considered a ‘weak architecture’ in this sense: it disappears more than shows up; it presents itself soft and open to the tensions of urban life. The beach surface, malleable and inviting, creates a world from the inside out: the architectural object wanes in favour of experience. Both Orozco’s work and beach experiences encourage an awareness of the temporal fragility of our actions as well as the richness of resources available if we would but use the ordinary in poetic ways. We could redefine the city and urban living by activating the potential of places otherwise deemed dysfunctional, dormant or even dead. The beach here is not just a surface of sand bathed by seawater, it also references a mythological ‘beach universe’, the immaterial dream of ideal urban living, the human desire for gathering on a surface under intense cultural production and ongoing cultural exchange, where freedom of space invests in human relations. Gabriel Oroczo, Sand on Table , 1992. Paris, Left Bank, 1968 Roberto Burle Marx, pavement, Copocabana, Rio de Janeiro, 1930-1970
Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, Dust Breeding , 1920 Traffic interchange over Turcot beach, Montréal
from the left:
The beach is a flexible mechanism for negotiations between people and places, economies and cultures, architectures and the city. This differs from more ‘stable’ urban structures defined by buildings and infrastructure – enhancement of the urban experience can find more resources in the flux exemplified by the beach. Fluidity, mobility, spontaneous feedback and nonlinearity offer a powerful social alternative to stability, predictability and rationality. The beach as a weak system identifies a dynamic territory where human actions are in constant transformation, generating a field of possibilities. We relax on a beach, we get away from our individualised spaces and enjoy our presence in the city through collective pleasurable production. ~ from the left: Ipanema Beach, Rio de Janeiro Lina Bo Bardi, Boardwalk, São Paulo 1986 Paris Plage on the Seine, 2006 Copocabana at the visit of Pope Francis, 2013 Walter Firmo’s view of Copocabana, 1957
It creates human promise in places not altogether defined (a quality Ignasi de Solà-Morales referred as terrain vague ), with their potential suspended, waiting to be activated. The beach acts as a valve to urban congestion, releasing various pressures of metropolitan life as an indefinite and open space of possibilities. Terrain vague goes hand in hand with Solà-Morales’s notion of weak architecture: the first shows the opportunity, the latter executes it. Weak architecture parallels Orozco’s art- making: a demonstration of the strength of weakness, the power that art and architecture produce when they adopt a non-aggressive, non-dominating, tangential and ‘poor’ posture. For Solà-Morales weak architecture helps to typify the distinction between vertical and horizontal, hard and soft, closed and open, challenging architecture’s rhetoric in its relationship to the city, traditionally an architecture that imposes more than retracts, one that occupies more than releases. The beach can be
63
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator