END OF PROJECT
Osdany Morales

Where there is architecture, nothing (else) is possible.
“Imagining Nothingness”, Rem Koolhaas

I.
I enrolled at the school of architecture in Havana to become a writer. I passed the admissiontest, which consisted primarily of drawing the corner of the workshop where we were being examined, and ever since, I hold this to be the best method of being admitted into any fancied place. A bit Kafkaesque—though paperwork always is—and there is no compelling reason why one should not exchange a criminal record or a birth certificate for a life drawing sketched from a corner at the local law enforcement office. The choices would be either abiding to official procedures or producing a corner. This should not be mistaken for a method that only favors those born with an ability for freehand drawing; being good at freehand drawing is a sign of talent but, by the same token, this is not enough, because drawing a corner is not concerned with reality as much as it is with an individual desire to face an end.

Years after these sketches, Fernando Martirena and Anadis Gonzalez drew their own corner and enrolled in the same school and, in no time, they too became writers. Their first book, El espacio del texto, signed by Infraestudio, and published by Ediciones Infraleves, contains procedures, quotes, lists, voices of characters narrating their encounters with buildings, actions (a chronicle of the last window expended in Casa Lamas that updates the burning of the Vignola books in the 1940s, when a group of students made an extracurricular bonfire with the design treatise of classical orders); their writing is characterized by the logic of daily life, with truths such
as: “Building a concrete slab is the most anticipated celebration of Cuban self-construction”, or “Nothing more difficult than to explain how something, which is wrong in principle, may be right”. Their second published volume was a single-family house entitled Casa B and it is, at the very least, the best work that Cuban architecture has so far produced in this century.

II.
Museums make us read while standing up. We spend more time in front of the wall’s text than before any evidence of work. The exhibition by Infraestudio In your mind transforms the work-text disparity into an opportunity. Viewers visit the LIGA gallery space to imagine other spaces through words. They come all the way here to get to other places. The only visible architecture is the Mexican gallery’s interior showing on its walls the fictions of the studio founded by Gonzalez and Martirena. Both had to seek shelter in words, their practice being steeped in legal limbo since the private practice of architecture was declared illegal in Cuba, on February 10, 2021, according to the list of the National Classifier of Economic Activities. Architecture’s illegality in the Cuban context enhances its legibility.

The repertoire of works in this exhibition includes two restaurants: one exposes how a functional typology holds ideologies of binary oppositions where function involves already a form of ideology and the "restaurant" situation is enough to halt change; the other shows a possible exit, in the words of Virgilio Piñera, a way to "move around the inevitable” by the everlasting form of formwork. There are also two houses: one speaks from the precariousness of the rural nightmare where we never cease to seize the premise of being urban, and another which builds a shelter amidst two intimate volumes of stone. Finally, there is an art residence in an old house in El Vedado neighborhood which spreads off the property’s walls; and three promenades: an inside stroll through the Parliament that gives the gaze back its power through fair transparency; a sequence of gardens where the personal city reveals its pauses; and a bridge that joins the architectural emblems of national aesthetics and politics.

"The paradox of fiction," declared the Argentine writer Juan Jose Saer, "lies in that its use of falsehood enhances its credibility." These narrated constructions materialize, surprisingly, into full architectural expression. The elements that initially tried to be avoided, that would guarantee their construction by preventing local contingencies, lead to works that seem to have been generated through an inverse process. It is hard to believe that the first decision was not about materials, or scale, structural solutions or proportions, or light. The idea as the only non-negotiable outline saves them from what Rem Koolhaas called “the hindrance of architecture”. Thus, every reader’s buildings will be equally precise and true to themselves in all their versions.

III.
For decades, the new Cuban architecture dwelled in projects, in postponed plans and virtual buildings; in freehand drawings of corners traced by future writers. With Infraestudio’s unbeatable equation to produce realities, that time is past us. The project, as an exhibition format, has been overcome; the model holds a miniature city. Infraestudio found both a real and imaginary construction. Thus, the project has found an end in its double sense: the end as consummation, as finitude; and the end as a reason for being, a purpose. Overall, the project has also come to an end in Cuban land. As students, González and Martirena were shaped by a conceptual education, hearing about works while being unable to ground them in the landscape or to uphold their standing by their facades. Now, they produce architecture from within that myth, by way of fiction’s credibility.

