers of coastline, where there is less and less land for life to take refuge. To recognize the territory, its specificity, the hybrid ecosystems that inhabit it and the relationship between them, is not only much richer than the imposing projection of a given vision, but also, much more poetic.
Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco
PhD Candidate in Architectural History and Theory. Princeton University.
Helena Rubinstein Fellow, Whitney Museum for American Art, Independent Studies Program.
http://lluisalexandrecasanovas.com
Debates around the city have progressively geared in recent years towards the incorporation of the digital in the material management of infrastructure. Notions such as “smartness” and “resilience” are the fundamental lexicon of any urban proposal. Interestingly, these expressions have equally appealed to app-developers, politicians, architects, and businessmen. But this vocabulary recasts the city as a self-sufficient element apart from the social contracts and political alliances that constitute them. These terms present the city as an organism in and of itself. They depict the city as an agent capable of its making decisions (“smart”) and to self-regulate its behavior (“resilient”). In this vocabulary, the city becomes a giant organism, not composed of flesh, veins and blood, but of connections, bits, and electronic waves. But the technologies, interactions, and modes of sociality undergirding the reconfiguration of the city as a technical organism cannot be disentangled from the inception of digital interactivity as a tool for control, surveillance, and attack. To understand the implications of the use of such urban terminology one may well look for their origin in the association between machine and living being in postwar science as cybernetics and bionics. In the seminal text “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision” (1994), historian of science Peter Galison shows the difficulties of appropriating the ideological structure of cybernetics. According to Galison, the axioms of cybernetic lexicon and discourse are ingrained in the idea of an “Other” that always acts as “the enemy.” Therefore, when rendered as a “smart” and “resilient,” the city is built on logics where the military prevails against the social, where “the Other”––either being disagreement, diversity or eternal adversities––must be fought and eliminated. Under these precepts, the city becomes a battlefield. For example, coastal cities have unsuccessfully tried to “eliminate” sea level rise in their urban fabric through dyke systems. Now, cities are getting used to “cohabitate” with this phenomenon, rethinking their sea fronts, agriculture and transportation. As historical agents in the construction of the urban, it is the responsibility of architects to rethink how digital urban management can both account for the control discourses it is based on, as well as outlining strategies to depart from its link to the military.
José Luis Muñoz
http://joseluismunozarquitectura.com/es/
“Of all the objects we have seen and admired during our visit to India, the Lota, that simple vessel of everyday use, stands out as perhaps the greatest, the most beautiful. But how would one go about designing a Lota?
First one would have to shut out all preconceived ideas on the subject and then begin to consider factor after factor : The optimum amount of liquid to be fetched, carried, poured and
stored in a prescribed set of circumstances. The size and strength and gender of the hands (if hands) that would manipulate it…
...no one man designed the Lota but many men over many generations. Many individuals represented in their own way through something they may have added or may have removed or through some quality of which they were particularly aware.”
The india report. Charles Eames, 1958
When the value of things is measured by their efficiency, that is, their capability to reach more goals using less resources, time becomes a crucial factor in carrying out any productive activity,
With the advent of the second half of the 20th century, architecture acquired high value as merchandise and even became an urgent and consumer product. The interest of the productive system is, above all, to generate efficient production processes. And this is accomplished, among other things, by the standardization of these processes and an efficient transport system. Nowadays, this normalization knows no bounds. Globalization has even led vernacular architecture from other cultures to use practically the same building techniques used in the western world. Communication and transport enable any super-efficient system to reach any part of the world within 30 days, and at a relatively affordable price.
In this way, the millions of square kilometers of the Cairo's outskirts are being built up with the same precast concrete beams and unfinished brick walls as Rio de Janeiro's favelas. The adobe and rammed earth houses of the former (materials of time and of the land) and the wood and cane dwellings of the latter (products of nature and the tropical climate), have ceased to evolve and have been replaced by an architecture that is more efficient in terms of production and supply that homogenizes the urban landscape and architectural culture.
Moreover, the structural logic of these systems generates spaces with similar proportions and volumes, therefore influencing typologies and, consequently, the behavior of their users. The identitarian nature of this vernacular architecture thus ceases to be an intrinsic part of its construction, remaining only on the surface and in the relationships it produces.
A thoroughness of knowledge and in the production of architecture, as well as the specificity of each project, contrary to standardization, is probably counter-productive in terms of efficiency understood as short term economic gain. Those who see each client and each place as unique are aware of this, and therefore, they understand that each intervention must be carefully carried out and likewise be unique and just. This critical and pertinent attitude is inconvenient in the realm of "the fast and profitable". In a context in which users is convinced of this and developers often set ethics aside for the sake of economic profit, responsible architects must accept the challenge and respond to the many factors resulting from their interventions, consciously using the most up to date technology to do so.
In this sense, technology not only makes production processes easier by making them more efficient, but it also enables recovering the lost dialogue between the user and the object. Continuous dialogue in time, which has generated such perfect objects as the "lota" in India or the Mediterranean "botijo", can be revived with the conscientious use of technology when the view of reality is amplified and not reduced to mere aesthetics, working with empathy and knowledge.
