Last week, the
FAD 2011 Awards
for architecture, interior design, city and landscape, ephemeral interventions, and thought and criticism were presented.
VIB{}K Editions
received the
FAD 2011 Award for Thought and Criticism
for the publication Collective Architectures: Trucks, Containers, Collectives. Urban Recipes , in which we participated with a brief text about
projecte3*/EspaiDer3*
. We couldn’t attend the ceremony because we went to the pre-premiere of the latest Harry Potter movie -it’s the latest because it’s the one that has been released most recently and because it closes the saga of the well-known young-wizard-apprentice, so it can be said that it is doubly the latest Harry Potter…-; but let’s get back to where we were, because this is beside the point.
projecte3* proposed that a group of students from the Joanot Martorell Institute of Esplugues de Llobregat design, build, and manage an educational space annexed to the institute itself and open to the context. Previously, and throughout a course, we analyzed together with the group the spaces, routines, and characteristic habits of the educational institution. By those coincidences of life, the possibility appeared to transform the desires and ideas arising from that speculative work into something tangible, into a “real” physical space: Santiago Cirugeda, who was collaborating on the project, had obtained a batch of prefabricated houses that were going to be scrapped and was distributing them among various groups.
Upon the arrival of the three modules that formed the house to the institute, part of the board of directors, with the director and the secretary of the center at the head, unilaterally decided to abort its unloading and installation. As we have also explained many times, an emergency meeting was convened at that time, a kind of crisis cabinet, in which all imaginable (and unimaginable) objections were raised to reject the placement of the modules inside or in the vicinity of the institute: from their point of view, the modules would become a kind of attractor for prostitutes, drug addicts, and Romanian gypsies (sic), and also an unhealthy shooting gallery. We were in that situation when the secretary of the institute pointed out something else: “What I don’t understand is why the project has to be so ‘FAD award'”. He said this while pointing to a map drawn up by Urban Recipes in which the architectural projects that, in collaboration with the different groups, they planned to carry out using the aforementioned houses appeared.
At that moment, we were surprised by the idea alone of qualifying something as ‘very FAD award’ -the very use of that expression as a qualifier for something- although we recognized its conceptual acuity. It was even more shocking to us that this quality was an obstacle: Although for us the form and aesthetic quality were secondary aspects, we strategically thought that they would be an attraction for the center. This is something that can be seen in the architectural projects of Santiago Cirugeda: the value of the render as an instrument of seduction against the competent authority; and it is quite evident if one compares the satin appearance of his computer-generated images with the shanty-town look and feel of his constructions.
We then assumed that the criticism came to denounce how the architect used the work of the students and the good will of the center to narcissistically show off his artistic skills, without taking into account the needs and desires of those who would inhabit the spaces designed by him.
Well, look where projecte3* has turned out to be, in some way, ‘very FAD award’, the irony lies, as you may have noticed, in that the award is for “Thought and criticism”. What this may say in the “dialectical framework” that we outlined, is something that we will leave for another occasion…