CITY OF BRIDGES

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CITY OF

BRIDGES

performativeurbanisms

of the everyday

Kirsten Larson

CITY OF

BRIDGES

performativeurbanisms

of the everyday

Kirsten Larson

CONTENTS

Foreword .........................................................................ii

Introduction—City of Bridges .......................................2

Words, Drawings, Actions .......................................10 Spatial Stories

Performative Drawings

Constructed Moments

Feira Livre—chatter ......................................................18

Roda de Samba—dance ...............................................28

Movimento Passe Livre—gather ..............................42

Dia das Crianças—imagine ........................................58

Pixição—mark ..............................................................68

References.....................................................................80 Works Cited

Summer Reading List

Afterword ......................................................................90

This book was produced in the context ofProfessor Jill Stoner’s seminar and studio Architecture on the Line 2014-15,in partial fulfillment of requirements for theMaster of Architecture degree at theUniversity of California, Berkeley.

Advisors:Jill Stoner and Nicholas de Monchaux

Printed by:Autumn Press, Berkeley

Copyright 2015Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.

i

Foreword

PREFACE ii

The experience of dance (of samba) therefore gave me the exact idea of what creation through the corporal act may be, a continuous transformability.

Helio OticicaDance in My Experience (Diary Entries)

page 107

…one path to this understanding is to hunt for situations that engage, in practice, the problematic nature of belonging to society and that embody such problems as narratives about the city.

Jim HolstonSpaces of Insurgent Citizenship

page 55

The work of this thesis is sited in São Paulo, Brasil, a city where I spent the better part of my mid-twenties. It is not autobiographical per se, but the drawings and stories are steeped in my everyday experience of the city—of long train rides to the northern periphery, of sitting on a cold cement floor with a band of teenage girls, of days and days wandering through the old city center, of being in an architecture studio course when I didn’t speak a lick of Portuguese, of samba circles that lasted long past sunrise, of traffic and bike rides, bank towers and back porches.

INTRODUCTION

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City of Bridges

INTRODUCTION 4

They knew all the bosses and concavities of the masons, as well as all the tales and legends associated with the existence and building of the bridge, in which reality and imagination, walking and dream, were wonderfully and inextricably mingled.”

Ivo AndricThe Bridge on the Drina

page 15

The constitution of non-representaitonal theory has always given equal weight to the vast spillage of things. In particular, it takes the energy of the sense-catching forms of things seriously (Crithley 2005) – rather than seeing things as mere cladding. Things answer back; ‘not only does our existence articulate that of an object through the language of our perceptions, the object calls out that language from us, and with it our own sense of embodied experience (Schwenger 2006: 3). But how to describe what Walter Benjamin called the ‘petrified unrest’ of things? Three main moves seem particularly apposite. To begin with, things become a part of hybrid assemblages: concretions, settings and flows.

Nigel ThriftNon-Representational Theory

page 8

We smell the city, taste its sugary coffee, feel its cracked lanes under thin bike tires, see its foggy hills in the distance, and hear the rumble of helicopters over midnight protests. Towers are erected, they are tagged, occupied, guarded—a small kiosk placed in front. They are walled. Sidewalks are scrubbed clean with very old push brooms and suds of soapy water. Motos make their own rules, tipping handlebars between the rear-view mirrors of dense traffic; transgression is their mode of articulation. Fearless skateboarders weave through the same cars, crouching, wind flapping in their hair. Taggers dangle from the lips of abandoned towers. Push-carts full of popcorn pull onto curbs. Travelers and artisans set up shop on the busiest corners, pinning down purple velvet blankets, and thousands of feather earrings. They amass along the length of a block, dotting its edges with glinting jewels. The humid, fluttering space between bodies and buildings is written and rewritten every waking moment, and in São Paulo every moment is waking. The daily uncertainties and specificities of enactment, flux and resonance etch an urban palimpsest. What we believe to be solid—the buildings, pilers, and pipes of the city dwell in constant interface with the world of force, will, action, and history. The city-body is composed in protest and festival, wandering and daily ritual.

Across São Paulo’s vast concrete landscape, seven thousand one hundred and fifty-seven bridges set their feet on the riverbanks and roadway edges. Their narratives are epic and everyday; moments of transition in a tangled urban score. On foot you do not cross so safely, darting traffic squeezes against median barriers, unless you are on one of the scattered foot-passes, like a concrete water main, sliced in half and propped up. Or on the ‘Viaduto

Caldeira, T.; ‘Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in São Paulo’, pp. 386

Holston, J.; ‘Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship’, pp. 37

Law J.; After Method: mess in social science research (quoted in Hiller J.; Stretching Beyond the Horizon) pp. 220

Kwinter, S.; Architectures of Time, pp. 14

5

Santa Ifigênia’, its tiled surface is thick with fortune tellers, and skateboarders, and hurried businessmen. But the feet of this historic bridge touch down in Centro, the cities oldest neighborhood, an area which is still quite dressed up.

Why so many bridges?

São Paulo is a city of rivers, and also a city of highways, lanes and lanes of roadways glued to concrete banks, and eroded banks, and Citibanks. The largest rivers, the Tiete and the Pinherios cling to their highways. Four lanes of stalled traffic in both directions. In the neighborhood of Morumbi, the ‘Ponte Octavio Frias de Olveira’—a monumental, yellow, high-tension-cable bridge stretches across the Pinherios river. Far away from the old city center, it marks ‘new money’. This typology, however, is rare. Most of the city’s rivers and streams are punctuated by simple two-lane bridges, adorned solely with chipping concrete railings and slightly elevated sidewalks. Highways are marked by the large soot-soaked columns of dim underpasses and long ramps of pedestrian foot-passes.

Often overlooked because of their functional character, this thesis considers the commonplace bridge and its conditions of possibility as scaffolding for art and politics in the city of São Paulo, Brasil. In figuring the performative in the mundane the work adopts a conceptual framing device from music, where the bridge is expressed as a unique transition, preparing the audience to return to the refrain. In cities, the footpath, viaduct, and underpass retain a familiar program of passage, becoming a matter of affect, duration, consistency, and individuation (or haecceity).

Stories of everyday city happenings, postulate a reconceptualization of the material and immaterial binary through a narrative approach to the urban imaginary. The thesis seeks methods through which the architectural design process can be driven and inspired by everyday narratives of the city, for what stories conjure in the minds eye, and what that tells us about space-making, where every story is a travel story—a spatial practice. The work stakes its claim within the sensory and sensual rather than the formal and programmatic. The affective power of crowds, loud music, dancing bodies, billowing bar-b-que smoke, and running children is as much the fodder for urban spaces as concrete, steel, and brick. Motivated by the relationship between the built and the sublime, the work explores the performative potency of architecture to unsettle, trouble, and make strange the construction and reconstruction of urban infrastructures.

INTRODUCTION 6

McCormack, D.P.; ‘A paper with an interest in rhythm’, pp. 476

de Certeau, M.; The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 115

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Pixicão

Dia das Crianças

Movimento Passe Livre

Roda de Samba

Feira Livre

7 INTRODUCTION 8

The next several pages introduce the project’s methods of representation: tightly bound and chattering to one another, both giving and taking directives. They are: i.) Spatial Stories—words; ii) Performative Drawings—drawings; and, iii) Constructed Moments—actions. This collection of representational languages are put into motion through narratives of five urban events: 1) Feira Livre—chatter; 2) Roda de Samba—dance; 3) Movimento Passe Livre—gather; 4) Dia das Crianças—imagine; 4) and, 5) Pixição—mark. Each event serves as the vehicle through which drawing as story telling enters into the affective space of the everyday, a locus for exploration, invention, and imagination—conceive(ing) of “movement” as a first principle and not merely a special, dismissable case.

The term ‘performative’ is borrowed from its origins in linguistic philosophy and work postulates that the most foundational performative act, the creative and emancipatory ‘speech act’ is equally fundamental in drawing and mark making, where performative constitutes a situation in which articulation itself generates a new reality. Echoing Jim Holston’s provocation—the intuitive and interpretive drawings are a representational endeavor in reading the social against the grain of its typical formations. The thesis takes seriously the architectural potential of feeling, narrative and event, so strongly present in the city’s streets, and so often intangible. The narrative and visual representations for each of the five events are the formal and conceptual base for a re-programing of commonplace bridges as performative social spaces.


Wolfrum, 5; Performative Urbanism, pp. 5

Holston, J.; ‘Spaces of In-surgent Citizenship’, pp. 54

WORDS, DRAWINGS, ACTIONS

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Spatial Stories

WRITING, DRAWINGS, ACTIONS 12

Their narratives are epic and everyday; they tell of migration and production, law and laughter, revolution and art. Yet, although obvious, their registry is never wholly legible because each foray into the palimpsest of city surfaces reveals only traces of these relations. Once lived as irreducible to one another, they are registered as part of the multiplicity and simultaneity of processes that turn the city into an infinite geometry of superimpositions. Their identities, modes, forms, categories, and types recombine in the gray matter of streets. City narratives are, as a result, both evident and enigmatic. Knowing them is always experimental.

Jim HolstonSpaces of Insurgent Citizenship

page 37

Its chief concern is to develop descriptions of how emotions occur in everyday life, understood as the richly expressive/aesthetic feeling-cum-behavior of continual becoming that is chiefly provided by bodily states and processes.

Nigel ThriftNon-Representational Theory

page 175

Five ‘Spatial Stories’—a foray into the palimpsest of the city. They sip São Paulo’s sugary coffee and its cold beer, running paragraphs along cracked streets and through busy traffic. They recall everyday events; weave narrative descriptions of music and smell, taste and light, sweat and bodies. They trace the forms of bustling blocks, slick floors, and open garages. The stories search for an architecture of stacked crates, pattering heel clicks, and crowded metro exits. Lina Bo Bardi described this way of working as fixing of joyful scenes in (her) mind, to be pulled from later when she is back at the office, huddled over a desk. And she was know for saying, ‘I never look for beauty, only poetry’.

This collection of events and their re-tellings are not necessarily ‘joyful’, but they are strongly corporal and they are looking for poetry. They vary in size, formation and time scale, but all encompass degrees of ritual, procession, repetition, cycles, shifting, and particularly a recontextualization, subversion, or reinvention of the street and of public space. They are stories of affective space pushed into motion with the stage, set, and actors of the city, of occasions where the sensual and corporal, taste and smell, sound and rhythm blur our dominantly visual sensibility.

Each of the five Spatial Stories draws upon spatial metaphor and corporal relationships between the built environment and bodies, as a problematic locus for meaning, experience, and knowledge. In the introduction to Participation Claire Bishop points to practices where the work [art object] is tightly bound-up with or inspired by everyday events and practices. “Less familiar is the history of those artistic practices since the 1960s that appropriate social forms as a way to bring art closer to everyday life: intangible experiences such as dancing samba (Helio Oiticica) or funk (Adrian Piper); drinking beer (Tom Marion); discussing philosophy (Ian Wilson) or politics (Joseph Beuys); organizing a garage sale (Martha Rosler); running a café (Allen Ruppersberg; Daniel Spoerri; Gordon Metta-Clark), a hotel (Alighiero Boetti; Ruppersberg) or a travel agency (Christo and Jeanne-Claude)” (Bishop, 10).

