ARQ magazine # 98 - Massive

No era has built as much, nor it has been in charge of as much population like ours. Indeed, none had had so many architects. Today it seems that everything is massive: catastrophes, hunger, wealth, migration, production, fashion, or cities. This issue of ARQ not only analyzes such condition but also interrogates it. Anna Puigjaner shows collective kitchens all around the world. Saskia Sassen observes the massive inequalities we currently face. Keller Easterling proposes a smartphone app to generate changes on a large scale. Baraona & Reyes tell the energy costs involved in the production of bitcoins. Dogma discusses collective housing coupled with workplaces. Mobil Arquitectos proves that architecture can improve mass transport experience. El Equipo Mazzanti systematizes architecture to intervene on a massive scale. De Castro questions the massiveness of a concept formulated by global organizations. Pedro Alonso shows how Soviet housing is massively being destroyed in Moscow. OMA and Ole Scheeren manage to make a complex of over 1,000 apartments seem less massive. Muszbek & Froimovich reposition the housing crisis argument. The project by Marsino allows reassessing market-developed mass housing. Finally, accountabilities for hyper-densification are discussed in the debate. As we can see, this issue proofs that there are still several approaches to what massive is.

ARQ magazine # 101 - Freedom

In 1926, Walter Gropius presented a diagram of housing densities that calculated the distance between buildings based on a ratio of their height, so that each block would receive an appropriate amount of light. Shortly after, in 1931, Adams, Lewis and Orton argued that the beauty of Manhattan’s skyline was due to the ‘mass effect’: a set of buildings with different heights, shapes and facades, placed close to each other. While the first image insists on the value of rationality, the second argues in favor of a lack of rules. One stands in favor of order while the other in favor of anarchy. Both express the debate between planning and freedom. Architecture has usually been closer to the former, since both its tools (design and preview) and its goal (the definition of an order) make it hard for its products to encompass the unpredictability of the latter. However, freedom is much more than a debate represented through architectural images. Freedom is not an aesthetic choice. It is a political battleground. In the aforementioned context, freedom would force us to position ourselves between ends: between a laissez-faire where, in the name of individual freedom, everyone does whatever they want, and a totalitarianism where individual freedom is lost in favor of a greater cause. Given the unfeasibility of both extremes, the obvious solution would be the ‘right balance.’ Such politically correct standpoint – which was in the core of the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale called “Freespace” – is precisely what this issue of ARQ attempts to avoid.

ARQ magazine # 103 - Ecology

The climate changed. When we decided to dedicate an issue to ecology, we never thought we would have to do it in a country with such a rarefied environment. After relentlessly hearing the word sustainability, we forgot to attend to the obvious: the system’s inability to sustain itself. The “Chilean spring” of 2019 refocused the conversation and rolled back the horizon to the mid-1970s, when, while human rights were violated in Chile, the climate crisis emerged as a matter of concern among scientists across the world. When we decided to dedicate an issue to ecology, we knew that what is in danger of disappearing due to global warming is not the planet, but us as a species. But what we failed to consider was that, with or without climate change, many people were already victims of this system. We mourned for the fires in the Amazon or in Notre Dame. But we failed to realize that fire is as violent as the environment in which thousands of people live in our cities. These analogies are possible because the social outbreak shares the same structure than the ecological catastrophe: both have been slow-cooked, making them almost imperceptible until they finally burst. Both, too, had been announcing themselves for a long time, giving small signals that we chose to ignore. This issue shows that, since the climate changed, we can no longer ignore the ecology.