informal to formal
Sometimes, it seems that
the concept of urbanism gets lost among the multitude of ideas that surround the
notion of the way people should live. When talking about the difference between
tactics and strategies and how the modern city doesn’t plan for urban organicism,
etc., the idea of an urban enclave came to mind. In an urban context,
understanding the different boundaries can contribute to creating cities within
cities. Usually, this means chaos, disorder, a spontaneous mess. But this is
what makes life, well, life. The appeal to Crawford’s “everyday urbanism” is
evident. It’s multidimensional and responsive to the intangible activities of
the user.
But the spectrum of this
organic, tactile urbanism is rather vague. It includes informal urban interventions
to more formal programs. A project that comes to mind is yet another
one in Barcelona: Can Batlló.
The residents here have claimed the transformation of an abandoned textile factory to
become something more functional for their needs. Many of the warehouses
have been converted into a library, theater, auditorium, even an auto shop, for the neighborhood to use. And since
then, the community has been collectively rethinking the transformation for the
rest of the site. What this community has been doing is taking a space that was
underutilized and putting together the proposal for reusing what they have and
transforming the space to fit their everyday needs.
As David said in class, “the
informal becomes formal.”
Said informal auto shop for self-repair of vehicles, including cars, motorcycles, bicycles, wheelchairs.
I love the idea of the people, the users taking control. Not only is it giving them voice and participatory access like we've been discussing but it gives that everyday life character to a structure that wasn't a part of that story. It gave it life again, but in a way that suited the "norm".
ReplyDeleteI do agree with this concept as a human, but I feel as an architect it has no direction. For our profession to take the turn of just building an enclosure that people fill themselves seems lackluster and benign to society. Architecture has to design flexible structures, but in turn take the profession into a flexible era. We need to find a way to design in this fashion, while providing more service to society than we would just by implementing a structure that gets filled by people.
ReplyDelete