MP: One third of the world's urban population
lives in similar structures to those found in shantytowns. Recently,
architects have been talking about successful favelas, or unapproved
constructions, in Brazil. I work with urban voids and overlooked
and economically exiled spaces. Your work also deals with voids
of a different sort, the occupation of space increasingly created
by urban planning and economic exploitation.
SS: If you read
the city as a narrative, both commercial architecture and the
unplanned structures you speak of are overlooked. It's
interesting that both are based on network systems in which
they often gather together in specific areas of a city in order
to support each other. What interests me is how the mechanisms
that control the form of a particular site are open to individual
or collective local reactions. What we can clearly observe
now is how the language of US modernist corporate culture travels
around the globe as a demonstration of economic power and cultural
value. Of course, it has happened before when Khrushchev visited
New York and set about building skyscrapers around Moscow,
or the modernisation of US transport being based on the Nazi
Autobahn system. To imagine that one could ÔreadÕ the
city, we must make the assumption that there is a still value
in a cognitive interpretation of space and architecture to
explain the unexplainable. To what degree can these cultural
signs be decoded? Reading the built environment through a series
of symbols or signs involves a level of speculation. What we
notice can be explained through anecdotes É or conspiracy
theories.
First published in Afterall a journal of Art,
Context and Enquiry Issue 06