In current architecture, this dialogue is no longer the result of a long lasting relationship between use and construction. It is the product of an intentioned and sometimes spontaneous set of elements that connect with historic experience, present needs, social and environmental commitments and the specific traits of a place with a preconceived design.
Along these lines, architectures such as those of Anna Heringer (1977, Germany), Anumapa Kindo (1967, India), Rozana Montial (1972, Mexico) or Glen Murcutt (1930, Australia), take these relationships and issues and truly materialize them. Their post-modern discourse regarding difference is allied with technology to recover the dialogue between user and context, thus avoiding contradictions and achieving the primitive goal of architecture: to improve the life of people with an awareness of shared places, time and culture.
Therefore, a new form of ecological technology appears in design and production that, above all, recognizes the value of environmental, social and cultural consciousness in architecture. This vision goes beyond what is solely technical and functional, taking into account processes that are carried out from the calmness of consequent and specific work.
In the day to day practice of architecture in Spain, precarious professional conditions are accompanied by a scarcity of work opportunities. At the same time, design needs are reduced, in many cases, to solving economic issues, providing technical services, replicating aesthetics or producing mere commercial projects. In this context, it is extremely difficult to find the space, and most importantly, the sponsorship, to build on the basis of intellectual research and coherence and without contradictions between an ethical discourse and the resulting product. Reality corners us, but at the same time it shows us how much were are needed and how responsible we are for recovering, despite its time consuming nature and its inefficiency, the primitive sense of architecture.
THE INCLUSION OF ECOSYSTEMS IN OUR LEGISLATIVE DAILY LIFE LEADS US TO REFLECT FROM OUR OWN DISCIPLINE ABOUT THEIR PRODUCTS: THEY SHOULD BE DESIGNED FOCUSING ON THEIR INSTALLATION IN AN ECOSYSTEM NOT DESTROYING IT, BUT SYNCHRONIZING WITH IT.
NOT CONSIDERING ARCHITECTURE AS AN ACTIVE AGENT HAS LED IT TO NEGLECT AND NOT TO PARTICIPATE IN AN EMPOWERED AND CONSCIOUS WAY IN SUBJECTS CONSIDERED AS "PERIFERICS", AS ECO POLITICAL, GENDER AND OBSOLESCENCE MATTERS. FOR THIS REASON, THE INCLUSION OF THIS KIND OF SUBJECTS INSIDE ARCHITECTURE WOULD BE A CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGE.
Lucia Parejo Bravo
Economista medio ambiental
For the effective and real inclusion of our ecosystems in our daily life and urban scenarios, the main issue that should be tackled is the economic model. The transition from a linear to a circular economy is the key in a context where three planets would be needed to satisfy the needs of a population of 9 Billion people by 2050 and where many of the products that nowadays represent modern and developed societies are built from the considered critical raw materials, meaning those which are under the risk to disappear in the following decades. The economic system can’t no longer hold on to an unlimited exponential growth and products can’t no longer be designed in the classic take-make-dispose model and using non-renewable resources.
Cities should learn from nature. In nature, living organisms manage its resourced based on a circular metabolism, where sunlight, water, nutrients etc. are transformed into heat, energy and biomass, and no waste is generated. Instead, materials which are not needed anymore will return into the loop and play another function within the ecosystem. But on the contrary, cities are based on linear metabolisms, extracting raw materials, manufacturing products for consumption and disposing them afterwards, contributing thus to pollution, depletion of natural resources and a high dependency to non-renewable ones. A new paradigm known as circular urban metabolism is required.
Nevertheless, this shift is not possible without new rules of game and a different way of understanding the economic models. An economic system that rewards a sustainable way of producing and penalises the production with negative externalities through transversal and global legislative changes and not isolated corrective measures.
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Paula Alvarez
Architect and publisher
The three globalizations: the problem of the Management of Everything
The problems that the pioneers of Modernity faced in essence do not differ from those of the present, or, for that matter, from those of Antiquity. Sloterdijk laid this out clearly when, at the beginning of the twenty first century, he revolutionized the idea of “globalization”. Distancing himself from the cultural consensus that places the beginning of this phenomenon with the fall of the Berlin wall, the German philosopher identified a first globalization with the rationalization of the structure of the world carried out by the Greek cosmologists who, for the first time, symbolically and conceptually reconstructed the totality of existence. For Sloterdijk, globalization is an irreversible process of colonization and conceptual assimilation of Everything—from the cosmos to subjectivity—that advances, unstopped, in a succession of stages. The second globalization corresponds with the advent of Modernity: the exploitation of the planet’s available forces and resources that characterized the universal taking over of the world by western, Christian-capitalist colonialism. This second globalization was also a revolution in knowledge, of the ways the word was seen and imagined conceptually, that is, in the construction of its images, just like the electronic globalization that followed it did in the post-humanist period: the incorporation of heterogeneity (eco-politics) is just another aspect of the exploitation of Everything (the advance of technology as a form of dominance), and cannot be conceived separately.
