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

Presentación de dossier

Presentación

Esta edição da revista arq.urb apresenta um conjunto diversificado de artigos, que abordam desde temas relacionados à história da arquitetura, cotejando seus fundamentos teóricos e conceituais com seus contextos sociais, econômicos, políticos e culturais, a temas relacionados às políticas públicas e seus rebatimentos nos processos de (re)produção social do espaço urbano, à formação e à prática profissional de arquitetos e urbanistas, bem como à utilização de novas tecnologias nas leituras urbanas; diversidade temática que muito contribui para a discussão no campo da Arquitetura e do Urbanismo, reforçando o compromisso desta revista.

The paper addresses the qualitative scope and character of women designed architecture in Madrid area, from the beginning of Spanish democracy Transition to the economic crisis of 2008. This architecture presents its own nature in, at least, three aspects: functionality, materiality, and shape. As it is called in the title, the research has focused on Madrid and its housing design, being not a qualitative study –even though is supported by data–, but a few findings that leads to critical conclusions about the effects of women professional incorporation to Madrid housing architecture. Through these reflections has been abstracted two main questions, related to domesticity: on the one hand, housing typologies, its spatial composition and functional program. On the other hand, condominium in-between spaces, that joint the public realm to the private sphere. From this gender perspective, the paper shows how in less than 20 years, from the beginning of the 80’s to the endings of the 90’s, the activity of women architects meant a significant increasing of solutions oriented to improve everyday life, individual and collectively, of the people who inhabit the domestic realm.

Several historians explain Niemeyer´s works based on what he learned from Le Corbusier. Others understand his use of curves as an interpretation of the exuberant Brazilian geography. But we know almost nothing about his work in Lebanon or his projects for Israel. This is because colonial historiography always looks north, supposing all explanations come from there, and, faced with this, nationalist narratives propose to look inward in search of local issues. But both positions, like any singular point of view, imply a limited field of vision and can only give partial answers. The problem comes when we assume that those answers are the only or the main ones, then they inevitably become fallacious and lead to blind or subalternate multiple facets of history. We will develop one of those forgotten histories. Several Latin American architects have worked in the Middle East, and valuable information can be obtained from this unsuspected connection to fill gaps in the architectural history of both regions. Contemporary crises show that colonial approaches, as well as nationalist ones, bring more problems than solutions. This work aspires to be one more brick in the construction of a decolonized architectural history focused on regional, transregional, and global processes.

The world of the 20th century can be understood as a conglomeration of diversity, exchanges and interpretations of what Modernity means. There is a network in which architectural objects, languages, authors, cities, etc. coexist unbalanced. This network is sustained by power relations that range from the geographical, to the institutional, to the historiographical. The geopolitical field is fundamental to the discursive field of Latin American architectural historiography, but it tends to be depoliticized. Thus, the narratives focus on authors, styles, and forms of production in terms of national cultural specificity and/or North European canonical influence. This logic has avoided observing modern architecture from broader frameworks such as globality. The text questions these categories based on the reconstruction of other networks of relationships whose guiding principle is not objects and their languages. In addition, it proposes that peripheral contexts are spaces of freedom and the possibility of identity experimentation. The Juárez Theater in Guanajuato, Mexico, is taken as a case study to show the complex relationship between modern architecture and globality.

The architects Louis Kahn (1901-1974) and Chloethiel Woodard Smith (1910-1992) were near contemporaries whose networks overlapped in multiple ways. Kahn’s best buildings offer transcendent experiences of community; Smith’s remain cherished, if far more ordinary, places to live and work. Although the level of fame the profession bestowed upon him eluded her, in the 1960s and early 1970s her singularity as a female architect working on a national scale led her to be frequently profiled in the popular press. Kahn began as an outsider because of his working-class Jewish background; Smith remained one because she was a woman, although she was highly ambivalent about, and -- when well enough established -- outrightly dismissive of being labeled a woman or – worse yet – lady architect. Each also benefited from their status as relatively privileged white Americans, while building for African Americans and in the Global South. Tracing the arc of their careers captures the opportunities for upward mobility that the postwar boom created in the United States, as well as ones that the Cold War bestowed upon its best-connected architects, even as it illuminates the obstacles that continued to hinder the progression of women in the profession.

The invitation to write this article gave rise to a review of my studies and writings produced in the last twenty-five years about the approximation between architecture and globalization. If in the 1990s the texts referred to the dissemination of Brazilian modern architecture in different parts of the world, by the turn of 1990s to the 2000s, they focused on the popular dissemination of elements of modernism in Brazil, with an interest in expanding the architectural scholarship limits in two directions: 1) vertically, discussing high-low relationships unfiltered or controlled by trained architects; and 2) horizontally by challenging the North Atlantic canon to debate the global reach of the Brazilian case. Reviewing these studies today allowed us to dialogue with contemporary reflections that involve an effort at epistemic decolonization, starting from the understanding that the understanding of globalization was closely related to the emergence of abstraction in the 16th century, a phenomenon that killed relational processes themselves, but which should be urgently recovered nowadays, making us unlearn the intimate relationship between architecture and globalization.

Every constructed building is a patrimony in the broadest sense of heritage, legacy, and wealth, but heritage can be devalued, and renovations are carried out so that inheritance is revalued. The reform reclassifies the form. Recycling reclassifies the function in a symbolic, operational, spatial, and technical dimension, separately or together. Reform is the West's default constructive mode throughout history. But the renovated work does not differ from the new work as an instrument at the service of a prosaic program in each situation, nor as a root good that has a cost and provides benefits, eventually constituting an object of aesthetic delight. This article presents examples that fit, at least in part, this special type of reform that is restoration, and discusses cases of interventions in monuments, based on the argument that cultural assets are not reproducible.

This article discusses a methodological proposal for the elaboration of urban resilience plans, which is one of the most important issues involving cities nowadays. The etymological concept of “resilience” needs to be rescued because Urban Resilience is the exact application of the original concept applied to cities, regardless of their scale. Bausista-Puig (2022, p.1) had examined 1014 publications during the period 1998–2020 and concluded that urban resilience literature has grown since 2009 until today and this reveals the great international interest in this topic during the last decade.Cities, due to their complexity and locus of living for a large part of the global population and with a rising tendency, need to guarantee their conditions of habitability. Considering the improvement of extreme weather events and the consequences for cities, resilience plans have become urgent and fundamental elements in this whole process. As demonstrated in this article, it is not only climate change that impacts urban life, but there are other elements such as infrastructure failures, strikes by essential professional services and the issue of refugees, which can also destabilize the urban balance. On the other hand, resilience plans that aim to return cities to their initial operational conditions need to contain all the elements that guarantee their execution. Plans with only diagnoses and actions of what should be done, will not guarantee their execution. Another important issue discussed in this article is the structuring axes which means, what are the priority areas and the themes that should be present in an urban resilience plan. Are they just those related to climate change or are there others with a high potential to destabilize our cities around the globe?