fala

"I like boring things.”

— Andy Warhol.

“Bob and I used to play a game called ‘I Can Like Something Uglier than You Can Like.’”

 — Denise Scott-Brown

“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”

 — Virginia Woolf

“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”

— gustave Flaubert

Five years after publishing 1961–1992 Japan, fala has once again dedicated a book to a unique architectural body of work, located in time and space, that includes none of their own projects. The first volume presented 250 highly sophisticated Japanese houses from the three central decades of the second half of the 20th century. This new book presents “a group of anonymous residential buildings constructed in Porto roughly between 1960 and 1990.”[5] The same time period as the previous book, but a different location. And, above all, the sophisticated architecture has now been replaced by anonymous architecture “shaped by repetitive plots, ascetic regulations, and resolutely prosaic circumstances.”

    This temporal correspondence fascinates me because I want to see it much like a scientific experiment in which only a minimum of controlled parameters are varied whose economy makes only the variables themselves meaningful, as a way to say something specific about architecture. “Several things” would be more accurate, since this book actually unfolds a series of vanishing points.

    First, it brings to light a little-known body of work typical of Porto, although the authors emphasize that, in their view, Porto is less at stake than this type of work itself. Significantly, this is a “typical” body of work, in the sense that they emphasize that “It assigns meaning to buildings that are, in positive terms, banal and insignificant”, insisting that “meaning is not a property of exception, but of accumulation.” To contrast the exceptional—traditionally associated with the exploratory nature of high architecture—with accumulation is to provide an implicit definition of typology. The repetitive power of mass culture versus the inventive sophistication of high culture. This research therefore proposes a renewal of typology in the form of a series of approximately one thousand photographs of one thousand buildings corresponding to a singular layer of Porto’s urban palimpsest. Here, a series of photographs taken specifically for this book is preferred over the tedious yet terribly beautiful plan views of entire city neighborhoods found in classical typomorphological studies. The massive, typological character of these supposedly modest architectures is emphasized by the “casual” nature of the images. The character of these images allows these architectures to retain their status as unspectacular urban objects. Photographing them according to the canons of high architecture—straightened verticals, color correction in post-production, etc.—would lead to their inclusion in a cultural sphere that is not truly their own: they might lose their liveliness and lightness. They would then tend to become what pinned butterflies in display cases are to living butterflies: objects that can be observed at will, whereas the beauty of garden butterflies is enhanced by the fact that we sense it when they fly and perceive it a little more clearly when they land, but we always observe them with a sense of urgency because we know they will soon take flight again. The architects walked the streets with the photographer to capture these images, barely pausing in their walk. This also speaks, implicitly, to the conditions under which such a research is conducted by the hyperactive members of an architecture firm that produces a lot and whose members, moreover, teach: time is scarce, and the urgency of life meets here the lightness of architecture and the need to document its existence before it disappears.

    In their approach to documenting a vanishing reality, if not in form, these images evoke those that Baron Haussmann’s administration commissioned Charles Marville to take of parts of old Paris slated for demolition due to upcoming construction projects. They also evoke, through their seemingly unremarkable nature, the photographs Eugène Atget took—also in Paris—at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Walter Benjamin, to underscore the uncanny quality of these seemingly boring images, said they resembled “a crime scene.” In the same vein, the “ugly ducks” have replaced the atmosphere of police photographs with that of real estate agency photos.

    In this way, they renew the representation of architecture by depicting it in a manner we are already familiar with; this is metaphorical of the way we might also think, at first glance, that we have already seen these buildings. Yet this is not the case. A closer examination—and prompting this closer examination is, of course, the purpose of this book—reveals the unique qualities of these seemingly unremarkable objects. In doing so, to use yet another metaphor, fala creates a work of architecture by decontextualizing this series of buildings and recontextualizing it as a coherent series within a book, that is, within a scholarly context, even as the form of representation seeks to preserve their vitality and status: “[…] they suck the aura from reality like water from a sinking ship”, as Benjamin put it, again referring to Atget, but it applies as well to those ones. Indeed, innovation in architecture consists less in inventing new elements than in creating new relationships between familiar ones. Thus, bringing unknown architecture to light is already an act of architecture.

    Leafing through this book and strolling among these seemingly mundane architectural works is an opportunity to refine one’s gaze so that it can grasp the infinitesimal aspects of architecture: when faced with documentary photographs such as Atget’s, one might wonder why they were taken. Here, one wonders why this or that building was chosen. This drift through the mundane within a unique temporal layer offers us the sensation of taking the pulse of the real with far greater intensity than reading an orthodox guide to Porto’s high architecture ever could. Just as it is pleasant, in a beloved foreign city, to stay long enough to grow bored of it. Then one feels as though one is beginning to grasp its soul and to inhabit it, for to inhabit is to be able to grow bored. This is the essence of banality, and this is what fala allows us to experience.

