Convocatoria Revista de Arquitectura N.º 45.

Call for Papers Revista de Arquitectura N. º 45.

IS ANOTHER CITY POSSIBLE? Architecture and Means of Urban Regeneration

 + FREE THEME

 

 

Issue 45 of the Architecture Magazine is calling for articles that propose new approaches to the relationship between architecture and the city. The recent pandemic should prompt debates and reflections on how this experience has made us more aware of the deficiencies of our urban ways of life. Having controlled that crisis, it does not seem too idealistic today to think about an architecture that serves to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants, that considers the value of public space as a detonating place for freedom, leisure, and culture; an architecture that blurs its objectivity in exchange for becoming the ideal framework for a more livable and safer city for everyone.

 

However, it would not be forgotten that architecture, as Berlage said at the beginning of the 20th century, "...is the three-dimensional background of every social event, the yeast with which practical spirit fertilizes the life of the community" (1989, p.219).

 

To develop this idea, it is not necessary to shape large projects. It is not about creating public buildings with unique character and specific functions either. Rather, it is about training the eye to see with renewed criteria the opportunities that any type of building, in project (courtyards, arcades, ramps, platforms, gardens...) or already built (residual spaces, interstices in common areas, corridors, stairs...) can offer to turn spaces into places that favor flexible social life and adapt to fluctuating demands. "We want an architecture of space and the intermediate; of the whole rather than singular phenomena, of horizontality rather than verticality, of flow and change, of anticipation originated by the given rather than by placing an artifice" (Beigel 1996, p.32).

 

It would be a way of projecting buildings not only inward but also outward, towards the city and the public, and thus orienting the social transcendence of the private. Turning these spaces into new forms of cultural irradiation -- of a culture with lowercase, closer to citizens -- that disperse the excessive centrality of large institutions and activate mechanisms of small-scale renewal, creating communication networks that, superimposed on existing infrastructure, program other ways of living in the city and serve to understand architecture not only as an "autonomous" system but also as a "connected" system (Fujimoto, 2009).

 

In short, it is about learning to make and understand architecture from new perspectives such as those proposed, among others, by Stoner in Towards a Minor Architecture because, he says, "minor architectures operate as verbs, not nouns. (...) Minor actions form spatial assemblages; they break pairs of opposites such as interior and exterior, public and private, authorized and subversive, large and small" (2018, p.40). It is about offering efficient and simple but revolutionary responses in their conception because removing ideas, exercising criticism, experimenting with projects is the only way to advance and create "worlds" (Goodman, 1978) that renew and transform existing ones. What capacity can architecture have to lose its compactness and become a device for social and cultural mediation and exchange?

 

 

Milla Hernández Pezzi, PhD. Full Professor. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. 2023.

 

Invitation to publish in two sections, composed of original articles reviewed by blind peer reviewers:

RESEARCH IN ARCHITECTURAL THEORY. Body of Articles. Range of 4000-6000 words

ARCHITECTURAL PROJECT RESEARCH. Planned and/or constructed works. Range of 3000-4000 words.

Deadline for receipt of articles:  September 10, 2023

Guidelines for authors: https://dearquitectura.uchile.cl/index.php/RA/about/submissions

References:

F.Beigel, en Ph. Christou: “La construcción de la exterioridad” a+t, 8, 1996, pág.32,

H.P.Berlage, “Architettura come arte sociale” (1919) en Architettura, urbanistica, estetica, Zanichelli Editore, 1989, pág.219.

N.Goodman: Maneras de hacer mundos, Machado libros, 2013

J.Stoner: Hacia una arquitectura menor, Bartlebooth, 2018, pág. 40