Holston, J.; ‘Spaces of In-surgent Citizenship’, pp. 37

bo Bardi, L.; Stones Against Diamonds, pp. 97

Ibid., pp. 129

Highmore, B.; ‘Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics’, pp. 119

Hence, space – as time – only exists in relation to consciousness, rather than as an absolute condition. Taking that into account, it becomes clear that cartography as a tool of epistemology and acquisition of knowledge is deeply challenged, and seems to fall short of requirements. In short, it is not about describing urbanity as an object; it is about conceiving the urban as a process.

Nikolai Frhr. v. BrandisRelational Space – Perception and Analysis

page 67

The challenge is to transgress representation: to interrupt and disrupt the transmission of a representation (Natter and Jones III, 1997) and to replace it with the disordered image of an unrperesentable practice or subject.

Jean HillerStretching Beyond the Horizon

page 198

13

Performative Drawings


A set of five Performative Drawings transpose each Spatial Story and take them to another place in the city, etching paragraphs into the landscape of the street, the bridge, and façade of joining buildings with all their messiness and movement. Each drawing begins at a bridge, wandering across the program of passage and flux, and stretches into adjoining streets. How can a drawing evoke the feeling of an event? Of a party or a protest?

The representational agenda of the Performative Drawings is one of motion, time and blurriness; they search for everyday infinities. Inspired by Julie Mehretu, Larissa Fissler, David Schnell, and Sarah Sze the drawings are constructed on the scaffolding of loose site maps, fragmented elevations, and the sounds of Spatial Stories. They are built to evoke rather than represent. They are maps of affect, speculative topographies of happening. The drawings take directives from Spatial Stories, but equally assert necessary edits. With the bold angular lines of bent façades a drawing will indicate where a particularly potent phrase is missing from a story; the story is amended. The stories and drawings are constructed in tandem and in dialogue, each asking their own questions about representation and urban space.

Geographer Nigel Thrift and City Planner Jean Hiller place this type of work within the intellectual framework of ‘non-representational theory’, which takes the leitmotif of movement and works with it as a means of going beyond constructivism. For Hiller a project of post-representational theory will incorporate issues of fragmentation, multiplicity, rupture, agonism, fluidity, transformation, transgression and undecidability: not either/or but both/and. The drawings are fragmented. They ask questions about the scale of a block, the scale of a smell, and that of a song. In Greek epistemology ‘character’ comes from the verb “to scratch” or “to engrave”. The rhythm of telephone poles and front doors, voices and horns, are cast as characters in urban story-telling, they are traced and retraced. The drawings are interested in overabundance much more than distillation.

Bertelsen, L. & Murphine, A.; ‘An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Féliz Guattari on Affect and the Refrain’, pp. 138

Thrift, N.; Non-Representational Theory - Space|Politics|Affect

Ibid., pp. 5

Hiller, J.; Stretching Beyond the Horizon - A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance, pp. 224

Architecture would then be seen in its full proximity and intimacy with the system of forces that give shape and rhythm to the everyday life of the body. Thus the object—be it a building, a compound site, or an entire urban matrix, insofar as such units continue to exist at all as functional terms—would be defined now ‘not by how it appears, but rather by practices’: those it partakes of an those that take place within it.

Stanford KwinterArchitectures of Time

page 14

It will be necessary to create ‘environments for these works – the actual concept of ‘exhibition’ in its traditional sense, is changed, since to ‘exhibit’ such works does not make sense (this would be a lesser partial interest) – structural spaces that are free both to the participation and to the creative inventions of spectators.

Hélio Oiticica Dance in My Experience (Diary Entries)

page 108

15

Constructed Moments

Drawing inspiration, formal tones, and narrative approaches from the Spatial Stories and Performative Drawings, a series of Constructed Moments test transposition as an architectural method. Large room-scale interventions pair the story and drawing of each event with a bridge typology and cultural program. Three Constructed Moments: an elevated artist studio, outdoor theatre, and truncated library are spaces of lively pause across the bridges program of passage. Each intervention galvanizes architecture’s character as an illocutionary event, employing time, movement, and light as foundational spatial elements. The interventions test, at various scales, the performative capacity of architecture, that of perfect incompletion, which discovers a moment in life (expectation, presentiment, nostalgia) and provides it with and expression, while making of this moment a principle for the “construction of ambiance”.

Citing the work of Félix Guattari, French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud discusses the aesthetics of culture production and its relationship to the construction of environments. “’How can you bring a classroom to life as though it were an artwork?’ asks Guattari (Chaosmose, 1992). By asking this question, he raises the ultimate aesthetic problem. How is aesthetics to be used, and can it possibly be injected into tissues that have been rigidified by the capitalist economy” (Bourriaud, 169)? How can a simple bridge, the most stripped-down infrastructural element, be brought to life as though it were an artwork? Guided by the Spatial Stories and Performative Drawings, each Constructed Moment projects the aesthetic, affective, and ephemeral space of everyday events onto a bridge, imagining an architecture of pulled corners and rhythmic samba melodies, dense crowds and loud protests, grab-holds and the shadows of invisible artists.

Inspired by the Afro-Brazilian ‘vertical dance’ of candomblé, in which the body rises and falls along an imaginary line, Lina bo Bardi’s spiral staircase at the SESC Pompeia emits the idea of ascending into the infinite. Pinned to concrete slabs its radius is tight and the cables tremble ever-so-slightly. This performative spiral stair is hung in the center of a slim concrete tower at a workers cultural center in the historically industrial region of Barra Funda, quickly becoming a densely populated upper-middle class neighborhood. Each Constructed Moment takes programmatic cues from the lively cultural spaces of SESC Pompeia and disperses them across the far reaches of the city, attaching, specifically to the many, many bridges, dotting equally the far periphery and center city.



Lefevbre, H.; Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, pp. 151

Oliveria, O.; The Subtle Substances. The Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi, pp. 179

FEIRA LIVREchatter

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Provisional and nomadic constructions thicken the hedges of the street. A motley band of trucks pull onto perpendicular lanes. The mounting clamor of stacking crates rises well before the sun. Worn green and yellow tarps are hoisted up–deflated hot air balloons, yearning to take flight. They warm the street with colored rays. Bustles of calloused hands pull and tie, securing the feira’s murky connections between fabrics and feelings. They don’t need words. Stout men whistle unintelligible couplets, toss fish and papayas; a color will “answer to” a sound. The street is already sticky and the air sweet. Sugarcane juice dribbles into plastic cups while its dry peeling skin falls like hey. Bubbling hot vats of oil pop and crack, waiting for a lady in a white hairnet to spin around and drop a doughy pastel right in the middle. But the hot food is always on the far end, and the far end is not so easy to get to. There are no clear paths here. It’s a straight shot but an unrushed elderly couple will trip you up, and so will the shredded coconut salesman. He doesn’t have his own tent, just a small agile cart set with large cups of coconut bits. He quickly passes one to you, sprinkling the street with the only snow it will ever see.

The ‘petrified unrest’ of things quiver. Produce bounces against the ground with a certain frequency that you can almost predict an inevitable fall. Everything is bumping and vibrating, the elderly couple same as the bags of rice and spices. It is like a crumpled candy wrapper dropped into a pile of gray rocks. It starts abruptly and ends abruptly. If new towers aren’t being erected in the immediate vicinity, you may hear it from a few blocks away. The feira chatters along with the city, and like bickering sisters one is always louder than the other.

At the feira every flavor has an emotional resonance, the timbre of the pastel plays a baseline to its taste—the crunchiness of golden brown corners and greasy, greasy dripping cheese. You’re handed a slice of mango, so juicy you can barely hold it in one hand. The produce keeps touching you. Ripe-to-eat bananas, bushels of chubby fingers oozing out the top. Everything here is just a bit dewy, waking up on a foggy morning. The feira leaves almost as quickly as it came, splintered wooden tables crawling back into their trucks. It leaves the street sticky and stained; the air thick, unsettled, like a living room the night after a house party—the ghosts of bodies bumming into one another and some broken wooden crates that won’t make it back home.

Open Market

FEIRA LIVRE 20

Bourriaud, N.; Relational Aesthetics, pp. 163


Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F.; A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 330

Thrift, N. (quoting Walter Benjamin); Non-Representational Theory: Space|Politics|Affect, pp. 8


21 FEIRA LIVRE 22

23 FEIRA LIVRE 24

25 FEIRA LIVRE 26

RODA DE SAMBAdance

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They redraw the nondescript corner, sleepy on weekdays and Sunday mornings. The interior rhythm of the collective renders its edges, steadily tracing the curb with pattering heal clicks, and ledge with sliding glasses. Sambistas know. A ceramic whistle is blown, from somewhere, hard to tell where. And the cuica starts, slow at first, whining, the whinny of an old horse trotting back to the barn along sonorous, gestural, motor lines, stomping harder on the downbeat. The florescent lights are blinding, worse than a budget dentist office, reflecting off glassy tiled walls. Butecos don’t have doors or windows, their apertures are over-sized garages cut out of the mass of the street stretching down the street. You’re never really “in” or “out”, and the music draws a much larger space. The florescent lights are only the fuel—tangy lime with cachaça and lines of freezers. The dentist lights flood cracked roads. The music spills out. The beer spills out. The beer is split, the slicker the floor the smoother the feet. The body is not just written upon. It writes as well, mapping muddy steps. The cuica speeds up, running after the tambourine, stomping harder on the downbeat.

The center is on the corner, a read plastic table, lighter than a brick, pulls like a magnet at the bouncing mass. An inner circle gathers around the table, tight, awkward, anything but circular, shaking fingers, calling out insults that rhyme, a hymn to the superfluous. But it is not so tight. An old man pokes his head in, tapping a bent steak knife on the bottom of a lunch plate. Smoke from makeshift grills blows in your eyes, the smell of steak and chorizo draw a larger space than the crowd, at least in the beginning. It’s a different story at midnight.

The center is also a states away, and decades away—in Rio, on the unpaved winding roads of the Favela de Mangueira, one-hundred degrees, January, 1973. Here, on the foggy street corners of São Paulo someone turns to you—“Salve, Candeia!” A sambista born in Rio in 1935, but we know him well. The music draws an area much larger than the block; it pulls corners together and collapses time, territorial refrains that are sung differently form neighborhood to neighborhood. The mass sings together, tipping their heads back, chanting lyrics they’ve heard hundreds of times. The intellect remains obscured by an internal mythical force, as the ledges, curbs, and columns of corners hook elbows with their borrowed neighbors.

Samba Circle

RODA DE SAMBA 30

Oiticica, H.; ‘Dance in My Experience (Diary Entries)’, pp. 105


Thrift, N.; Non-Representational Theory: Space|Politics|Affect, pp. 141

Ibid., pp. 2


Oiticica, H.; ‘Dance in My Experience (Diary Entries), pp. 105

31 RODA DE SAMBA 32

33 RODA DE SAMBA 34

35 RODA DE SAMBA 36

37

Maracatu, heavy gourds cloaked in nets of small beads. Drums, drums, drums. The rumble of sugar cane trucks and dashing motorcycles. The clamor of a neighboring block.

A set of raised bleachers frame the corners of pedestrian foot-passes as a series of stages. Small, elevated, concrete stages. They are platforms of least acoustic isolation. The soundtrack of their songs are mixed, and remixed with the sounds of the city. They play short clips to passers-by and longer sets to those who linger.

The whine of Forró’s accordion; couples spinning round and round, and the incessant honking of slow moving traffic. Bleachers are lunch spots and rest-stops, itineraries for neighborhood jam bands and theatre groups.

Roda de Samba and the Stage

RODA DE SAMBA 38

39 RODA DE SAMBA 40

MOVIMENTO PASSE LIVREgather

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Weaving bodies yelled to the highway below, roiling maelstroms of affect. July, 2013. It was never about a 20c rise in bus fare. That was just the last card before the stack fell to pieces, jacks and eights sliding across the floor. A silent Internet announcement, an updated piece of digital text, a mid-level bureaucrat clicked “post”. The streets flooded, it’s such an overused metaphor, but that’s what happened. Bodies poured out of their mid-rise apartments and out of the periphery. The old plazas of Centro pulled at the veins of the city, the space of use and reclaimed immediacy. And they were flooded, right at the onset of rush hour, when cars really rule the city, when they choke the streets honking and inching forward. Not today, or next Friday, or the following Tuesday… They will creep along at a much slower pace today, and they will do it on less important streets.

Bordering buildings, clinging to the sidewalk loomed large—shadows of a concrete city constructed in a century. Shadows of an eighteen-million population surge, of a state capital running out of water, of a City of Walls—a trace of creation in the created. São Paulo pulled at the veins of the country and now its bodies poured into the street, bumping paths tracing trajectories of difference, drawn from the far southern and eastern zones. The corpus of angry, chanting, banner waving, mask wearing, filming bodies mounted quickly, surged out of metro exits, wounds cut open, as if to show what 20c means in volume, in mass of human bodies. They pushed back at the cities pervasive traffic, barricaded it, pressed it out of their way; lanes and plazas became a means of performing difference. The Praça do Sé was like the drivers seat on the onset of a drag race, from zero to sixty, grinding hard in fourth gear.

The hill from Centro to Paulista felt longer than normal, and steeper. The canyon city echoed as winter dusk fell to night, São João Batista’s tall bell tower keeping time. The buildings performed with the crowed street—a confrontation between a bank complex an occupied building, a yellow, crumbling colonial farmhouse, the long soot-soaked wall of the cities oldest cemetery, another overpass, and the lights of Paulista. Beneath the hanging concrete slab of MASP’s belly propped up on each end by massive red columns a space of protest was put into motion, the color red always bleeds.

Free Fare Movement

MOVIMENTO PASSE LIVRE 44


Lefevbre, H.; Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, pp. 146

Caldiera, T.; City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo


Hiller, J.; Stretching Beyond the Horizon: A Mutiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance, pp. 212

Bertelsen , L. & Mur-phine, A.; ‘An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Féliz Guattari on Affect and the Refrain’, pp. 138

45 MOVIMENTO PASSE LIVRE 46





Tall, thin stacks follow the lines of huge highway girders. A faint rumble of traffic above. Cars, bikes, and motos flash along all sides. Play in this short stop-motion film. A ribbon pattern of red metal reveals books, and books, and books.

The library is tucked within the underpass, the dark underbelly of large infrastructure. Framing tunnels of dotted light, it holds forgotten poetry of years past, a collection of stories penned by the anxious hands of high-school students, an anarchy handbook, folklore and music scores. Tales of the neighborhood, the city, and the world. A place of wondrous pause. It catalogs and collects, receives and gives away.

Movimento Passe Livre and the Library


DIA DAS CRIANÇASimagine

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The street is a place to avoid cars, and darting motorcycles. At least, 364 days a year it is. Today it’s an unfolded kitchen. And a castle come alive. And a boat of imaginary beasts sailing to sea, quickly filling with water. A thousand stacked bunk beds, for all of your very best friends, the nested hierarchy of social bodies, starting with the family and ending with the urban community. The moon hangs just above the top bunk. A garden of marching florescent plants, tapping their soccer-ball bulbs on low awnings. A chalkboard staircase, for all of your dreams, building an economy of jouissance. A forest of giant pink doors, shaking on their loose hinges. And all those swings, dangling like wrecking-ball pendulums from the re-bar of incomplete columns.

Wait, what’s going on here?

Cars park perpendicular a few blocks away, and block the street. The 20th of November, after all, Dia das Crianças, Kids Day. School is closed and so is the street. Doors slide open, the street, sidewalk, and adjoining garages are one continuous space, a constructed conviviality of colored flags, garage cafeterias, vats of spaghetti, the open plot— a trampoline, a stage, a soccer field. And this continuous space is speckled with children’s dreams run wild, enlivening the performance of the present. They dart across in every direction, shout to someone they can’t see; she appears in a window half-a-block down the street, throws a Popsicle splat! onto the street. The mass of the buildings blend together. They’re all their house. An jointed complex of back doors mark paths through everyone’s living room. Small pattering bare feet run in and out, drawing new ways of socializing spatially. Trunk speakers blasting, her uncle’s buffed red car pumps deep rhythms into the perfectly bubbly clouds hanging just low enough to catch on cable receptors and telephone wires. They squint in the sun, and squeeze under chairs, tap shoulders and spin around, wave recklessly and race up the hill, their street can only be experienced fully through movement.

Kids Day

DIA DAS CRIANÇAS 60

Stanek, L.; Introduction, Toward and Architecture of Enjoyment, Henri Lefeb-vre, pp. xxxiii

Lefevbre, H.; Toward and Architecture of Enjoyment, pp. lxi

Bourriaud, N.; Relational Aesthetics, pp. 166

McCormack, D. P.; ‘A paper with an interest in rhythm’, pp. 473

Dell, C.; ‘Producing City – Producing Space’, pp. 148

Wolfrum, S.; Performative Urbanism, pp. 15

61 DIA DAS CRIANÇAS 62



PIXIÇÃOmark

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Kassab undressed São Paulo almost a decade ago, renegotiated its infinite geometry of superimpositions. He passed the Clean City Statute and pealed off all the signs, ads, and billboards. Many of their rusting frames are still perched on roadsides and facades—skeletons of unhung advertising. He undressed the city, took its expensive gaudy Gucci make-up off. Raw walls—a faded patchwork of dollars lost reasserted their stubborn plainness. But this ground is not only paid for in cash, with its crew of men and their entourage of cranes exchanging walls on the seventeenth floor with strips along main avenues. A nocturnal complex of unpaid bodies writes and rewrites the score of the city, an aggregate of matters of expression, rolling their own symbols on every imaginable surface and the unimaginable too. There is no center, but there are certainly ranks.

This is the city of pixação, of creation through the corporal act—tall thin letters dimensioned by arms-reach and roller width. Any monetary notion of value is scrambled; surfaces are assessed by difficulty, visibility and long histories of turf. The unending landscape of structures is re-cataloged by grab-holds and overhangs, barbed wire and window frames. The city is a mountain. It dares young men to climb the impossible southern face, its ravines and its ledges. Notoriety isn’t inscribed in books, it is inscribed on luxury towers. The hardest to reach spaces are the most desired; here the buildings are really the ground. Subverted and tagged and scaled, and the scale of the letters mimic the scale of the tall buildings of this radical urban sport. Pixação is aggressively visible, and its enactors invisible, spattering their own eighth-notes across the massive page.

Carroll and Borges told us stories of impossibly huge maps, one to one scale in fact, as big as the territory they describe. Well, here it is, always unfolded, draped across kilometers of concrete. Despite all political efforts to fold it up, like they had so successfully done with the signage of yeas past, pixaçao persists—a memoir of social inequality in plain text, huge, plain text. A pervasive wallpaper of the subaltern. The letters are not passed down from European roots, they have their own system of signs, articulation itself generates a new reality. Typeface is defined by clan, number of years painting, and the dimensions of a cheap paint roller. Busy at work, the furthest reaches of the periphery, twenty kilometers in some cases, reach into the city center and imprint their presence.

Tagging

PIXIÇÃO 70

Holston, J.; ‘Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship’, pp. 37



Oiticica, H.; ‘Dance in My Experience (Diary Entries)’, pp. 107

Caldiera, T.; ‘Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in São Paulo’, pp. 396

Wolfrum, S.; Performative Urbanism, pp. 5

71 PIXIÇÃO 72

73 PIXIÇÃO 74

75

A thickened billboard—the artist studio steps in front of its bridge, standing in for advertising of years past. Lightly pinned and built on thin steel legs, it masks the bridges stubbornly dull character. It lights the dark highway with a soft blue glow.

A series of panels both display and blur rotating works, anonymous yet highly visible, finished and in process. Hung on bright blue tracks, display panels slide back and forth, are replaced and repainted on an unpredictable and unplanned basis. Sometimes, the work is as blurred as the lights of fast traffic below, sliding behind a perforated screen or ribbed panel. Other times the work is as clear as the taillights of a car in front of you during the long trudge of holiday weekend stop and go traffic. In this case, a painting is slid to the center, unobstructed and unmoving.

Like the work of pixadores that so intensely marks the surfaces of São Paulo, the studio holds steadfast while its occupants come and go, climb a thin ladder into the studio’s tower, peer over the city below, paint and repaint.

Pixição and the Artist Studio

PIXIÇÃO 76

77 PIXIÇÃO 78

REFERENCES

80

Works CitedAndric, I. (1945) The Bridge on the Drina. University of Chicago Press.

Bertelsen, L. & Murphine, A. (2010) ‘An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Féliz Guattari on Affect and the Refrain.’ In The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press.

Bishop, C. (2006) Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art). The MIT Press.

bo Bardi, L. (2012) Stones Against Diamonds. Architectural Association Publications.

Bourriaud, N. (1998) Relational Aesthetics. Les Presse Du Reel.

Debord, G. (1957) ‘Towards a Situationist International.’ In Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art). The MIT Press.

de Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. University of California Press.

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F (1987) A Thousand Plateaus. University of Minnesota Press.

Dell, C. (2015) ‘Producing City – Producing Space.’ In Performative Urbanism: Generating and Designing Urban Space. Jovis Press.

Caldeira, T. (2012) ‘Imprinting and Moving Around: New Visibilities and Configurations of Public Space in São Paulo.’ In Public Culture. Volume 24, Number 2 67: 385-419. doi: 10.1215/08992363-1535543

Caldeira, T. (2000) City of Walls - Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo. University of California Press.

Highmore, B. (2010) ‘Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics.’ In The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press.

