Against Architecture (Green Arcade) - Softcover

La Cecla, Franco

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604864060 ISBN 13: 9781604864069

Verlag: PM Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

First published in 2008, (as Contro l’architettura), Against Architecture has been translated into French and Greek, with editions forthcoming in Polish and Portuguese. The book is a passionate and erudite charge against the celebrities of the current architectural world, the “archistars.” According to Franco La Cecla, architecture has lost its way and its true function, as the archistars use the cityscape to build their brand, putting their stamp on the built environment with no regard for the public good.

More than a diatribe against the trade for which he trained, Franco La Cecla issues a call to rethink urban space, to take our cities back from what he calls Casino Capitalism, which has left a string of failed urban projects, from the Sagrera of Barcelona to the expansion of Columbia University in New York City. He finds hope and some surprising answers in the 2006 uprisings in the Parisian suburbs and in wandering the streets of San Francisco. La Cecla recounts his peregrinations, whether as a consultant to urban planners or as an incorrigible flaneur, all the while giving insights into how we might find a way to resist the tyranny of the planners and find the spirit of place. As he comments throughout on the works of past and present masters of urban and landscape writing, including Robert Byron, Mike Davis, and Rebecca Solnit, Franco La Cecla has given us a book that will take an important place in our public discourse.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Born in Palermo in 1950, Franco La Cecla is a renowned anthropologist and architect. He has taught anthropology in many European and Italian cities such as Palermo, Venice, Verona, Paris, and Barcelona. In 2005 he founded the Architecture Social Impact Assessment, ASIA, an agency that evaluates the social impact of architectural and city planning projects. In addition he has created several documentaries, one of which, In Altro Mare (In Another Sea) won the Best Coastal Culture Film award at the 2010 San Francisco Ocean Film Festival. Franco La Cecla is currently in production with RAI television on a series based on Against Architecture.

Mairin O'Mahony was born in London where she worked as an editor for 13 years before moving to San Francisco. Her experience includes a wide variety of copywriting on subjects ranging from agriculture to finance to travel. She is a passionate Italophile, dividing her time between San Francisco and Italy.

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Against Architecture

By Franco La Cecla, Mairin O'Mahony

PM Press

Copyright © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-406-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Chapter 1 Why I Did Not Become an Architect, 
Chapter 2 Tirana, 
Chapter 3 Banlieue Bleu vs. The Decline of the Arrabal, 
Chapter 4 Crema Catalana, 
Chapter 5 Architecture Washes Whiter, 
Chapter 6 Italian Cities, C & G (Cool & Garbage), 
Chapter 7 The New Banks of Happiness, 

CHAPTER 1

Why I Did Not Become an Architect

Le Corbusier, for example, may design the most health-giving, labour-saving, altogether desirable residences; but he is no more an architect than a planner of up-to-date and equally (from the hens' point of view) desirable hen-houses.

— Robert Byron, The Appreciation of Architecture (1932)

WHY DIDN'T I BECOME AN ARCHITECT?

