http://www.saopaulocalling.org/more/moscow-from-abstract-to-concrete

Colaboradores: Felipe Aravena, José Hernández, Ismael Cárdenas, Catalina De Pablo, David Icekson, Constanza Krauss, Carlos Letelier, Pablo Muñoz, Davor Pantoja, Alan Patrick, Carolina Rocco, Carlos Rojas, Javier Rosende.

FROM ABSTRACT TO CONCRETE
Pedro Ignacio Alonso – Hugo Palmarola Sagredo

Relatively marginal to the official historiographical accounts of modern architecture, during the twentieth-century the creation and development of building systems based on the prefabrication and assembly of large concrete panels was central to debates about modernization and industrialization. In fact, they exceed merely technical or practical discourses to become integral components of political, aesthetic and ideological speculations in both art and architecture. This can be seen in the large number of building systems developed in the Soviet Union as a direct consequence of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech to the National Conference of Builders, Architects and Workers of 1954, and whose ultimate goal was the destalinization of the country and the removal of all ornamental excesses proper to socialist realism. Accordingly, these new types of buildings were known as Khrushchvkas.

These systems were generically named by using acronyms, initials and numbers such as K7, G-3i, G-5, II-32, II-35, II-49, II-57, 1MG-300, 1-335, 1-510, 1- 605; II -57, 1- 464, etc., but were not exclusive to the Soviet Union and had strong presence in France and East Germany, Holland, Denmark, USA and Japan; and were exported and adapted to several other countries in Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. It remains both interesting and strange that such technological and typological richness is still remains a relatively unexplored filed in architectural and technological research, especially considering that more than 190 million apartments of this type were built worldwide.

Within the context of Latin-American countries during the cold war, the arrival of panel systems to Cuba in the 1960s, and to Chile in the 1970s allows the reconstruction of a certain genealogy that starts with the sending of the French Camus system (patented in 1948) to Khrushchev’s Russia (1956), its subsequent adaptation in the Soviet 1-464 system, and its becoming the Large Soviet Panel in Cuba, and KPD and VEP in Chile.

Deserta es un libro en el que convergen muchos y aparentemente diferentes puntos de vista, que sin embargo tiene como centro una preocupación principal: ¿cómo pensar al desierto como ámbito dónde, paradójicamente, también se habita y se trabaja? ¿Con qué bagaje técnico pero también intelectual debería abordarse este problema?. En definitiva ¿cómo construir y generar arquitectura e infraestructura en una región de clima extremo como Atacama? Para dar una respuesta a estas interrogantes, el autor del libro, Pedro Alonso, ha congregado a un conjunto de personalidades que desde su disciplina o ámbito de intereses han abierto perspectivas al respecto y que, de una u otra manera, no han olvidado la dimensión productiva que tiene el desierto. Se trata de un cuadro de autores variado y fascinante, que comprende desde los clásicos como Charles Darwin o el historiador y crítico de la arquitectura inglés Reyner Banham, hasta especialistas en el campo de la energía solar y la fitogeografía, sin descuidar los estudios históricos urbanos. Se suman a estos textos varios ensayos fotográficos y también el resultado de una serie de Talleres de Arquitectura desarrollados por la Escuela de Arquitectura de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile entre el 2009 y el 2011, uno de ellos en colaboración con la Architectural Association School of Architecture de Londres y auspiciados por el Centro del Desierto de Atacama de la misma universidad. Este libro forma parte de la colección La gran escala de Ediciones ARQ, con la que se pretende, justamente, pensar a la arquitectura desde una nueva consideración de los macroescenarios en que tradicionalmente se ha dado.

Desde los tratados arquitectónicos del Renacimiento, pasando por los manifiestos de las primeras décadas del siglo XX, hasta llegar a articulaciones discursivas contemporáneas, las palabras han jugado un papel fundamental en la conceptualización de la arquitectura como un discurso singular y orientado a un set especifico de prácticas proyectuales. En tres sesiones, este del seminario revisara estos distintos tipos de discursos con el fin de contextualizar los términos y condiciones propios de cada uno de ellos.

