LIGA Book vol. 2 “Exposed Architecture”
Architecture from a Pavillion
Paola Santoscoy
A museum works on many fronts in order to be a showcase of artistic and aesthetic manifestations that inform the way we understand and ascribe meaning to our time. The competition for Mexico City’s El Eco Pavilion emerged in 2010 with the intention of providing a platform for the work of young and mid-career Mexican architects, by means of an invitation from the El Eco Experimental Museum to create a temporary space in the museum’s courtyard that for two months operates as a stage for a multidisciplinary program. Inspired by pavilions like that at the Serpentine Gallery in London or the MoMA’s PS1 gallery in New York, this competition is unique insofar as it is an intervention of Mathias Goeritz’s “emotional architecture” and is an extension of the museum’s mission to focus on experimental work.
To date, the competition has been held on seven occasions, with a total of 40 projects presented and six pavilions built. The activities organized in the resulting spaces are difficult to quantify, since they do not always involve the museum program alone, but open the doors to the public to imagine their own uses. What can be said is that the pavilions have hosted anything and everything: talks, concerts, meals, readings, book presentations, dance, film screenings, dance marathons, collective drawings, plays, barbecues and the occasional spontaneous action.
In order to discuss the history of the Eco Pavilion I reconstructed a script based on a conversation with Jorge Munguía in which we respond to some of the questions raised by the editors of this publication, treating these as a guide for thinking about the past, present and future pavilion.
Origin
Mathias Goeritz is a figure who throughout his career exploited the crossovers between art and architecture with a great deal of flexibility and daring. Interdisciplinary work was always at the heart of his practice, and the artist’s El Eco Experimental Museum project he conceived in 1953 was no exception. In the words of Daniel Mont, a businessman and his partner in the project, it was initially intended to be a “restaurant/ bar/gallery.” What they achieved together was to build something that was unique and visionary for its day: a space for projects focused on the art of the moment, one that placed experimental work at the heart of the matter.
Today, we still refer to the Manifesto of Emotional Architecture, in which Goeritz describes how the museum aims, both in the space itself and its program or “experiments”, at “an integration of the arts that causes the greatest emotion in modern man.” The courtyard, Goeritz remarks, is a waste of space from a functional point of view, but fulfills the goal of being the place where the emotion of the visitor reaches its peak, and is intended to ensure that what is exhibited in the museum is understood from the perspective of comprehension of the space.
Through a competition like that of the Eco Pavilion it is interesting to think not only about how we translate and interpret the legacy of Goeritz today, but also how we open the doors to new manifestations.
Can we make these spaces for new ideas a recurring feature, looking towards the future legacy? Proposing an architecture competition was not part of a discussion that only refers to the possibilities of architec-ture, but part of a broader conversation that included reflections on the museum itself. When in 2009 the planning of the Pavilion began with the then director Tobias Ostrander, it was analyzed whether a space of this kind could, as well as being a platform for advancing experimentation and reflection on architecture, provide a stage for a more wide-ranging program of the interdisciplinary character celebrated by Goeritz, and thereby become a tool for bringing together different voices and audiences.
In this way the project took shape, which as part of the reflection on the museum extends beyond the competition to reflect on the uses of Goeritz’s inhabitable sculpture, in such a way that everything that happens around the Eco Pavilion raises questions that are often answered in other areas of our work. Similarly, responding to a particular architecture in a rapid fashion in terms of programming is a curatorial challenge we have decided to take on, and one that allows us to play, conceptually, at picking apart the possibilities of one or the other project.
Experimentation
Working with and in a space whose very name raises the banner of experimentation means positioning ourselves in a place of vulnera-bility, a porous place in terms of definitions of the experimental. The Eco Pavilion, like the rest of the museum program, is part of a working methodology that is based on speculation and flexibility. The El Eco is unusual in being a museum without a collection, and its labor of conservation is focused on the legacy of Mathias Goeritz and Daniel Mont: the building itself. However, the current concerns of the program extend beyond this goal.
By contrast with the exhibitions, the underlying idea of the Eco Pavilion- we hope-is not to contain but to provoke. It aims for the intervention, besides being a spatial proposal in itself, to provide a platform for a series of programs rooted in other disciplines that react to the space rather than simply taking place within it. In the specific case of El Eco, we can see the building itself as the collection or archive of the museum, one that still creates opportunities to explore and new readings to be made. In this sense, the exhibitions can enjoy greater freedom, because they can assume a more distant position with regard to the legacy of Modernism and of Emotional Architecture, while the Pavilion cannot ignore it, being rooted in the space itself.