Really, why, in spite of my interest in cities and the built environment and the way they enfold the generations who occupy them, did I not continue my architectural studies? Actually, I really did become an architect, but then I began to be troubled, I had qualms that prevented my going forward, my being an architect, my doing it as a career. For years I asked myself why on earth this avoidance was such a sure, precise thing, even if I never felt it was something personal. It was not my choice; it was an inevitable choice. So why instead did I become someone who writes, someone who writes about cities, about spaces, about life in those spaces? This year, for the first time, I no longer felt myself alone. In a Paris bookshop I discovered a recent book by Orhan Pamuk, Other Colours, and in it I found an essay entitled "Why I Did Not Become an Architect." I hadn't known that Pamuk, a cultivated and disturbing writer from the ephemeral and complex world of Istanbul, who has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, with his temperament suspended between Constantinople and Istanbul, had also started out studying architecture. Then something happened to him. Having to search for a space to rent or buy in the old Galata quarter, he was drawn in, willy-nilly, as he visited dozens of occupied apartments: in big houses, constructed by Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and Genoese merchants and craftsmen, their silent entryways infused with worlds of intimacy, scenes of everyday life. At the top of the double staircases that led up from the lobby, apartments opened up that had been carved out from many little divisions of these mercantile houses, salons of another Istanbul, more cosmopolitan, more tolerant than now. The writer found himself looking into rooms occupied by children stretched out on old divans watching TV, by seniors reading the newspaper in the kitchen, by strapping women with the questioning air of those subjected to an intrusion but at the same time puzzled by the presence of a stranger. The everyday life that consumed and filled these rooms conceived for other stories and other lives, the replenishment of the space in these old mansions with the more modest but insistent and trivial minutiae of today, the customs, the fumes, the sounds of the kitchen, and the odors of washing and ironing. After having traversed so many lives and followed so many corridors and having spied on and been spied on by the occupants of so many rooms, the reasons for architecture began to fade and then disappeared altogether. Had he actually entered the architectural field, he would have designed, projected, planned, but he would never have had anything to do with this kind of reality but rather something faraway, abstract, and quite contrary to the dimension of daily Istanbul life. He would have planned apartment blocks, flats in multistory blocks like those that proliferate in the suburbs of the city, but it would have been impossible for him to have anything to do with real houses. Because houses are the outcome of the confused, fragmentary, rough-and-ready arrangements that constitute living, Pamuk never really puts it like that — "living" — the whole essay says something indecipherable and precise at the same time. What clouds the vision and makes it frustrating, indeed, useless to be an architect, is the way that the reality of occupied spaces, branded and scarred with use, compares with the perception of them. If I have understood correctly, the question is that architecture knows nothing of that precisely narrative essence from which spaces are made. Pamuk became a writer, because that makes more sense; it is more honest in facing the way his city is made up. He wants to bear witness to this city, he wants to be present in it, gathering with a sharp eye and witty shrewdness the past of places, of events, of its stones. Better to write, to narrate, because places don't stand still, they change with the swelter of the lives that leave their imprints there, with the elusive approximation of intrinsicality. Before encountering Pamuk as a soul mate, I had not understood the relationship between not becoming an architect and instead becoming a writer. It seemed to me that the two things were not connected, that writing was an original, archetypical passion that had replaced my attention to the built environment. Instead, during the course of my writing life, space again injected itself forcefully and, along with it, living spaces and spaces designed by architects. I became close again to architects, or rather, to tell the truth, they became close to me, irritated and upset as they were by my criticisms of them. And with some of them, on various, ever more frequent occasions, I started a frank, open discussion, with the proviso that there be a willingness on their part to join in wholeheartedly and not close themselves off behind the security of their profession. But only through Pamuk did I understand how for me, as for him, writing is the most honest way to deal with the city and with space, because writing does not kill magmaticity, nor presume to invent it, nor expect to exhaust it. Writing keeps in step, it cherishes the stones and the people who live with them, it speaks of the process through which the stones and the people mingle with one another. That which elsewhere I have called the "local frame of mind," a personal and collective history where spaces and territories are indistinguishable from the experience one has with them over the course of time. That is, it is something that can be defined only by storytelling.

Writing is very likely writing about this: there is no distinction between descriptions of landscapes, of urban and nonurban geographies, and of real life experiences. The geography of the novel is not a juxtaposition of disciplines but is an indispensable key to understanding the novel and the geography. We unravel time in rooms and the rooms help us to recover and rewind the thread of time. It is for this reason, if I have understood Pamuk properly, that one cannot do less than renounce architecture, because architecture has nothing to do with the substance of the true geography of the present. This book, the umpteenth on lived-in and constructed space, wishes only to make one little point. Until such time as the city and the practices put into motion for understanding it and transforming it abandon the burden of the stroke-of-genius reformers of which architecture today seems to be the most fashionable representative; until such time as they take back being first and foremost the narration, the clarification of the profound and dense galaxy, of the existential horizontal and vertical configuration in which cities are made, there will be...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: PM Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1604864060
• ISBN 13: 9781604864069
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland