agora und void | unplanbar 2

Next june, TU Dresden organizes an International Conference called Agora and void. The staging of the center in architecture and urban planning. They invited us to deliver a paper at the Conference, that we have given the name:

…or how to build the void in the city

It will be a very interesting meeting, and an opportunity to meet colleagues in Dresden working under similar theoretical illusions. We are very pleased and have great expectations about the Conference.

The general issue is defined below:

Architectural visions of human society often culminate in
monumental community buildings that symbolically or concretely occupy the center. In the 20th century, these buildings often propose new concepts for content concepts and the place of traditional symbolization of transcendence, such as the cathedral or the grand palace, is often replaced by the blank, although structurally dominant place or the metaphorically exaggerated concept, detached from material substance. Particularly in realized ensembles, the staging of the center is often planned, yet not always implemented. Community buildings can also move to the edge and thus become attractions beyond the local context. The
staging of the center thus becomes an important indicator of social structure.
This conference will review and discuss concepts of forming centers in the 20th century from different regional and temporal relations with their the societal implications: of
interest is both the adoption of traditional settings in terms of aesthetics or content, as well as the development of new
concepts. In addition to the architectural visions and plans, the
development of existing centers is of interest as well as changes in their use and symbolic meanings. The range extends from the concept of the Civic Center through the possibilities of spaces of the void, to dystopian visions of centers with negative
transcendence such as the New Tower of Babel in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. The debates which often accompany these topics also make the public-minded aspects of urban development in the 20th century clear.

And this is the abstract of our contribution:

…or how to build the void in the city

We became accustomed to understand the city, both the physical (i.e. built) space of the city and its ‘sociological’ counterpart (i.e. the political space) as a kind of representation of the society in which it appears and in which is developed, as the image of a present (actual) state of things and as its solidification as built environment.

This paper will state that things are rather otherwise. Paradoxically, maybe is the material configuration of the city the one that allows its social and political configuration appear. First we have the spaces, then community gathers.

To illustrate this point, we will focus on the birth of classical Greek polis. Of course we know that the classical city is highly distinguishable from today's cities. Nevertheless, some issues remain unthought and deserve our attention.

Our first aim is to explain how the classical polis was formed not as a result from a specific social context and social organization, but as the result of the physical, architectonical construction of a certain type of space, a ‘multipurpose’ space that the community could feel as their own precisely because is empty, useless, free. That of the agora: the void in the city.

Our second (and main) aim is now revealed: how architecture today could think and build the new emptied spaces that could allow, in our superurbanized and hyperconnected world, for a new polis? Which kind of ‘void’ inside the limitless cities of today must be constructed? Could it be enough? Could we say that the ‘limits’ we search for should be traced from within? What can architecture (and urbanism) propose? In the world of ‘liquid space’, is still possible to retrace the empty space (empty because should be filled) of poli^(s)tical community? What about oïkonomia?

maría de la o del santo mora
josé vela castillo