Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The starting point for this article is the friendship, shared concerns and professional collaborations maintained for 25 years by Fernando Higueras and César Manrique. Both creators establish a fruitful conversation around friendship, art, architecture and landscape with numerous common interests and places. Since they met in the sixties of the last century, a complicity forged in a similar way of seeing life, a passionate, hedonistic and committed stance, based on a special sensitivity to the environment and a concern for creating for people and not for criticism. Iconoclastic and contradictory, they will recreate the dream of an alternative way of inhabiting the world linked to the tradition of anonymous architecture, to nature and to the landscape with a wild force. This almost ancestral position brings them closer to animals and their essential ways of building a shelter, attentive to the conditions of the place and the climate, while at the same time distancing themselves from the elitist intellectual discourse to find the essence of their discourse in space and construction technique. The objective of this article is to reveal the most determining aspects of this conversation, taking the island of Lanzarote as the setting, delving into some of their residential architectures, their incursions into the design of tourist accommodation and the development of the most intimate spaces of the house. In this motivation to reveal alternatives to industrial and alienated production, in the work of Higueras and Manrique we recognise characteristics of the “artisan”, a term defined by the sociologist Richard Sennett as a figure of resistance to capitalist dynamics, placing them in a position of manifest contemporaneity.

The article rediscovers the urban project created by famous urban planner and historian Leonardo Benevolo for the San Polo district in Brescia, focusing on the public urbanisation method, tested for the first time in Italy and, despite the economic and urban success of the operation, never repeated since. The first section provides an overview of the political and administrative conditions that brought Benevolo to Brescia, and his relationship with Luigi Bazoli, the enlightened town planning councillor. The second section describes the paradigm shift brought about by public urbanisation: a revolution in the systems of land ownership in Italy that aimed to align itself with the main European countries by defining a market for publicly owned urbanised areas that would lower construction prices and allow for cohesive planning of urban development. The third section offers a critique of the planning operation, underlining its undisputed merits, but also highlighting its limitations and unexpressed possibilities. The fourth section shows how San Polo is a uchronia, a single fragment of an alternative history, illustrating how, in 1962, Fiorentino Sullo's proposal for national urban reform, which would have made public urbanisation a state law, raised such great concerns that it provoked an attempted coup d'état. The conclusion re-inserts San Polo into the contemporary age, verifying the urban value of the operation fifty years later and attempting to bring to light Benevolo's lesson, unheeded but still valid for today's challenges.

Situated in the tropic of Cancer, Ahmedabad was the site of the first housing projects carried out by Le Corbusier in India. Chimanbhai Villa was the only one that was not built, but a scale model was made, which Le Corbusier would refer to in The Modulor 2 as a “snail shell”. The location in which photographs were taken, next to the water and among plants and pebbles, like a gastropod seeking the cool of the shade and humidity, emphasises the climactic discourse of the architect for “a pact with nature”. A pact that when it comes to setting domestic comfort against heat, resorts to combining winds as a strategic location of expanses of water, and with other architectural devices set out in La Grille Climatique, that are emphasised in the dismantling of the model. The fusion between place and model through photography is repeated in the ones subsequently carried out for the Shodhan Villa and the Governor’s Palace, in addition to the manual character of these objects, which reinforces the idea of a production by and for the people of a new nation. The shadow of an innovative window-mounted air-conditioning unit in the photographs of the opening of the Shodhan Villa highlights the predominance of machines over adiabatic atmospheres in Le Corbusier’s Indian architectures. Today, Ahmedabad is one of the world’s cities with the largest air-conditioning emission energy footprint.

Of all the housing estates constructed in the peri-urban area of Barcelona in the 1960s, that of Bellvitge in Hospitalet de Llobregat (designed in 1955–1965, constructed in 1964–1976), with its over 9,700 dwellings, 62 hectares of surface area and lengthy gestation, is perhaps one of the most relevant cases. The study, based on original plans, focuses on the contributions made by Xavier Busquets Sindreu between 1960 and 1961 for the design that had been proposed initially by Antonio Perpiñá Sebriá (1955–1960). It examines how this case of mass production of multifamily housing could have been affected by aspects such as the applicable legal framework, the incorporation of private initiative into public development, the rationalisation of the building type, the lack of design ordering strategies, the testing of the first means of industrialisation of construction, and the introduction of foreign architectural references from coordinates as far apart as Team X’s viewpoint, architectural modernity in Brazil and the industrial practice of French prefabrication. The analysis sheds light on the conventional residential culture of Spain in this period and anticipates some of the phenomena that would be consolidated in the decade.

The Walden 7 (1970–75) is a housing building that remains a unique example of what could have been a City in Space, the research undertaken throughout the 1960s by Ricardo Bofill and a team of architects, artists, engineers, mathematicians, writers and poets. Widely debated and analysed both in the generalist and the specialised press, the Walden 7 tends to be seen as a utopian experience that alludes to a way of living in society which is paradigmatic of its time. However, the closer social and cultural context —the Barcelona that saw (and made possible) the birth of the work— has not yet been sufficiently explored. It is our purpose to demonstrate that the design of the interior spaces, although corresponding to a social model that was beginning to find acceptance, is a reflection of an unconventional lifestyle that an elite of Barcelona already practised. After a résumé of the ideas of the City in Space, the paper seeks to clarify the extent to which the book Walden Two was influential in the conception of an alternative social model, and to what extent informality was already a manifest characteristic in the interior design of small works contemporary to the Walden 7. Both aspects are taken up in the analysis of the building’s cells, which seeks to emphasise the spatial strategies intended for an individualistic, although festive and hedonistic, use of the dwelling. A usage that was common to a select few was now devised for a large majority.