Even if the name of this exhibition comes up in a Google search, and the LIGA webpage assures us of its previous shows, it is possible, however, that your visit is yet another fiction by Infraestudio. They have convinced you that the gallery’s architecture is real, that the exhibition’s opening is on September 8, 2022, in Mexico City, on 176 Dr. Erazo Street. You have come this far. You have completed a stroll throughout the texts that invite you to imagine eight different spaces and before leaving the gallery you pick up from the floor this piece of paper which you are now palpably reading, yet this experience only takes place in your mind.

Explore the exhibition 

Did you miss the opening? 

LIGA, Space for architecture commissioned 6 young architectural photographers to take a new series of images of the building. The exhibition presents the views of Arturo Arrieta, César Béjar, Luis Gallardo, Onnis Luque, Ariadna Polo y Luis Young. In dialogue with the curators, each photographer chose a work to be shown on the wall, and a series of images to be consulted by the public on the central stand.

In this case, the museum becomes the work of art itself, by liberating it from the function for which it was conceived, as an exhibitor of others, and becoming the centerpiece of the show. Each photographer offers new interpretations of the space through a contemporary and personal reconstruction.

The central display was commissioned by LIGA and built in structural steel, donated by Gerdau Corsa, a great ally and supporter of our initiative. For its construction a 24” and 1-ton IR beam was used, weighing 55 pounds per foot, made of high-strength, low-alloy steel produced from 94% recycled material in an electric arc furnace. This beam was originally 12.20 m long and 1.09 m high, and was cut and shaped to build the angular exhibition pedestals.

Curators: Frida Mouchlian and Arturo Arrieta.

This Mexican duo presents an intervention at liga that describes part of an investigation titled — El Sinseñalismo—which explores the concepts of digital disconnectivity and deceleration and its relationship with art and architecture. Through this endeavor Tezontle seeks to suggest a reconnection with the elemental essence of humankind.

‘Fair Shelter’ is a living space for a fictional explorer: in which a ‘signal-less’ life can be sustained. A diorama of sorts, this space seeks to display this character’s life by means of a series of objects, artifacts, and sculptures that represent and symbolize the daily routine of the user. Elements that recall, through their interactions with the most basic forms of life, a way of relating and reconnecting with nature, with the essential, while questioning our contemporary way of living— behavioral patterns, customs, and uses we take for granted. By creating an ephemeral space, the installation also explores themes of temporality in architecture, calling into question the very notion of permanence. 

The São Paulo-based firm, known for its austere, pragmatic buildings, exhibits eight of its single-family home projects in this labyrinthine space: Casa Maracanã (2009), Casa Mipibu (2015), Vila Matilde (2015), Casa Guaianaz (2018), Casa Cruzeiro (2019) Casa das Jabuticabeiras (2019), Casa Indianápolis (2020) y Casa Lírio (2020-). The models, made of basic neutral grey materials, are presented simply and straightforwardly, like all of Terra e Tuma’s work. It is not the beauty of the individual models that counts, however, but rather the relations established between them. Set up as a series, in a darkened space, with very precise lighting, some of them are placed in front of a mirror in which the following project is reflected.

In all of the houses designed by Terra e Tuma the material elements and the  typologies are similar, copied from other works of Brazilian architecture. The process of repetition or copying fosters the perfecting of the technique adopted and their adjustment to different lots, budgets, and client demands. The fact that their works are at once copied and different suggests a detachment from tradition, to be observed in the theory of “the New” formulated by Haroldo de Campos. According to the literary critic, certain important works are hybrids, amalgams, full of contrasts, as they carry within themselves multiple references to striking earlier works. They form part of the “plagiotropic movement of literature,” a kind of “oblique ramification, as the growth of certain plants is designated in botany.”

