[Jacket-flap text for Espaço em obra by Guilherme Wisnik and Julio Mariutti, Edições Sesc, 2018]
Espaço em obra, by Guilherme Wisnik and Julio Mariutti, is a palimpsest of a book. Like ancient manuscripts whose parchment was scraped clean to be written on again, every page here evokes multiple layers. One layer concerns the authorial dialogue Wisnik and Mariutti have maintained since their days at Bamboo. Guilherme wrote a column there from 2012 to 2016, bringing architecture, urbanism, and art into dialogue with graphic design through his exchanges with Julio. Another layer appears in the titles, from that of the book, “space under construction,” a reference to critic Alberto Tassinari’s interpretation of modern space, to those of its three chapters. The first, “What Ever Happened to Urbanism?,” quotes an essay by architect Rem Koolhaas. The second, “Gigantic Country of America,” incorporates Le Corbusier’s definition of Brazil. The last, “Artarchitecture,” is a neologism pointing to The Art-Architecture Complex by Hal Foster, critic and professor emeritus at Princeton University.
The most multifaceted layer is the editing of the collected texts. Alongside the 42 articles published in Bamboo, it presents five previously unpublished pieces (“The Formlessness of the Informal,” “Leisure and Play,” “Other Places,” “Between the Place and the Map,” and “Emptiness and Shadow”). Reorganized around three themes—the challenges of urbanism, the Global South, and the relationship between art and architecture—the texts are articulated within the temporality of sequential reading that a book affords. Thus, although produced separately and at different times, they form an entirely new whole. Within it, analytical profiles of cities such as Tokyo, Shenzhen, Brasília, and São Paulo sit alongside those of artists such as Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meireles, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Michael Wesely, to name a few, without creating false continuities. They are joined by true portraits of architects and studios, including Sergio Bernardes, Vilanova Artigas, Lina Bo Bardi, and Oscar Niemeyer, and, internationally, Tadao Ando, Herzog & de Meuron, Diller Scofidio, and SANAA. All are portrayed through their works.
No less relevant are the reflections on São Paulo’s municipal Master Plan, approved under Fernando Haddad’s administration in 2014, in the face of the impasses of the postindustrial city. In the same vein, a retrospective look asks what the consequences of the Lula government’s “spectacle of growth” were for contemporary urbanization. Interwoven with these themes are discussions that make us rethink the emergence of recent phenomena and the persistence of others. On the one hand, there is the depth of movements such as Ocupe Estelita in Recife and Praia da Estação in Belo Horizonte, which shaped ways of activating public space in Brazilian cities. On the other, the paradoxical—because lethal—vitality of the city organized as a “Carropolis,” one of the themes of the 10th Architecture Biennial, for which Guilherme served as chief curator, and which punctuates this collection. This kind of city is structured around the illusion of freedom the automobile gives us, even as it traps us in traffic, pollutes the environment, and consumes fossil fuels without restraint. A symbol of an irresponsible lifestyle, Carropolis corroborates a thesis dear to Wisnik: “the concept of planned obsolescence is shifting dramatically from commodities to the very territory of the planet.”
Hence the need to draw attention to sustainability, embracing solutions based on recycling and reuse as constructive possibilities. That is what this book does. Without yielding to the temptation to demonstrate formulas and resolve conflicts, this space under construction invites us to interpret words and things. It opens to the reader as a second-generation original, in which every return describes a new center and another possible beginning.
[Image: Juliana Alves]