EMPTY AND CITY | n’UNDO at the Venice Architecture Biennale

Location: Venice, Italy

Year: 2016

Framework:  Venice Architecture Biennale

#Empty  #Architecture

EMPTY AND CITY

Rulfo told me: “To write you have to use the tip of the pencil that has rubber.” In the art of writing, deleting words is as important or more important than find them. You have to know how to eliminate the ones that are left over.” 1

The cities are the result of the addition of built elements and spaces that are multiplied by the activities that take place in them, among the population that occupies them. Build city, it is not only build, not even from the strict view of discipline. Making a city implies generating spaces where life can happen. Create places for defined uses and activities, with specific spatial and technical requirements, but also preserve gaps, which are not resolved from the pre-definition of the project, but as the place where anything can arise; places that welcome uncertainty and future, that from the humility of minimal intervention guarantee the widest opportunity for use.

The environment is constituted both by what is built and by each renunciation, each respected void, by what it has been decided not to do, so it has been removed. Actions all of them of alteration and of our world, transcendent and necessary.

“Where there is nothing, everything is possible; where there is architecture nothing else can happen” 2 and Precisely those places where everything is possible are fundamental parts of the city, so it must be from the discipline, from the technical and multidisciplinary knowledge, from where it is guaranteed and promote its existence and creation. Today’s urbanism has to take care of the protection and consolidation of untouched, empty spaces, of silences, of the horizon, because today, more than ever, what has not been defined, assigned, equipped, consumed, is at risk of losing its condition and ceasing to be of value to the environment.

The architectural discipline is not a fixed definition, it is not accumulating material in an orderly or random manner. fashion. It is not self-referential, it is outlining diffuse potentialities, it is a blurring, it is deciding what will not be, it is thinking about emptiness, confronting nothing, vacating, allowing everything to happen.

n´UNDO | September 2016.

1 Eduardo Galeano.

2 Rem Koolhaas.