Hillier, J. (2007) Stretching Beyond the Horizon: A Multiplanar Theory of Spatial Planning and Governance. Ashgate Publishing Limited.

Holston, J. (1999) ‘Spaces of Insurgent Citizenship’ in Cities and Citizenship. Durham and London: Duke University Press 37-56

Kovac, T. (2013) ‘100 YC [100-Year City]’. In Log. Issue 27 40-49. Anyone Corporation.

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Kwinter, S. (2001) Architectures of Time : Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. MIT Press.

McCormack, D. P. (2002) ‘A paper with an interest in rhythm’. Geoforum. Volume 33, Issue 4, 469–485. doi:10.1016/S0016-7185(02)00031-3

Lefebvre, H. (2014) Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment. University of Minnesota Press.

Oiticica, H. (2006) ‘Dance in My Experience (Diary Entries)//(1965-66)’. in Participation. London: Whitechapel.

Oliveria, O. (2006) The Subtle Substances. The Architecture of Lina Bo Bardi. Romano Guerrra.

Stanek, L. (2014) Introduction. In Toward and Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri Lefebvre. University of Minnesota Press.

Thrift, N. (2008) Non-Representational Theory - Space|Politics|Affect. Routledge Press.

Trummer, P. (2013) ‘The City as an Object: Thoughts on The Form of the City.’ In Log. Issue 27 51-81. Anyone Corporation.

Vittorio Aureli, P. (2013) ‘The Theology Of Tabula Rasa: Walter Benjamin And Architecture in The age of Precarity.’ In Log. Issue 27 111-124. Anyone Corporation.

Watson, V. (2006) ‘Deep Difference: Diversity, Planning and Ethics.’ In Planning Theory. Vol. 5 no.1 31-50. doi: 10.1177/1473095206061020

Wolfrum, S. (2015) Performative Urbanism. Jovis Press.

Yatsuka, H. (2013) ‘Urban Project as Thought Experiment.’ In Log. Issue 27 102-120. Anyone Corporation.

REFERENCES 82

Summer Reading List

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Careri, Francesco: Walkscapes. Walking as an Aesthetic Practice. Barcelona 2002.

Hempfer Klaus” “Performance, Performanz, Performativiat”, in: Hempfer, Klaus and Jorg Volbers: Theorien des Performativen. Sprache – Wissen – Praxis, Eine kritisch Bestandsaufnahme. Bielefeld 2011, pp. 13-43

Jackson, John Brinkerhoff: A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time. New Haven, London 1994.

Janson, Alban, Florian Tiggers: Fundamental Concepts of Architecture: The Vocabulary of Spatial Situations. Basel 2014.

Gerald Raunig, “Creative Industries as Mass Deception,” in Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries,’ ed. Gerald Raunig, Gene Ray, and Ulf Wuggenig (London: MayFly Books, 2011), 191-203.

Kwon, “Genealogy of Site Specificity,” One Place After Another (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 11-31.

Shannon Jackson, “Performance, Aesthetics, and Support” and “Quality Time: Social Practice Debates in Contemporary Art,” Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Richard Florida, “What Critics Get Wrong About the Creative Class and Economic Development,” The Atlantic Cities, July 3, 2012, http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2012/07/what-critics-get- wrong-about-creative-class/.

Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3-30.

Jen Harvie, Theater and the City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Xuefei Ren, “Architecture as Branding: Mega-project Developments in Beijing,” Built Environment 34, no. 4 (2008): 517-531.

Laura Kurgan, “Introduction,” “Mapping considered as a problem of theory and practice,” “Representation and the necessity of interpretation,” “From military surveillance to the public sphere,” Project 4 – Kosovo 1999” Close Up at a 9. Distance: Mapping, Technology and Politics (New York: Zone, 2013), 7-54, 112-127.

REFERENCES 84

Annette Kim, Chapter 1 “Seen and unseen” and Chapter 4 “Mapping the unmapped” in Sidewalk City: Re-mapping Public Space in Ho Chi Minh City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 4-38, 102-169.

Iris Marion Young, “City life and difference”, in Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 226-256.

Aaltern, A. (1997) ‘Performing the body, creating culture’ in Davis, K. (ed.), Embodied Practices, Feminist Perspectives on the Body, London: Sage, pp 41-58

Abbott, A. (2001) Time Matters, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Abercombie, N. & Longherst, B. (1998) Audiences: A Sociological Theory of Performance and Imagination, London: Sage.

Abrahams, R.D. (2005) Everyday Life: A Poetics of Vernacular Practices, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ahmed, S. (2004) The Critical Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Albright, A.C. (1989) ‘Mining the dance field: spectacle, moving subjects and feminist theory’ Contact Quarterly 12: 23 -47

Allen, J. and Pryke, M. (1994) ‘The production of service space’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 12: 453-476.

Appadurai, A. (2006) Fear of Small Numbers. An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Brennan, T. (2004) The Transmission of Affect, London: Continuum.

Bruno, G. (2002) Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York: Verso.

Carter, P. (1992) The Sound In Between: Voice, Space, Performance. Kensington: New South Wales University Press.

Caygill, H. (1998) Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience. London: Routledge.

Cohen-Cruz, J. (ed.) (1998) Radical Street Performance. London: Routledge

Colebrook, C. (2005) ‘On the specificity of affect’ in Buchanan, I. and Lambert, G. (eds) Deleuze and Space, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 189-206

Dunagan, C. (2005) ‘Dance, knowledge, and poer’ Topi, 24: 29-41

Eco, U. (1989) The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Farnell, B. (1994) ‘Ethnographics and the moving body’ Man, New Series 29: 929-974

Foster, S.L. (2005) ‘Choreographing empathy’ Topi, 24: 81-91

Franko, M. (1993) Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gibson, A. (1996) Towards a Postmodern Theory of Narrative, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Gross, D. (2006) The Secret History of Emotion, From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Grosz, F. (ed) (1999) Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory and Futures, Ithinca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Hewitt, A. (2005) Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kofman, E. and Lebas, E. (1995) ‘Lost in transposition-time, space and the city’ in Writings on Cities: H. Lefevvre, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 3-100.

