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

Título On Frank Lloyd Wright’s Concrete Adobe. Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler and the American Southwest, publicado por Donald Leslie Johnson (University of South Australia, Adelaide). Diecinueve ediciones entre 2013 y 2016 en ingles. El objeto principal del libro es la investigación de cinco casas proyectadas y construidas por Frank Lloyd Wright (Wright) en el área metropolitana de Los Ángeles entre 1919 y 1925, desvelando las relevantes interrelaciones existentes con su hijo mayor Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. (Lloyd Wright), Irving Gill, Rudolph Schindler y Walter y Marion Griffin. El marco temporal preludia el que es, quizá el segundo florecimiento en la prodigiosa producción de Wright que se inicia tras abandonar definitivamente California en 1925. Se trata de Hollyhock House en Olive Hill (distrito de Hollywood de Los Feliz, 1919-1922), las cuatro casas de Millard (Pasadena, llamada La Miniatura, 1923-1924), Storer, Freeman y Ennis en Hollywood Hills entre 1924 y 1925 y secundariamente Little Dipper, una guardería en la Colonia de Olive Hill (1925, sin construir en su totalidad).

In the mid-1950s, millions of people left the rural areas of the Portuguese interior. They came to Lisbon in search of new and better living conditions. The population growth in the peripheral territories of the capital started to increase exponentially, completely changing its landscape, particularly on the northern fringe, with a huge impact on commuter traffic flows and property speculation, affecting an emerging middle class that was ignored by the state and exploited by an economically-driven market. Outside the narratives of high culture, these places have progressively embodied the image of postmodernity’s greatest evils: the anonymous character of (sub)urban life, mass housing and the ‘motorway’. Their study has been overlooked and, consequently, an important part of the city’s fabric. Using unpublished archival material, films and period news, this article reconstructs the history of the urban ensemble of Quinta das Lavadeiras on Calçada de Carriche, Lisbon’s northern gateway, developed during the 1960s by private developers. The crossing of information regarding the project, its construction and its impact on the landscape, in its intermediate condition, between rural and faith in urban progress, between centre and suburb, between social classes, allows a critical reflection on the divorce between the theoretical debate and the construction of a counter-architecture promoted by construction companies that acted in these expectant territories, defining them.

The Pirineos Cooperative is a residential complex in Zaragoza designed in 1979 by Saturnino Cisneros and Juan Carmona, main members of Grupo Z, a collective which contributed to renovate the architectural panorama in Aragon since its creation in 1970. The analysis of the building shows the shift in the way of facing the issue of collective housing in contrast to previous decades. Their conception of collective work allowed them to avoid personal approaches, prioritizing agreed proposals as the most optimal for particular problems. The interpretation of the urban environment was made according to the particular conditions of the place, proposing solutions that differ from those of the surrounding residential developments. The incorporation of users through participatory processes allowed them to define the housing types and common spaces, reinforcing the idea of community. Therefore, a special attention was paid to the intermediate spaces where people interact, which are present in the whole project scales. The language looked for a categorical expression, making the complex recognizable in contrast to the unstructured surroundings. A particular attention to the specificity of each situation, at different scales, happens in all these matters, refusing generic solutions inherent to former periods.

This article explores the case of the community design of La Maison Médicale, “La Mémé”, a collective housing project at the Medicine Faculty of the Catholic University of Louvain, designed and constructed by Lucien Kroll. Begun in 1969, the project has often been described as a work of “anarchitecture”, occupying a prominent place in the historiography of participatory methods. The main aim is to examine the project’s participatory dimension and its evolution in time by researching the notion of anarchitecture. To this end, it explores the term anarchitecture in association with the thinking of anarchist architects and urban planners in order to contextualize the tradition of which Kroll and his project form part. The main body analyses how, over time, this anarchitecture has been translated into the spatial forms and processes that make up La Mémé. To do so, it presents three resulting characteristics: organicity, community involvement and technical implementation, each addressed in terms of their conception in its design, use and possibilities for transformation today. It concludes with the key learnings that Kroll’s anarchitecture offers, based on reflections that question or challenge a simplified understanding of the idea of participation and its spatial conception.

Based on the journeys around the world taken by Fernando Távora and three architects of the recently opened School of Architecture of Seville in the 1960s, the way in which architecture was sensitive to the environment, its capacity for integration with the natural forms of the land, and the search for passive solutions for protection from extreme weather conditions in countries with a warm, humid or dry climate in works from other times and other civilisations are recalled. The text has the objective of encouraging research on solutions based on construction typology constants, in harmony between craftsmanship and nature, and in interpretation of climate, social and cultural realities as some of the responses that architecture offers to face the problems of climate change, contributing to the objective of a society based on efficient and sustainable criteria. The articles which give continuity to this text may be understood as the first lines of this collective research.

The book "Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather and Sensation" condenses the knowledge on design and atmosphere Silvia Benedito has developed over the last decade. In the light of climate change, Benedito champions the idea that spatial practices need to be reconceptualized as atmosphere or weather. In contrast to recent examinations of landscape architecture which have focused on other perspectives such as ecology or social sciences, Benedito claims the need to approach this design discipline as a meteorological phenomenon with physiological and psychological well-being implications.

La casa e la mostra d’architettura sono i due oggetti di ricerca che s’incrociano in The Housing Project. Discourses Ideals, Models and Politics in 20th century exhibitions, co-curato da Gaia Caramellino e Stephanie Dadour nel 2020 per i tipi di Leuven Press. Il volume s’ispira alle discussioni del convegno On the Role of 20th Century Exhibitions in Shaping Housing Discourses (2016, ENSA Paris Malaquais e Politecnico di Milano). I dieci saggi di altrettanti autori europei e americani esplorano il ruolo delle mostre come medium in una fase cruciale di elaborazione e circolazione internazionale delle tante declinazioni della casa moderna, tra gli anni 1920 e 1970. Sono organizzati in due parti, che approfondiscono rispettivamente il ruolo delle mostre come spazi di traduzione e di mediazione. Caramellino e Dadour prendono le distanze da un approccio monografico e collocano le tante e diverse esperienze espositive in una cornice più ampia, sul piano disciplinare e geografico.

In the 1960s, the print networks for dissemination of architecture amplified the scale of interaction and connected geographic regions that were distant from each other, providing contact with new ideas in terms of planning and the habitat in a rapidly changing society that was subject to demographic and territorial pressure and imagination powers that were considerably affected by technological evolution. In contrast, the response to the housing problem in Portugal was marked by “pessimistic” landscapes in territories subject to non-planning. This article seeks to provide an understanding of the extent to which resonance of contents and the international critical debate, both widely distributed in specialised periodicals, influenced the research into housing models, the forms of representation and the reinvention of urban planning practices in Portugal in the late 1960s. Based on the qualitative analysis of texts, contents and images published in the magazines Arquitectura and Binário and the original archive documentation of the specific case of the Almada Integrated Plan, the first moment of experimentation, the influence of this widespread critical perspective on the demand for, and definition of, solutions, which became common in how architectural conception focused on generation and aggregation systems, in a quest for flexibility and adaptability, in lieu of previous concerns with formal composition.

The PpA’s issue 27 intends to reflect on the words and works of a generation of architects that experienced the contradictions and profound transformations —ideological, social, and cultural– that marked the 1960s. In a time of great demographic and territorial pressure, but also of prodigious technological development, epitomised by space exploration, architects pursued visionary solutions for a distant future, seeking to answer the problems of urban organization and habitat in the face of an everyday environment of increasing alienation.The essays assembled here inquire on the methods and discourses through which architects reconsidered the disciplinary dilemmas and tensions generated by the city and the crisis of existing collective housing models. From idealistic visions to the crudeness of the market, from the rhetoric of the debate to polarizing figures, from modular systems to the production of urban megastructures, the themes addressed here function as very different entry points for the inquiry of disruptive processes in the architecture and urbanism of this period.

The manuscript is a bibliographical review that exposes the importance, in the architectural discourse, of the book entitled Francesco Venezia, John Hejduk y el arte de la memoria, written by Gabriel Bascones de la Cruz. The book is an investigation that leads us to discover the art of memory as a science based on the analysis of the works of Francesco Venezia and John Hejduk through the historical theatres of Giulio Camillo and Robert Fludd.