Marina Lathouri (Ph.D University of Pennsylvania) dirije el programa de magister en Historia y Pensamiento Crítico de la Architectural Association School of Architecture (Londres, UK), y enseña ademas en la Universidad de Cambridge (UK). Sus intereses académicos y de investigación abordan las múltiples formas de relación entre arquitectura y ciudad desde una perspectiva contemporánea de teoría y crítica. Ha dado charlas en Cambridge University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Kunste Stuttgart, y Universidad de Navarra. Además a presentado su trabajo en conferencias en la Werner Oechslin Library Foundation, University of Greenwich, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, y University of Virginia Tech, entre otras. Es co- autora del libro Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (Routledge 2009).

Territorial Infrastructures
It has been recently noted that architecture has taken a “geographical turn”. In fact, an emerging group of geographical inclined architects is currently borrowing theories and concepts from geography together with the discipline’s representational tools. Instead of plans, sections, and volumetric representations of spaces, we are now seeing more and more architectural proposals expressed in form of cartographical representations mapping in time and space the transformations of topographical features as well as fluxes of matter, goods, energy, people and information. This fascination with mapping has been triggered, at least partially, by the digital revolution that has taken place in geographical representation and generated easily accessible phenomena like Google Earth and various forms of geographic information systems. However, beyond the captivation with such new digital tools, geo-architects appear to be striving to expand and redefine their fields and modes of intervention. No longer strictly engaged with the architectural object, geo-architects think in terms of environments and territories, and develop their proposals in forms of adaptable systems and flexible or hybrid infrastructures. This last type of intervention in particular has lately been the focus of debates, controversies, or productive encounters between multiple disciplines such as urbanism, architecture, landscape architecture and landscape urbanism.

Recent debates about the question of infrastructure recurrently mention the relatively new currency of the term, its present ubiquitous use (declined with diverse connotations in multiple domains), and the etymology of the word. The Latin prefix infra, meaning “below”, suggests something concealed from view, inferior and infernal. Such was in fact the nature of the mechanical and service systems mapped, for example, in Lewis Mumford’s “invisible city”. However, contemporary infrastructures’ growing visibility and ubiquity invite to reconsider and multiply the readings of the term. The proposal is that the 2012 Phyllis Lambert Seminar will take the form of a colloquium devoted to the question of infrastructure in an “expanded” sense and at a territorial scale.

http://www.saopaulocalling.org/city/moscow/subject/from-abstract-to-concrete

http://www.saopaulocalling.org/more/moscow-from-abstract-to-concrete

Colaboradores: Felipe Aravena, José Hernández, Ismael Cárdenas, Catalina De Pablo, David Icekson, Constanza Krauss, Carlos Letelier, Pablo Muñoz, Davor Pantoja, Alan Patrick, Carolina Rocco, Carlos Rojas, Javier Rosende.

FROM ABSTRACT TO CONCRETE
Pedro Ignacio Alonso – Hugo Palmarola Sagredo

Relatively marginal to the official historiographical accounts of modern architecture, during the twentieth-century the creation and development of building systems based on the prefabrication and assembly of large concrete panels was central to debates about modernization and industrialization. In fact, they exceed merely technical or practical discourses to become integral components of political, aesthetic and ideological speculations in both art and architecture. This can be seen in the large number of building systems developed in the Soviet Union as a direct consequence of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous speech to the National Conference of Builders, Architects and Workers of 1954, and whose ultimate goal was the destalinization of the country and the removal of all ornamental excesses proper to socialist realism. Accordingly, these new types of buildings were known as Khrushchvkas.

These systems were generically named by using acronyms, initials and numbers such as K7, G-3i, G-5, II-32, II-35, II-49, II-57, 1MG-300, 1-335, 1-510, 1- 605; II -57, 1- 464, etc., but were not exclusive to the Soviet Union and had strong presence in France and East Germany, Holland, Denmark, USA and Japan; and were exported and adapted to several other countries in Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. It remains both interesting and strange that such technological and typological richness is still remains a relatively unexplored filed in architectural and technological research, especially considering that more than 190 million apartments of this type were built worldwide.

Within the context of Latin-American countries during the cold war, the arrival of panel systems to Cuba in the 1960s, and to Chile in the 1970s allows the reconstruction of a certain genealogy that starts with the sending of the French Camus system (patented in 1948) to Khrushchev’s Russia (1956), its subsequent adaptation in the Soviet 1-464 system, and its becoming the Large Soviet Panel in Cuba, and KPD and VEP in Chile.