LIGA 14: MAPA (Uruguay + Brasil). Spaces within Spaces
Photography: Luis Gallardo
[…] There is a cultural trait that was imprinted in all South American countries since the beginning. A terrible legacy from the colonial past, absurdly extend into the cultural sphere. This trait left these countries with a distorted approach characterized by a vertically-aligned gaze: people look upwards with envy, and downwards with disdain, and never, ever look sideways. So for over 500 years we have cultivated a cultural pattern based on the European model. At the same time, we have fed a systematic disdain for both our own and neighboring cultural values. This trait remained insurmountable for over 500 years. This makes it all the more surprising that today signs proliferate that a change is underway that aims at overcoming this legacy. It is evident in the breadth of dialogue and growing levels of exchange, above all among students and young architects in the countries of South America.
Such is the banner under which MAPA work: a studio with hybrid cultural roots, formed by young Uruguayan and Brazilian architects. They acknowledge their shared interests and bring together the experience gained from both countries in their proposals. They have proven their ability to engage in dialogue that emphasizes their strengths, even in a context that was doubly disdained. They bear witness to the fact they are pursuing a path to overcome that legacy of a vertical cultural outlook. The group is numerous, with six partners: Luciano Andrades, Matías Carballal, Rochelle Castro, Andrés Gobba, Mauricio López, and Silvio Machado, together with other collaborators. This shows that they place their commitment and the manifesto above individual whims. On the contrary, with their broad background, they enthusiastically declare that architecture is a collective activity, and raise this idea as their standard.
This is no small step. It is much more than a good start. These young architects are more mature. Moreover, the output of MAPA in at least three other completed projects on different scales (Administrative Headquarters of CREA Paraíba, 2010; MINIMOD, Rio Grande do Sul, 2013; House in Xangrilá, Rio Grande do Sul, 2010-2013) is already proof enough that it is an established practice.
MAPA at LIGA
The MAPA exhibition at the LIGA gallery in Mexico is cause for a double celebration.
Although LIGA was only founded three years ago, an initiative of the architects Abel Perles, Carlos Bedoya, Víctor Jaime and Wonne Ickx (PRODUCTORA) together with the curator and art critic Ruth Estévez, it has already had a significant impact, and its quarterly exhibitions, interludes, lectures and workshops have assembled many new voices, with a particular focus on young architects. LIGA has created a significant space matched by bold curating, and it defines its role as the exploration of new names in contemporary architectural output. As a result it exhibits striking work by young studios, expanding the space for reflection and placing surprising and innovative production at the center of the debate. This trend gives the impression that with each new exhibition LIGA adds a new name to its cause, a cause which is that of so many others, one that encourages young contemporary architects, especially from South America, to produce new work: the openness to dialogue, architecture as collective activity and a wide-ranging, participatory outlook.
In this way the MAPA exhibit is a way of exploring a way forward, marking as it does an encounter between young architects from Brazil and Uruguay who come to Mexico to relate through their work what they envision as an unfolding of their professional practice.
Remarks on the MAPA Exhibition “Spaces within spaces”
Planning a work of architecture is not the same as planning a work of art for an exhibition. In this sense an architect is not an artist. Therefore, the invitation to take part in an exhibition in which the work is displayed in a similar manner to a work of art represents a challenge for an architect, or at the very least a warning: not to get confused about the purpose of the profession. In other words, it is necessary to find the right approach, and to make the work into a declaration of motives and values, a form of commentary on the architect’s own processes in thinking about their profession. This approach hits the target in MAPA’s proposed show for LIGA. It is guided by four clearly-described operations: [1] repetition in series, Spaces Within Spaces; [2] serial arrangement, vertical variable; [3] the basic operation of the exposed interior; and [4] the relational spatiality, blurred space. It may thus be inferred that it is a question of an operational reasoning that guides them in the process of drawing up an architectural project. An operation opposed to a composition, it is more played by forces, than by forms. Naturally, it is a mode of thought, informed by the metropolitan condition, that is characterized by the dissolving of the object within a complex that is made banal by the scale. Two contradictory findings are experienced in this process: first, the sense that the work loses value as a result of the dissolving; but immediately it may be observed that its power is amplified to an extreme, vibrating in the universe as if everything that was there before were connected to the new.
Within this panorama, the work presented by MAPA can be understood.
It is a work that opens a dialogue between this metropolitan condition and the action that this demands in order to imprint a human dimension on the world. In regard to this purpose, the work undertakes something extraordinary: it brings about a flattening of time so that the contemporary condition—inhabiting the metropolis—rediscovers its most ancient roots in the idea of living in the tropics.
How do they do this?
The “building block” is a vertical prism of wood carved in a rustic style that is repeated as many times as the exhibition space allows, with minimal separations between each, just enough to allow people to pass at certain points. The repetition of this building block represents two things: the context and the time that precedes the action. Indeed, it is of the greatest importance that the element is repeated as often as possible, since the context it represents should be depersonalized, and multiplication is the operation used to pulverize the individual element in the group. Pulverization is the first and dominant aspect of the experience of the metropolitan condition. It is also very important that the gaps between the pieces be as small as possible, as the usual sensation we experience in this metropolitan context is one of anxiety, and this is well-represented in the mode of moving around these narrow spaces. What emerges against this backdrop created by the work—just as it does in the metropolitan context—is a lack that demands action to relieve it.
Thus, in MAPA’s work, the reaction to the context is emphatic and constitutes the operation, properly speaking: a clearly-defined shape is carved out of an indistinct prism, a section of an enclosed cube. The name they give it, “the exposed interior,” may lead us to imagine the building blocks represent vertical buildings in a large city. In this way, the sharp excision exposes what was enclosed there, like a revelation, as if the external walls of the boxed-in apartments were opened up, as if those silenced by isolation were granted a voice. It is a kind of paradox in which the interior, like a closed room, is transformed into the exterior, like a terrace. A dark tower converted into a lighthouse; a mute tower into a minaret. The isolated cells are inverted to become platforms for dialogue.
If we link MAPA’s exhibition to a theater of the metropolitan condition, like an ideal stage for dialogue between architects in this encounter, then the creators would also become the actors, alongside others. On one of the clearly detailed platforms we would find Luciano Andrades, Matías Carballal, Rochelle Castro, Andrés Gobba, Mauricio López, and Silvio Machado; on another we would find Abel Perles, Carlos Bedoya, Víctor Jaime, and Wonne Ickx; and another would be home to Ruth Estévez, and so on until each platform was occupied, in order to present a rich and polyphonic event with all the possible voices, addressing a wide range of issues, dealing with the future paths of architecture.
I believe that the future they dream of will, in fact, be the future. It is worth noting that the dreams of the future suggested in this exhibition also make room for the deeper ancestral vision of the house in the tropics, a form that was never intentionally translated into architecture’s formal repertoire. This is why I think it is important to emphasize the fact that the clear-cut sections carved out of these building blocks are, in schematic fashion, the caves of Serra da Capivara in São Raimundo Nonato, in Piauí, Brazil. Truly ancestral, because they contain the oldest records of human activity in South America. In those caves there was no interior, or rather, their interior—as MAPA propose here—was always exposed. The ancestral house in the tropics was simply a terrace. It may be that the line separating inside from outside never existed until the beginning of the colonization process.
Imagine the nature of the material removed by this cut, the thickness of what was removed. Such is the dimension of the overcoming I believe is sketched out in this encounter with MAPA’s proposal for LIGA.