Copying and plundering are part of the creative process

CAH studies the concealed and exposed waterways that circulate within Mexico City, as well as their effects on the environment, viewed in constant relation to historical and temporal conditions. The focus of the present exploration is the Becerra river, a body of water whose place and role in the urban territory of Mexico City offers rich material for investigation. Located in the west of the city, it flows from the heights of Santa Fe, through the neighborhoods adjoining Alta Tensión, and on between the thoroughfares of Periférico and Patriotismo, finally running into a deep drainage system at the commencement of a major distributor road. As one of the last visible bodies of water in the center of the city, its bears witness to the desiccation and sanitation polices implemented since the Spanish Conquest, right through to the modern regimes of presidents Porfirio Díaz and Luis Echeverría: river = tubing = drainage.

CAH is presented as an observatory and expanded sensorial or phenomenological amplifier that makes it possible to enter into the metabolism of the water and visualize it, using various micro-controllers intercommunicated and articulated through a server. The translation of the fluctuating data is presented through two platforms: one of them physical exposed at LIGA, and the other virtual, on the website of the project www.panosmico.com, where comparative analysis graphics and other details of the project are also available.

The display operates with three sensor stations installed in dams A, C, and D of the Becerra river, which provide hourly readings of several fluctuating index: pH, amount of oxygen, speed of movement, temperature, and density of particles dissolved in the water. The collected information circulates in real time inside LIGA, translated by actuators in the installation. Each container receives the processed information of the river and reacts to the values obtained, affecting the image of the dams reproduced on a screen. Through this filmic approach, the riverbed can be imagined, where concrete and asphalt take possession of the space, showing the chaotic urban structure. The stations, equipped with closed circuit cameras, function as eyewitnesses.

CAH is a project by PANOSMICO (Manolo Larrosa and Mariana Mañón) in collaboration with Roberto Michelsen, Íñigo Malvido, Francisco Ohem, and Mateo Torres Ruiz. This is the winner proposal of “Imaginal Machines”, LIGA ́s open call competition. 

A construction that reminds us of the rib cage of a great whale, trapped inside the gallery space itself. The "thorax" is fragile and flexible at the same time, a space that simultaneously represses and protects our vital organs: between prison and protective cave. It is difficult to know if the wooden structure inquestion is the fragile beginning of a construction (the wooden studs of a workin progress), or if it is its ruin, that what remains after the shipwreck.

The reductive, but explicit tectonics-in this case the pinewood slats and their joints articulated with ixtle-cord-is a key element in Escobedo Soliz's work. But here, the disjunction between the envelope (the floor, ceiling and walls of the gallery) and the interior temporary construction, generate an interstitial space: a witness of the friction that exists between the constructive logic and the architectural obsession. Accompanied by a text by Pablo Goldin, the exhibition questions whether architecture has the capacity to liberate and emancipate us, or if, in its naive ideological aspiration, it only makes us prisoners of its own system.

The exhibition takes a starting point the project “Monolith Controversies,” an investigation undertaken for the Venice Biennale 2014, curated by Rem Koolhaas, as part of the section “Absorbing Modernity.”  A hybrid object stood in the middle of the Pavilion of Chile: a concrete panel 3 x 3 m in height, produced by the KPD factory donated by the USSR to the city of Quipulé in Chile, to support the socialist government of Salvador Allende.

This concrete monolith, part an industrial product, part a monument to the present, was a symbol of the social and economic transformation of Chile through the mass construction of social housing. The model came from France, and had been invented as a cheap and efficient solution during the post-war reconstruction period in Europe. It was later adopted by the Soviet Union due to the housing shortage arising from the de-Stalinization process led by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Its third incarnation emerged in Cuba, where the system was readapted as the Soviet “Great Panel” in 1963, as the result of the donation of a concrete panel production factory to the regime of Fidel Castro. By means of these adaptations, the panel system finally reached the Chile of Salvador Allende, following a new donation of a KPD panel factory to support the Chilean people in the wake of the 1971 earthquake.

