WRT
Book Review
LONDON: TAYLOR & FRANCIS
2018

Places, Types, Archives and Records: Alvaro Siza and his Legacy

A critical review of ‘Neighbourhood: Where Álvaro meets Aldo’. Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli, exhibition catalogue for the Portuguese Pavilion in the 2016 Architectural Biennale, published by Hatje Cantz (2016). Platon Issaias. The Journal of Architecture, volume 23, issue 7-8, 1316-1320.

Team
Platon Issaias
Categories
Architecture, Criticism, Curatorial, Exhibition, Housing, Theory, Typology

Whether it’s an agricultural fair or an art biennale, every national participation in every international exhibition faces an almost impossible challenge, which is a result of a structural problem. The power relations that reside within and define geopolitical asymmetries produce a pattern where culture, politics and ideology suffer both from unconstrained nationalism and the desire to be ‘international’. The fetishisation of everything ‘local’, every ‘original’ place, artefact and product enters a predefined grid that organises it as part of an ‘international’, ‘global’ heritage and production of meaning and value. The very idea of the ‘local’ is not just the residue of colonial practices, it’s colonialism itself: a network of forces that violently produces types, standards, subjects and commodities.

[…]

There is something fascinating in Nuno Grande and Roberto Cremascoli’s curatorial project for the Portuguese Pavilion in the 2016 Architectural Biennale. Grande and Cremascoli decided to organise an exhibition about Alvaro Siza, but instead of just celebrating his legacy and persona, they aimed to push it towards a different direction.

[…]

The curators’ sincere effort to present alternative, less celebratory and inclusive narratives for the four neighborhoods fall into some well-known traps. There is a particular ideological bias that talks of some sort of ‘European-ess’, a remnant of a social-democratic, federalist European dream that even if it did, definitely doesn’t make sense anymore. ‘Fortress Europe’ of extreme securitisation, unapologetic nationalisms and far-right violence, has merged with inter-EU colonization of the sovereign debt crisis. A massive retreat in public spending has made the right to housing sound like an impossible political goal. In ‘Neighborhood: Where Alvaro meets Aldo’ there is a romantic belief that the character of the architect and good, or at least ‘better’, design is enough to sort it out. This is not true; without an uncompromising attack on the complex mechanisms that financialised and de-territorialise land and housing there is no hope. We need compulsory purchase of land, serious control of profit in real estate, the dismantling of oligopolies in the construction industry and the overall rethinking of standards, protocols, comfort, materials and the way we live together and we take care of each other. Alexander Alves Costa’s magnificent testimony on Bairro da Bouça and the SAAL (Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local) shows us the way to do it: neighborhood associations and collectives, citizen initiatives and political organization. As in revolutionary Portugal, we need radical political and design experimentation.

[link to article]

About

Fatura Collaborative – Research & Design Practice, was founded in 2009 and is developing projects across a wide range of scales, from intimate objects and performance, to architecture, urban design and planning. We are interested in architecture as social infrastructure, in developing collective equipments, in the design of spaces of care, empathy and welfare. We design and research expanding new problematics about ecology, the domestic, everyday life and the city.

Members

ELISAVET HASA
ARCHITECT

is an architect, researcher and educator based in London. She holds a diploma in architecture from the School of Architecture of the University of Patras, Greece (2015) and was awarded a PhD from the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art (2022). Her thesis dealt with the materiality of grassroots, ad hoc and mutual aid projects by social movements in Europe and the United States, with an emphasis on their relationship with the state. She is teaching in undergraduate architectural design studios and history and theory courses at the London South Bank University and Central Saint Martins. She is also a registered architect in the UK (ARB) and Greece (TCG) and has practiced architecture in London, Madrid and Athens.

PLATON ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

is an architect, researcher, and educator. He studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MSc from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft and The City as a Project research collective. He is Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the co-Head of Projective Cities MPhil programme at the Architectural Association, where he is also teaching Diploma Unit 7 with Georgia Hablützel and Hamed Khosravi. His research interests explore urban design and architecture in relation to the politics of labour, economy, law and labour struggles. He has written and lectured extensively about Greek urbanisation and the politics of urban development.

THEODOSSIS ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

(he/him) is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator, Heinz Architectural Center, at Carnegie
Museum of Art and Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. He studied
architecture in Athens, Greece, and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on architecture at the intersection of
human rights, conflict, and the provision of shelter. This interest led to his PhD dissertation
“Architectures of the Humanitarian Front” (2021, Yale University), which examined a period
around WWI when conflict, displacement, and territorial insecurity provoked the reconfiguration
of humanitarian operations –their spatial organization and ethical imperatives.

GIANNANTONIS MOUTSATSOS
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Lund, Sweden. He graduated in 2010 from the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens and holds an MSc in Energy Efficient and Environmental Building Design from the School of Architecture of Lund University (2015). He has practiced architecture as a freelance architect in Greece and currently in Sweden (eg. Tengbom architects), where he works on a wide range of projects including small houses, larger residential complexes as well as care, educational and industrial facilities.

ALEXANDRA VOUGIA
ARCHITECT

is an architect and an educator. She graduated in 2007 from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds the MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from GSAPP, Columbia University (2008) and a PhD from the Architectural Association – School of Architecture, London (2016). She is currently an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has previously taught at the Architectural Association and the University of Westminster and practiced as an architect in New York and Athens.

MYRTO VRAVOSINOU
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Thessaloniki. She graduated from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2015 and holds an MSc in Environmental Architectural and Urban Design from the same institution (2023). Since 2017, she has been collaborating with a group of freelance engineers, working on a variety of residential, workspace, and small-scale digital fabrication projects. Her special interests lie in urban and architectural design practices that promote spatial justice.

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