Breaking the Law Breaking the Law

Cirugeda's "Spatial Agency" highlights a moment of reaction and survival that was spurred in the wake of Spain's financial crisis of the late aughts.

Al Jazeera's profile on Cirugeda and his brand of guerilla architecture followed his team through several built projects, as well as some under construction. His process felt like a bridge between our last module of participatory architecture, and our current module of political architecture. He showed his design process of meeting with the community, then his construction staffing process of literally asking a crowd who wanted to swing a hammer, versus who would sign up to pour concrete. The video shows a bunch of hippies showing up to an empty lot and building a pretty hideous spider, but for some reason, everyone loves it. There's a good line in the interview about everyone having an ugly friend that everyone loves.

I think the reasons why they love their architectural "ugly friend" relate back to the ability to skirt the laws and typical process of building permits, financing, permissions, etc. and instead, just finding the scraps, finding the land, finding the labor, and going for it. Sometimes they admit they bite off way more than they can chew.

We hope our economy doesn't face similar challenges to that of Cirugeda's time and region. But in the off-chance it does, it makes me wonder if we'd start some group chat to design-build a way out of economic collapse (reply in the comments if you'd ghosting the chat, or heavily involved™). Would it just be a team going to prop up a circus pole, before it all comes crashing down on us.