    In doing so, they lead us to question how much minimal architecture a building must contain to hold our attention, to give meaning to the space, and to be featured in such a work. A particular ornament, through its astonishing subtlety or its excess; a particular relationship between structure and infill; the originality of a specific element’s design; a complex geometry that seems to serve no purpose; a particular repetitiveness; a counterintuitive façade composition; a particular color; a particular material; the literal brutality of a particular collage; the narrowness of a façade; and so on. Architecture always relates to a form of excess. And even restraint can be excessive.

    fala chose to show only facades, even though they had access to the plans during their visits to the archives. This, too, tends to define architecture: that of the city, of public space—not of private space, even if it is, by definition, reflected in the facades. An idea of architecture as a public matter, as a matter of facade expression and communication. And, all things considered, an idea of popular architecture, for it is undoubtedly the concept of facades, rather than that of space, that non-architects often associate with the work of architects.

    This, combined with the fact that the architectural expression of these buildings is both clumsy and infinitesimal, renders this architecture “naïve” in the etymological sense of the term: that is, both nascent and natural. Thus, just as we gain insight into something unique about the universe by exploring its beginnings through telescopes probing the deepest reaches of space, fala explores the native state of architecture.

    It is in this sense that I see this book as the counterpart to the one on Japanese houses. As is often the case, it is more productive to ask what things that are seemingly opposites have in common than to emphasize a difference that is already obvious. One book, presenting sophisticated architectural designs, contains redrawn plans, to facilitate comparison and highlight the quality of the spatial arrangements, accompanied by photographs, notably many interior shots: space is at stake in these projects, which their critical dimension pushes to the limits, often blending the sophisticated with a form of archaism; here too, a zero state, almost rudimentary and nascent, which, in its own way, challenges the definition of inhabiting. The other, which is in your hands, consists of photographs and, while in a sense intended to be placed at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, also presents a state that is native to architecture. The first elevates research on space to great heights and detaches it from convention. The second struggles, in its own way, to offer an architectural expression by detaching it, despite everything, from pragmatism. This “scholarly minimum” of convention, on the one hand, and this “popular minimum” of architectural expression, on the other, are two extreme states whose respective economies of means ultimately converge to form a circle. Both, once again, remind us that meaningful architecture always rests on a form of excess.

    Another aspect in which these two types of production converge is that the “ugly ducks”, which are supposed to go unnoticed, become remarkable through fala’s eyes; conversely, one is often surprised, when visiting the Japanese projects by Shinohara and his school, by the modesty of these buildings—small in scale and constructed with simple means, and most often seeming to blend into a non-hierarchical urban mass. And yet some of these buildings, stranded at the corners of ordinary streets in Yokohama or Uehara and covered in patina, have constituted—and continue to constitute—true conceptual tsunamis. The massive presence of the modest, the modesty of the presence of the explosive concept: here, too, a circle closes.

    Through such initiatives, fala practices architecture in a form other than their projects, if we consider that practicing architecture consists of implementing, in one form or another, a critical perspective on space. In doing so, they also reveal to us a significant part of their imagination: Japanese architecture starting with Shinohara, to put it somewhat succinctly, and the private real estate development in the city where their office is located: Porto. Significantly, they have chosen to take the opposite approach to the standard architectural guide to Porto as we know it, opting instead for one of the major components of Porto’s banality. I am always surprised myself, when leafing through a guide I wrote on 20th-century Parisian architecture, at how difficult it is to immediately recognize Paris in it. And for good reason: scholarly architecture struggles to achieve a singular expression.

By revealing their imagination to us in this way, fala runs the risk of having the originality of their work downplayed. They would be wrong to fear this, for what they show us is that an architect’s or artist’s primary project is the creation and cultivation of their imagination. Like that of any accomplished architect, fala’s imagination is a project in and of itself. And, beyond the notion of a project, the imagination is our primary mode of knowledge, even if our world, dominated by the Cartesian gaze of technology, tries to make us forget it. And imagination stems from forms of rationality no less consistent than Cartesianism. But I believe it is essential to emphasize as well how this second volume, devoted to the things they love, stands in stark contrast to the exhibitionist platitudes of so many architects who feel compelled to share their autobiographies and lists of favorite films, as if being an architect made one an expert on everything, or as if architects had to stoop to the level of the tabloid press. On the contrary, fala shows us how, far from any cheap originality, their work in all its forms is profoundly unique, for it carves out within the common language of the architectural discipline a language that only they speak but that we can all understand.