In the exhibition, you address and question the political voice of architecture. What are your own politics – as a curator, critic, and teacher of architecture?
As a teacher and critic, I’ve always tried to call upon the need for responsibility. My curatorial politics are about expanding and promoting innovative and creative design culture – outside-of-the-box architectural and urban thinking – in order to tackle our immense problems and fight the dominance of increasingly mediocre mainstream culture...
Is there a critical stance to be found within this show?
It is not easy to produce criticism when one curates at an institution like MoMA. However, there are always critical choices to be made, even if it’s left to the viewer to interpret whether the absence of certain works or authors is a form of criticism. At its best, architecture is a cultural form that can make political statements; I’ve also tried to convey some criticism of architecture’s culture itself, when it is subsumed by economics and contributes to a landscape of pure consumption, or when it adopts simplistic ideas like “physical transparency equals social transparency.”
Are we surrounded by an inflated abuse of the term “political?”
Maybe. However, even at the risk of many superficial uses of the word, I still prefer that option to what’s been common in the field of architecture for so many years: the absolute primacy of autonomous practice that feels no responsibility towards the world and therefore considers itself “apolitical.” That tendency has been around ever since critics like Manfredo Tafuri lost faith in the ability of architecture to carry a revolutionary purpose, and that disillusionment then extended to a whole generation of starchitects who lost sight of the political implications of their work to achieve a certain material success.
You selected 100 works from the MoMA collection – what’s missing from their archive that you’d like to acquire?
In the little time I had – nine months – I did make an effort to acquire a number of works that I considered important so as to represent political aspects not otherwise represented in MoMA’s collection. They appear mostly in a section called “Occupying Social Borders.” These acquisitions included recent works by raumlabor Berlin, Didier Faustino, and Andrés Jaque, and one earlier work by Álvaro Siza.
9 + 1 ways of being political: 50 years of political stances in architecture and urban design
Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Architecture and Design Galleries
12 September, 2012 - 25 March, 2013
www.moma.org
Pedro Gadanho is an architect, curator, and writer currently based in New York City, where he is the Curator for Contemporary Architecture at the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art.
From Siza, you included his SAAL housing projects, which alleviated slum conditions in Portugal in the mid-1970s – and seem to have a relevance again after 40 years, not only in Portugal. What political stances in architecture and urban design do you foresee will have a comeback?
The participatory processes of design, typical of work by other architects in the 1970s, namely in the Netherlands, have already returned to architecture. Fiction and the exploration of dystopia as a form of expressing political dissent is also around, and in fact motivated a certain archeology of the theme in one of the exhibition's sections. Humanitarian and social concerns are also part of the current agenda. It will be interesting to see if institutional critique becomes more a norm in the architectural field, because with less commissions, architects increasingly produce unsolicited work.
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