Lo que quiero con estos fragmentos es contribuir a que reflexionemos más ampliamente sobre las causas que han cambiado la manera de producir, entender y pensar la arquitectura. En el texto de Félix de Azúa se alude brevemente a una de ellas mediante una cita:
“Estoy persuadido de que buena parte del paisaje americano actual ya no puede enjuiciarse como una composición de espacios individuales bien definidos, sino como zonas influidas y controladas por las calles, carreteras y autopistas: arterias que controlan, nutren y dominan su propio paisaje, al que en todo momento podemos acceder. Lo cual quiere decir, si no me equivoco, que ya no es la arquitectura la que provee los símbolos relevantes. La arquitectura (…) ya no es, en nuestros nuevos paisajes, la encargada de sacralizar lo simbólico y lo permanente, lo sagrado y lo colectivo de nuestra identidad (…) La carretera genera su propio modelo de movimiento y permanencia, y actúa sin haber aún producido su particular modelo de belleza para el paisaje, o su significación del espacio.”
Este pasaje de John Brinckerhoff Jackson lo recoge Félix de Azúa como testimonio de la incapacidad de la arquitectura como constructora de nuevos espacios habitables acomodados a las nuevas circunstancias (para concluir diciendo que la incapacidad es realmente de los arquitectos y que es mayormente debida a cómo se enseña arquitectura actualmente).
Lo que Colomina plantea en su libro son algunas herramientas para tratar de comprender más profundamente algunas causas que han cambiado las condiciones en las que se produce actualmente la arquitectura:
City I (Pág.21-22)
"The excessive weight attached to the question of where one is, goes back to nomadic tribes, when people had to be observant about feeding-grounds.
Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities.
Things, like ourselves, were losing their qualities with astonishing ease. Vienna, for instance, might well have been a city, but this alone did not make it a place. One cannot say that the condition was intolerable, only that the epoch of closed questions, of fixed places, of the objects in themselves had ended, and the period of relationships had begun. (...)" It was not important where one was; ever since the railway conveyed us impassively through the "emporium of the world", place as such no longer permitted any differentiation. Just as in department stores, where things are not differentiated by the place they occupy. Everything occupies one place. In traditional terms, the department store is not even a place. In such a placeless world, even talking about travel had ceased to make sense, since despite the frenetic movement it was as if one did not move. (...) If Vienna was no longer a place and if the question of place was, anyway, already indifferent, what could one do in order to differentiate oneself? What could one separete oneself from in order to gain an identity? (...) Surviving let alone inhabiting the city became a question of definig limits, limits much more complicated than the clear lines that established the traditional city"
City VII (Pág. 47)
"Anyone (can) observe how much more easily...
architecture can be grasped in photographs than in reality.
Walter Benjamin, "A Small History of Photography"
What can an architecture for magazines be when the magazine uses photography as its medium? Does the photographic transformation of architecture do no more than present it in a new vision, or is there a deeper transformantion, a sort of conceptual agreement between the space this architecture comprehends and the one implicit in photography? Does the fact that its relation with the masses is transformed through its reproduction not also presuppose a modification in the character of architecture, in the Benjamin sense?
Photography was born at almost the same time as the railway. The two evolve hand in hand -the world of tourism is the world of the camera- because they share a conception of the world. The railway transforms the world into a commodity. It makes places into objects of consumption and, in doing so, deprives them of their quality as places. Oceans, mountains, and cities float in the world just like the objects of the universal exhibitions. "Photographed images," says Susan Sontag, "do not seem to be statements about the world" -unlike what is written, or hand-made visual statements- "so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire." Photography does for architecture what the railway did for cities, transforming it into merchandise and conveying it through the magazines for it to be consumed by the masses. This adds a new context to the production of architecture, to which corresponds an independent cycle of usage, one superimposed upon that of the built space.
But in addition to all this, the railway turns places into nonplaces because it poses itself as a new limit, whereas previously the built object had done so; but since the railway is a fluid limit, it actually nullifies the old differences between inside and outside. It is often said of railway stations that thy are a substitute for the old gates of the city, but what they do in fact is to displace the notion of frontier; not only they fail to demarcate the edge of the urban fabric, but they ignore the city as such, as fabric. The railway, which knows only of departure and arrival points, turns cities into points (as Arturo Soria y Mata understood when he called the cities of "the past", those which existed, "points" rather than "stains", which was more what they looked like), connected to the diagrammatical railway network that is now the territory. This notion of space has nothing to do with that of space as an enclosure within certain limits, a notion the Greeks bequeathed to us along with the agora. It is a space that recognizes only points and directions, not the void and that which surrounds it, a space that does not know of limits but of relations.
Photography participates in this spatial conception, and for this reason it is able to represent it (not so with space conceived as a container). Photography shares with the railway an "ignorance" of place, and this has on the objects shot by the camera an effect similar to that of the railway on the points it reaches: it deprives them of their quality as things."
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