One of the first panels to be produced was signed by the hand of Allende himself, as a symbol of a new era, an example of modernization and new social policies for housing. Following the 1973 coup d’état, the factory switched direction and strategy, altering the path set out by the socialist wing. The wall, which was signed together with the Russian ambassador with the legend “Thank you Soviet and Chilean comrades,” was canceled out with a new layer, converting the social monolith into a traditional religious altar: the triumph of the conservative right over socialism and the burial alive of a moment loaded with hopes and airs of renewal. The factory continued operating, and the concrete panel would be assimilated into two politically antagonistic phases, representing its fourth and fifth interaction: the socialist KPD (1972) and the neoliberal VEP (1976).

For the exhibition, the two researchers make a recount through photographs of the history of the panel as a reflection of the architectural, political and cultural history of Chile, starting with a journey of several decades until its recovery and exhibition at the Venice Biennale. In the LIGA space a model of a “Matrioshka” building is on display, where the different interconnected systems of this model converge, with values of similarity and repetition, standardization and variation of an object, which is linked to technological, architectural, design, art, political and cultural processes.

In addition, drawings and press documents will be exhibited that accompanied  the sociocultural process of Chile and the transformation of the city during the period of Salvador Allende. Finally, a previously unseen documentary will be shown that covers the whole process of the recent discovery and unveiling of the panel.

It makes reference to the different options of spatial perception offered by the blurry reflection of the steel, the result of the thin sheet which leaves slight undulations in the surface. At the same time, it happens to recall the twenty installations that over the past five years, since LIGA was inaugurated in 2011, have occupied the gallery. The successive exhibitions have each left their mark on the space, like a kind of invisible preexisting structure. Observing Campodonico’s work with a little imagination allows us to look back over all the past simultaneous alternatives and, perhaps, some of those still to come.

www.nicolascampodonico.com.ar

It makes reference to the different options of spatial perception offered by the blurry reflection of the steel, the result of the thin sheet which leaves slight undulations in the surface. At the same time, it happens to recall the twenty installations that over the past five years, since LIGA was inaugurated in 2011, have occupied the gallery. The successive exhibitions have each left their mark on the space, like a kind of invisible preexisting structure. Observing Campodonico’s work with a little imagination allows us to look back over all the past simultaneous alternatives and, perhaps, some of those still to come.

 About the architect:

www.nicolascampodonico.com.ar

The paper patterns are stretched between wooden frames and activated by the lighting and ventilation, which is controlled by interactive sensors. For the architect, these are manufacturing tests, experiments and prototypes where local knowledge, craftwork and traditional assemblages are linked with automatization, interactive systems and digital design processes. In this way, Haiek relates local skills with the global ecosystem, combining obsolete resources with applied technology. With the grace and ingenuity of an episode of “The Office,” the installation subverts the universe of the professional architect and transforms its everyday components—rolls of calculator paper, binder clips, paperclips or computer fans—into tools for poetry, criticism and resistance.

www.labprofab.com

Depending on the point of view, the ambiguous contraption hung between the two masonry walls can function at once as a tunnel or a bridge, as a space or as an object: a Moebius strip that confuses the interior with the exterior. In this way, with the use of a restrained, direct work of architecture that emerges from these specific conditions, Arraigada perforates the building and calls into question one of the basic premises of architecture: the definition of an inside and an outside.

www.diegoarraigada.com

MMX generates an insight on scale, content and frequency by multiplying the space of LIGA in the large second floor gallery of MUDE (Museum of Design and Fashion of Lisbon). LIGA could fit as many as thirty times within the 561 m2 of MUDE, which means that, taking size as the main reference, MUDE could feature the work of up to thirty architectural firms: the same physical volume that would be achieved after eight years of exhibition. MMX has installed a repetition of LIGA’s perimeter through vermillion fabrics tightly bound around metallic columns that created a diagonal field that saturated MUDE’s space. The geometrical and spatial attributes of each space create a dialogue with each other in order to explore the possibilities of content, establishing a new relational organization. The show is accompanied by a text written by anthropologist Pablo Landa (MEX).

www.mmx.com.mx

RCJV’s proposal, A Room for Mexico City involves the construction of a space –a room– that floats inside of LIGA’s exhibition space. Placed inside this chamber is a unique and unpublished atlas: a book that gathers images of places, objects, elements and works that recreate the career of Ricardo Carvalho and Joana Vilhena throughout the years. “The Room is the Place of the Mind. In a small room one does not say what one would in a large room”. With this statement of Louis Kahn, RCJV discusses the construction of an everyday architecture that also happens in the present moment, carried out with light and ephemeral materials. The show is accompanied by texts written by architects Manuel Aires Mateus (POR) and Mauricio Pezo (CHL).

www.rcjv.com

Chilean architect Eduardo Castillo, who was also educated as carpenter in his father’s workshop, explains: “I propose to occupy a gallery with opacity, with a wood structure measuring 2, 26 meters in height.  Silent, scented and braced, half-way between a backwater and a hideout for gangs. It is not a work of art to be exhibited, but rather a space excessively occupied with a wood structure, temporarily boxed in with four wedges between earth and sky that, like in a Grimm tale, allows me to show the ability of transforming straw into gold.”

The show expands and materializes the content of the book through projection of audiovisual materials that have been realized ex profeso for this installation. The register of light and sound phenomena (all recorded in different places) penetrate from the outside into the inside spaces.  Their projection through reflecting filters in the LIGA gallery suggests that architecture emerges from an unequal meeting between light flows and the heavy movement of matter. For plan:b, architecture is pure permeability.

http://www.planbarq.com

In spite of the bucolic environment that emanates from this ludic and colorful installation, the architecture signals with precision and clarity the urgent problematics of the actual crisis of the discipline— its disconnect from the user and the distrust of society towards the profession.  Like Charles and Ray Eames, for Chinchilla “everything is architecture.” Inspired by the ubiquitous details of daily life, her work promotes an architecture engaged with professional innovation: a refreshing combination of new technologies and a search for primary and sensorial experiences.

www.izaskunchinchilla.es

www.adamo-faiden.com

This installation invites the visitor to walk through the space, using movement to discover, approach, touch and feel the robust models of raw material. It also evokes a moment full of expectations, when primary matter arrives at the construction site and remains temporarily piled up, waiting for its confrontation with the terrain.  The “act” or “action” of architecture happens in that moment, when the drawn traces start to orchestrate form and final position of those solids inside the projected whole. Just like Ambrosi’s work, the spatial intervention in LIGA happens in a serious and direct manner. The naked visibility of the constructive parts show architecture in its most intimate and unprotected form, inviting us to reflect on the assembly processes that define the nature of his work.

www.amet.mx

The title of the show suggests that the gallery is flooded with water that is contained in a hydrogel, which are minuscule spherical particles of a polymer normally used for agriculture, greenhouses and hydroponic farms, and that can absorb 150 times their own weight in water. This material allowed the architects to create a set of scale models inside a continuous aquatic landscape. The light projected from the lower part of the base generates a somnambulist light effect, characteristic for the studio. This light accelerates evaporation of the contained water and creates, throughout the exhibition space, a humidity similar to that of a greenhouse. The plants between the water particles activate the installation with live elements, introducing continuous and slow change in the scenery over the course of the exhibition.

About the architects: www.l-a-p.co / www.luiscallejas.com

Photos: Ramiro Chaves

These range from typological studies between art and architecture to built residential projects. No More No Less revisists notions of structural clarity, formal unity and typological repetition, all of which are present in the monolithic and enigmatic objects that compose their oeuvre. The representation of architecture in scale (through photos, models and 1:20 drawings) inside the “mother-model,” generates a double reduction that speaks to a problematic inherent to architecture: the exhibition as representation of an absent object and architecture itself as the representation of yet another thing.

www.pezo.cl