During the 1960s, Valencia experienced an economic awakening that was accompanied by the development of territorial and urban infrastructures. With more than half a million inhabitants, the city was recovering from the floods of 1957 and was gradually growing, even without measuring the consequences of an aggressive urban planning process that was increasingly questioned by its inhabitants. The catalyst for urban activism was the energetic protests to save El Saler, although other phenomena followed. The neighbourhood movements activated and united different social fronts, always backed by young professionals who were experiencing a turning point in their disciplinary orientation. This paper provides a comparative overview of the claims that timidly emerged in the 1960s, gained popularity in the 1970s and evolved, especially in Valencia, into residential operations during the 1980s. Case studies are selected at different scales, featuring choral voices rooted in local culture: all are disruptive processes resulting from urban conflict. The conclusions reveal common threads in the reflections on the private and the public, in the reactions against speculation, and in the valuation and preservation of the natural environment for the well-being of users.

After the Second World War, cities experienced a sharp increase in population, forcing them to expand their limits and reconfigure the relationship between the centre and the periphery. Suburban complexes appeared which, under the precepts of science and promises of progress, looked forward to a new future with great optimism. By the mid-1960s, the reality was quite different. These settings were highly conflictive, a situation that was reflected in film production. This article explores the introduction of an urban critique in a certain filmography of that period through three films that are representative of this way of showing both the new suburban complexes and the mega-structures. In Two or Three Things I know About Her (Godard, 1967), A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971) or Shivers (Cronenberg, 1975) urban proposals have a radical prominence, relating the spaces of the suburb as spaces of loneliness or violence. All of them contributed greatly to the formation of a negative urban imaginary that would spread across the modern movement, putting an end to the utopias that had been formulated concerning the city of the future.

Among the Brutalist architectures that relied on the exterior formalisation of the circulations as part of their sculptural language, the Experimental Building on Malecón and F in Havana (Girón Building, 1967) by Antonio Quintana Simonetti and Alberto Rodríguez Surribas stands out. A contemporary —or even an earlier— approach to similar European projects, this residential building became the first great experiment in modern architecture in Cuba and paved the way for the modernisation of the country after the triumph of the Revolution. A building as pioneering as it is little known, about which there are hardly any bibliographical reviews and access to documentation has not been possible, and which threatens ruin. The following text frames and offers an analytical and critical view of the Girón Building through unpublished graphic documentation based on a survey carried out in situ, with a twofold objective: on the one hand, the reading of a revolutionary architecture where the machine provokes an atypical spatial configuration, whose language and final result end up sublimating the idea that gave birth to the project without supplanting the architecture; on the other hand, the need to perpetuate —given the high degree of deterioration of the building— and the scarcity of sources, the legacy of its architecture, contextualising the project decisions with the ideas that emerged from the Revolution, the European and CIAM influences and their dialectic with the Cuban architectural tradition, the appearance of technology and the determined commitment of its creators.

New York, paradigm of the vertical city, was also the setting for disruptive processes in response to numerous urban renewal actions which began in the 1950s. These actions adopted the modern residential model based on construction from scratch. In the following decade, however, certain projects, springing from the art world, provided an alternative for living reusing obsolete productive spaces. Following a case study methodology this research presents three complementary proposals in which former industrial spaces are innovatively linked to the collective housing project. The first case, designed by the artist I. Noguchi with the support of Buckminster Fuller, transformed a former factory into an open sculpture garden within the residential community of Astoria. The next two initiatives were promoted by J.K. Davidson and by the J.M. Kaplan Fund: a cooperative housing system in the SoHo manufacturing district, designed by the artist G. Maciunas and the architect S. Shapiro, and a project by the architect R. Meier converting the former Bell Labs headquarters into Westbeth Artists Housing. In their adaptive reuse and configuration as creative domestic spaces, these pioneering initiatives further explored the construction of inclusive and collaborative habitats in industrial spaces, as well as their importance as emerging contemporary heritage

Projetar para territórios com climas tropicais apresenta-nos desafios muito particulares que, ao longo dos séculos, foram ensaiados por múltiplos arquitetos. As abordagens tradicionais exploraram materiais naturais e abordagens inspiradas em saberes vernaculares onde cada gesto é expressão de uma essencialidade. A situação tropical apresenta desafios únicos, cuja atualidade se vê hoje relançada numa conjuntura de crise climática emergente. Neste contexto, o livro Building Design, Construction and Performance in Tropical Climates, editado por Mike Riley, Alison Cotgrave e Michael Farragher, surge como referência para uma abordagem sistematizada a uma problemática complexa. No livro, são tratadas muitas das questões-chave para os projetos de arquitetura tropical, contribuindo para juntar ao desejado equilíbrio entre o local e o global, a consciência ambiental que estimula o surgimento de edifícios mais adaptados, sensatos e resilientes, capacitados para responderem aos desafios de um planeta em transformação.