Kwon, M.P. (2004) One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Latour, B. (2006) ‘Air’ in Jones, C.A. (ed.) Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 104-107.

McCullough, M. (2004) Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Massumi, B. (2004) ‘Building experience’ in Spuybroek, L., Machining Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 322-331.

Norman, D.A. (2004) Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.

Pred, R. (2005) Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness of Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schenchner, R. (2002) Performance Studies: An Introduction, London: Routledge.

Schieffelin, E.L. (1998) ‘Problematising performance’ in Hughes Preeland, R. (ed.) Ritual, Performance, Media, London: Routeledge, pp. 194-207.

Schwenger, P. (2006) The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sheringham, M. (1996) ‘City space, mental space, poetic space: Paris in Brenton, Benjamin an dReda’ in Sheringham, M. (ed.) Parisian Fields, London: Reakiton, pp. 85-114.

Vesely, D. (2004) Architecture in an Age of Divided Representation. Cambridge, MA:MIT Press.

Vidler, A. (2000) Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Warner, M. (2002) Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.

Ahmed, Sara (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

REFERENCES 86

Alteri, Charles (2003) The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Anderson, Ben (2006) ‘Becoming and Being Hopeful: Towards a Theory of Affect.” Environment and Planning D 24: 733-52.

Bishop, Claire (2005) Installation Art: A Critical History. London: Tate Publishing.

Brennan, Tresa (2004) The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Clough, Patrica (2007) Introduction to The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Clough with Jean Halley, 1-33. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gibbs, Anna (2001) ‘Contagious Feelings: Pauline Hanson and the Epidemiology of Affect.’ Australian Humanities Review 24.

Grossberg, Lawrence (1997) Dancing in spite of Myself: Essays in Cultural Studies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hansen, Mark (2004) ‘The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life.’ Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring): 584-626.

James, William (1884) ‘What is Emotion?’ Mind 9(34): 188-205.

Klingmann, Anna (2007) Brandscapes: Architecture in the Experience Economy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Latour, Bruno (2004) ‘How to Talk about the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies.’ Body and Society 2(3): 205-29

Moran, Joe (2005) Reading the Everyday. London: Routledge.

Postrel, Virginia (2003) The Substance of Style: How the Rise of Aesthetic Value is Remaking Commerce, Culture, and Consciousness. New York: Harper Collins.

Redding, Paul (1999) The Logic of Affect. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003) Touching Felling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy. Durnham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shouse, Eric (2005) ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect.” M/C Journal 8(6).

Steward, Kathleen (2007) Ordinary Affects. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Virilio, Paul (2005) City of Panic. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Berg.

Virilio, Paul (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life. Trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. New York: Semiotext(e).

Lefevbre, H. (2004) Rhythmanalysis – Space, Time and Everyday Life. Bloomsbury Academic.

Stoll, K. & Lloyd, S. (2010) Infrastructure as Architecture – Designing Composite Networks. Jovis Press.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012) The Make-Believe Space – Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity. Duke University Press

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89 AFTERWORD 90

To turn the world upside down using theory, the imaginary, and dream, to contribute to its multiform practical transformation, without being restricted to a limited form (political, “cultural,” ideological, and, therefore, dogmatic), in this way the meaning of our initiative is given.

Henri Lefevbre Toward and Architecture of Enjoyment

page 28

I attempt from different perspectives to convey something of the fascination of thinking of the city as an action – in the overlaying of the concepts of rationality, performance, improvisation, and thinking space “musically”. In the end, however, it is not about closing a circle, but traveling a path of recurrent and distinctive iterations woven into a historical track of thinking and working on a very specific variant of urban theory.

Christopher Dell Producing City – Producing Space,

page 147

Afterword

Books about architectural projects always feel so finished. Evenly cut sheets, neatly glued together bind a particular type of finality: a wrapping up. They give neatness and order to the disorder that surrounds creative projects. This book is, in its own way, an ordering and organizing of thoughts and drawings—stacked and rolled-up on shelves, strewn about an ever-messy desk, post-its waving like war flags from the top of bound volumes. But I confess, this is much less a final product or ‘wrapping-up’ than it is a rest-stop. A place to gather many of the thoughts, things, and words that swirl around any architectural project, simultaneously pulling toward and away from a coherent argument. A thesis?

These works’ connections to theory are in motion as much as the drawings—thin lines dancing off the page. I am constantly searching for vehicles through which literature, critical texts on urbanism, the city, and the everyday make their way into an architectural thesis, so intently focused on the creative labor of producing drawings. This book is looking for openings where narrative seeps in. A dialogue between theory, a soundtrack of ideas playing in your mind, and drawing. How might these multiple and interwoven ‘soundtracks’ register?

The ideas and references compiled here by no means form a complete intellectual lineage. They are the result of long evenings sitting between stacks of unfamiliar library books, of afternoons leafing through articles I hadn’t read in years, of recommendations, and a budding but enthusiastic interest in performance and affect theory. The contextualization of the thesis and its parts is self-aware in its under-theorization. The ‘Summer Reading List’ serves as a mile-marker in the long task of critical reflection, the work of which has barely begun.