LIGA 37: Juan Campanini Josefina Sposito (Arg). On the other side / Façade on Dr. Erazo Street
Photography: Arturo Arrieta
From the street: an old industrial building veiled by a new façade that allows glimpses of it.
From the gallery: a projection of what we see from the street.
Between them: an immaterial space where experience and perception challenge the idea of a boundary between the exterior (public) and the interior (private).
This is how the intervention designed by Juan Campanini and Josefina Sposito for
LIGA 37 could be described –in an extremely direct manner. And within this radical synthesis lies the intellectual core of their proposal: material synthesis as a means to intensify the architectural experience.
Inspired by Juan O’Gorman’s painting “City Landscape of Mexico” (1949), Juan and Josefina beckon us to look at the city once again, this time through their own eyes, and to redescribe the fragments of the urban landscape alongside its relationships it presents with society. The project of a new façade also overlays the productive means that make visible the material effort involved in the act of constructing our habitat day by day. Observing, redescribing, constructing, re-observing, re-redescribing, reconstructing… It is in this “infinite loop” that some architects often find our place in the world, temporarily participating in a work that is perpetually executed for our civilization. We do this in various and diverse ways that encourage multiple understandings of the purpose of our discipline. But there comes a moment when all our proposals manifest and become public to the rest of the city through an element that rationalizes the exchange between our private world and what happens beyond: facades. Through their facades, architecture actively participates in the transformation of the urban landscape that Juan O’Gorman depicted in the portrait of his city. Facades that imprint a collection of stories and worlds that contribute to the collective construction that materially represents us as a society.
Today, we stand before a new façade, one more for Mexico City. In a block surrounded by industrial warehouses where, seemingly, little happens, an architectural installation of a cultural space opens –or rather, rekindles– the debate surrounding the thin line that divides public space from our private environments. A boundary distorted by a duality that mediates between reality and its image, between material and digital, between the concrete and the artificial. From the city, a new façade; from the gallery, the city anew; amid the two: that coming and going that leaves an invitation open for those who visit the exhibition and wish to contribute their own perspective to the world we are all collectively constructing.
