LIGA 28: Pedro Alonso & Hugo Palmarola (Chl). Trajectories of a panel
Photography: Onnis Luque
A few years ago, thanks to some Russian friends, I found out about an ingenious souvenir from this country: the rulers’ Matryoshka. This novelty version reinterprets the traditional wooden doll game in such a way that, in the most recent version, Putin, Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Stalin, and Lenin fit one inside the other. In containing each other, they also contain a sharp critical observation about the meandering path of Russian politics: all politicians contain Lenin.
This reinterpretation of the doll set lends itself to an additional interpretation. In exchanging the dolls, traditionally identical, for the different authorities occupying different posts to govern a changing region—in terms of both its boundaries and its political definition—the souvenir suggests that after all, all these politicians might be similar versions of the same story, reminding us of the recurring character of some narratives. The rulers’ Matryoshka then points to two concepts: an idea of the origin (in this case, Lenin) and the eternal return, a conception of history developed by Nietzsche as the idea of a recurring and infinite narrative.[1] Origin, repetition, and difference are all circumscribed in these small wooden objects.
In presenting to us the different iterations of the panel system used in France, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Chile as a large Matryoshka, Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola open the door for a similar interpretation of architecture, the repetition of architectural systems, and the political systems that produce these repetitions. Ideas of the copy, copyrights, reinterpretation, and transference have received much attention in recent architectural discussions, in which authors seek to complicate modernity’s anxiety over originality.[2] Alonso y Palmarola approach this discussion from the opposite point of view. Produced in order to be reproduced, the panel system has no aura to begin with, as Walter Benjamin would remind us—or at least it aspires to this lack![3] And yet, in this architectural Matryoshka, the panels Camus, I-464, Great Soviet Panel, the Socialist KPD and the Neoliberal VEP contain each other in a narrative that has, as conceptual or primary end, the pressure different governments from diverging political orientations have had to house the populations which they, at least in theory, are supposed to serve. The different mutations and alterations realized in each change in the system, that is, the alterations within this cyclical repetition, point not only to the changes in weather and culture, but also to the priorities and political orientations of these governments.
This interpretation between political orientation and formal solution would seem to give an abrupt end to this story. Thinking about the meanderings of the Camus panel, Alonso and Palmarola argue that the panel has the characteristics of the doppelgänger, a figure that according to some myths would prefigure the death of its original. In the same way as this character, Alonso and Palmarola conclude, the multiple iterations of the panel eventually lead us to the death of the socialist dream. Accordingly, the last iteration of the panel, the VEP, was repurposed by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to be used in resort housing in the Chilean coast. The path of the panel leads from the solution of housing precarity to the idea of the holiday house as an object to be sold or rented: in other words, we go from housing as right to housing as commodity.
Here the history of the panels comes to a halt and we find ourselves back in the present. The different iterations of the panels had different degrees of benefit for different groups. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the dream of collective housing was gradually lost in favor of credit systems in which planning was relegated to private interests. It is in this way that we see single family housing solutions spread across the continent, increasing distances, sprawl, and shifting the responsibility of the state on the housing question. But if we think of this present as one of the voids between the dolls, we can make a few additional reflections. Thinking about the history of the panels as a series of recurring iterations suggests that perhaps we are only in a pause within a larger system. Perhaps there are more iterations to come, new versions of the system that continue the search for housing solutions. Perhaps these new versions might go back to thinking of housing as a right, not as commodity. Perhaps the promise of the system is not that of a closed and repetitive system, but of an open system—a system that can retract and collapse, but can also be retaken, reopened, and reinterpreted in a new series of solutions, responding to new political projects that understand that the right to the city, to housing, and to space is a right for all.
[1]I am deliberately avoiding extending myself too much on Nietzsche because I am more interested in thinking about the idea of recurrence and want to avoid getting lost in his labyrinths. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 273.
[2]For instance in the recent anthology edited by Amanda Reeser Lawrence y Ana Miljački, see Reeser Lawrence, Miljački, eds., Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange (New York: Routledge, 2018).
[3]Walter Benjamin, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