Experimentalism or avant-garde: permanent readjustment as the masking of a dismissal
In an almost imperceptible way, humanity has relegated the “Management of Everything” to the electronic technologies with which architectural experimentalism dreamed of at the beginning of the twentieth century. Considered idealist and even naïve, visions such as Taut’s, the constructivists’ or Mondrian’s may have elevated the bar of political imagination in architecture perhaps a little too much, but this explains why today they have proven to be an attractive tool in order to question the present. As controversial depictions of the world, these visions not only anticipated many aspects of the future evolution of the relationship between technology, humanity, the environment and objects. They also foresaw that the dramatic burst onto the scene of all available knowledge under the relentless advance of technology required the search of an ecosystemic equilibrium that fully engaged all aesthetic practices. However, the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, attempted to tackle the challenge of the Management of Everything by giving technology a privileged role, aligning it with the “unilateral taking over of the word” of the Modern Period. While experimentalism focused on the existing, the inherited, the everyday, the common, the environment and the cosmos by understanding technology as a balancing instrument subjected to aesthetic and symbolic transformations, the avant-garde set its eyes on the construction industry and technologies to turn technological innovation into a form of definitive agency. Architecture was able to advance as a utopian technology dismissing ecology and commonality as eco-political variables that informed its development, and this is how it became burdened with inertness, resisting to change at the speed of the rest of the world. Ever since, architecture has proclaimed itself as a useful tool for the management of multiple and successive crises that, in truth, are none other than its own crisis. Even today it partakes in the “ideology of permanent innovation”, in the need to permanently show a break from tradition. By displaying the signs of its own crisis, architecture can survive unquestioned, concealing its unilaterality. It barely realizes that this break is the conceptual basis behind the chain of unbalances that have taken place under the auspices of “progress”, something which, since the end of the nineteenth century, political philosophy and the social sciences have strived, untiringly, to dismantle.
Architecture as a missing branch of electronics
There is a tendency to think that environmental and technological aspects—including electronics—are variables that can be incorporated into architecture, thus enriching it. With this incorporation, the “ideological fantasy” that architecture, understood as an ensemble of techniques that can be continuously readjusted and perfected to respond efficiently to successive crises, is symbolically reconstructed. However, architecture just might be forcedly and clumsily accommodating the inevitable pulverization and dissolution of existing reality that had already been a must for experimentalism. The “explosion of architecture out towards reality” was the beginning of a search for an eco-systemic balance. The avant-garde movements resisted this controversial vision, in an attempt to strategically find, without frictions, a position within a productive system that was in the process of reorganizing itself. Ever since, avant-garde architecture has offered an essential semantic service to a neoliberalism needed of “improvement narratives” to cover up its ongoing unbalances. The need to “break away in order to be” is an unconscious and public enactment of a void right at the center of architecture: the abandonment of that which it needed to take care of. As the utopian-dystopian visions of architecture of the 1960s and 70s intuited, that is, an environment “impregnated” by technology, the electronics industry—a sector much more versatile, light, flexible, portable, scalable, elastic and expansible than the construction industry—ended up gradually and discreetly taking on the complex eco-political management of what architecture had dismissed, not to make it inhabitable, but economically productive. In the 1990s, Koolhaas suggested that globalization was a branch of architecture; we could reformulate this question: could architecture be a lost branch of electronics that needs to be re-incorporated back into it, and not the other way around?
Inverted inclusivity: readjusting our role within heterogeneous assemblages
While habitability explodes and dangerously falls apart under the logic of the techno-cultural market, the problem remains the same, one that social sciences posed to the architectural avant-garde movements that followed the path of “ex novo rupture” as opposed to the continuity proposed by the “experimentalist assemblage”: with what interests, techniques and supervision is the Management of Everything being implemented? To this we must add another question (one of an architectural and urbanistic nature) that has not gone unseen by political philosophy: with what interests and supervision was the electronic technology designed and developed, in all its ramifications and potentials? What “ideological fantasies” have led us to delegate in it the unilateral management of the multiple interactions between fragments of the world which re-assemble that grand synthetic-organic compound to which Everything has been reduced to? And if architecture is a branch to be reincorporated into electronics in order to contribute criteria regarding inhabitation, how can the eco-policies of “inclusion” or “heterogeneization” of the organic-synthetic assemblages we inhabit become free of the myth of progress? What would happen if we flipped the inclusivity of the marginal, the other, the non-human and accepted that architecture as it is known, imagined and defended nowadays is only a residue, another fragment in a huge dump, shortsightedly managed by the intelligent calculations of mercantile electronics? And if we liberate ourselvesfrom the construction industry as a parameter that defines (also unilaterally) our expertise, achievements and value and we project ourselves modestly and silently on this problematic heterogeneous framework that is the world, not to manage it, but to contribute to create a new polemic image of Everything, an image at the level of the questions about architectural design that keep piling up?