Another important point about the Pavilion is that it has always been intended as a platform for other forms of expression, such as theater and music, rather than as an end in itself. This distinguishes it from the exhibitions held in El Eco, as it is tied to this relationship with other disciplines.
This is more of an opportunity than a constraint, and it is interesting to observe how the museum program has interacted with the different pavilions. On the one hand, there is always the surprise of what will take place in the courtyard while a given exhibition is on show, and on the other, an increasing number of artists invited to produce a project for the museum respond by occupying the courtyard in ways that could well be seen as pavilions. In this way, the line between art projects and architecture projects grows thinner. This means we are continually reflecting on the nomenclature of the work undertaken within the museum.
In Practice
Each year, the proposals go beyond our expectations or preconceived ideas. Regardless of whether they are practical, capable of being built, or fit the museum’s budget, the discussion in the media, among the jury and the broader public becomes interesting whenever they address the possibility of rupture and risk. In the history of the pavilions-whether or not they were built —there are valuable ideas, just as there are in the process of constructing them, and in the events that bring them to life.
The first pavilion, by Frida Escobedo, made for an excellent start, with a topography that could be adapted to suit the different activi-ties, while providing a direct support for them. Estudio MMX, meanwhile, resolved the important issue of providing shade in the courtyard, with a hanging “roof” made of agave fiber that projected over and intervened in the space with a play of light and shadow. The project by Luis Aldrete surprised visitors with its replication of the museum’s façade from the inside, using mirrors to create a virtual, circular space that broke with Goeritz’s angular design. In the case of Estudio Macias Peredo, the idea of raising the floor level of the courtyard until it met the white external wall functioned wonderfully as an open forum space, as well as forcing us to rethink the relationship between the museum and the street. Taller Capital took this a step further by linking the pavilion to the infrastructure of the city, while positioning the museum as the manager of a complex maneuver, by placing a concrete drainage ring from Mexico City’s deep sewer system in the center of the courtyard. Finally, APRDELESP’s El Eco Experimental Park proposed a change in approach with a work that was more of an appropriation of the space than a formal intervention, leaving the program in the hands of the public rather than the museum.
Each intervention has introduced very different tensions and relations into the space, and their most powerful arguments differ from the very outset. Gradually, the history of the different pavilions is shaping a conversation on multiple planes. Each project also speaks of the way that each architect or studio conceives their own practice.
Meditations
Establishing a project for experimentation and reflection on space, from the perspective of architecture or other disciplines such as art itself, entails erasing definitions and playing with the possibility that human behavior, exploration and movement within the space can be different to our own experience.
The Pavilion, or any spatial manifestation designed for others and for dialogue, is dynamic in that it changes over time and according to who occupies it. What influences a space of this nature? How can we open up a broader conversation? The competition itself should be an active posture that reacts to conditions and opportunities of the museum, to how our idea of the discipline changes, how it interacts with other disciplines and what it seeks to promote or emphasize.
Some of the recurring and most valuable questions that have arisen around the jury table have been: could or should a next step be to move out of the museum, out of the physical space of the courtyard? Or should other parts of the museum also be subject to interventions? Another thing that has occurred over these years is that other artists’ projects have also occupied the courtyard in ways that could well be considered pavilions, and artists have worked together with architects on developing projects. As an interdisciplinary space, would it not make sense to open up the call for entries to artists, or indeed to those from other disciplines?
Alternatively, given the lack of competitions or spaces for experimentation in Mexico, perhaps it should be kept exclusively for architects?
What architecture could be built out of practices that aim to be communal, as spaces of dialogue and exchange?
The Future
For the near-term at least, the future comes in book form. In 2016 the decision was taken, after seven pavilions, to put the competition on hold A year’s hiatus for a period of public reflection on the future of this project.
A pause that in reality is nothing of the sort since the aim is to produce a series of small publications that examine the issues touched on by each pavilion in greater depth, together with a series of talks that open up a space for dialogue. The end goal of all this is to reformulate the basis of the competition in 2018.
Moving from the space to the printed page also presents challenges and opportunities to explore other dimensions of architecture. Other territories. And how many other territories are there to explore?
What must they include in order to be spatial actions, rather than a reference to a spatial action that takes place elsewhere?
