Entre las muchas cosas que al parecer han quedado sin estudiarse lo suficiente en Ciudad Juárez a raíz de los eventos descritos es el empleo de las cicatrices y la ruina dejada por la violencia urbana como una estrategia para definir ubicaciones estratégicas para la construcción de nueva infraestructura urbana en Ciudad Juárez. Obras que abracen e incluyan los monumentos informales e improvisados además de aquellos oficiales y cívicos. Estos sitios se entiende se encuentran dispersos por toda la ciudad armando un tejido urbano con un valor potencialmente articulador; pero quizás no.

Muchos de los eventos violentos dejan marcas en el paisaje dependiendo de su escala o impacto. Sin embargo, en su repetición, terminan caracterizando patrones que identifican o re-significan barrios o distritos urbanos enteros. Desde grandes secciones de la periferia del valle de Juárez a intersecciones urbanas congestionadas, y, ciertamente, a barrios marginales y segregados espacialmente donde se concentran las poblaciones de menos ingresos habitando zonas informales o autoconstruidas a otras desarrolladas formalmente. A raíz de los últimos hechos destaca en este renglón, por ejemplo, el área de Riberas del Bravo. El día e imagen de hoy de Ciudad Juárez se cubre de una serie de monumentos o mausoleos recordando dónde, cuándo, y a veces cómo sucedieron los hechos. Algunos de éstos se han convertido, incluso, en símbolos reconocidos internacionalmente, como es el caso de las cruces rosas que recuerdan a los homicidios de mujeres ocurridos antes de la actual guerra.

Los 3 niveles de gobierno están en el proceso de planeación y, más, de construcción de infraestructuras sociales para la ciudad, misma que incluye espacios y servicios públicos, así como inversión en educación. Estos espacios se espera provean con oportunidades de actividad para la juventud juarense, de manera que sea apartada del crimen y vandalismo. Destaca la inversión del gobierno federal dentro del programa llamado “Todos Somos Juárez”. Una respuesta de arriba abajo que inicialmente respondió detonada por la tristemente famosa masacre de las Villas de Salvarcar a principios del año 2010, donde 15 jóvenes fueron asesinados en un solo evento. Un evento más sucedido en un aislado fraccionamiento de interés social rodeado de plantas industriales. “Todos Somos Juárez” incluye un presupuesto de cerca de mil millones de pesos lo que representa una cantidad quizás sin precedentes en infraestructura social en una ciudad como Ciudad Juárez en México.

Esto es una gran oportunidad pero hace que surja la pregunta de ¿cómo este muy afectado y fracturado paisaje urbano se puede orientar en su re-estructuración derivada de esa inversión? ¿Cómo podría ser que aquellas áreas dónde ha habido concentración de violencia o crímenes puntuales de gran impacto primero recordarán y después tomarán la oportunidad de incrementar su interconectividad urbana a raíz de la inversión aplicada? ¿Cómo se puede planear estratégicamente para algo que incluye toda una diversa gama de elementos y espacios urbanos, desde el centro tradicional, a espacios residuales, a los extensivos y fragmentados terrenos de interés social, a los barrios informales? ¿Podría ser que esta historia de violencia se convierta en rastros geográficos que provean de un nuevo tejido tanto de sintaxis como de semántica urbana? ¿Puede ser que la lógica perversa del crimen, sus estrategias y tácticas, convertirse en la condición con la cual reaccionar por medio de inversión pública igualmente responsiva e inteligente?

Si los sicarios de Salvarcar pudieron fácilmente aislar el vecindario, bloquear sus accesos para cometer un acto con impunidad ¿Cómo es que esto no se convierte en una lección de urbanismo para la inversión pública? ¿No ayudan las tácticas empleadas por el crimen a entender qué es lo que se tiene que cambiar en el medio físico de la ciudad? De hecho los orígenes de la planeación urbana han estado directamente ligados tanto al ejercicio del imperialismo o colonialismo como al entendimiento militar del medio físico y natural. ¿Por qué los arquitectos y urbanistas no aprendemos a pensar y actuar, en nuestras consultorías y en nuestra práctica, suficientemente como estrategas urbano-arquitectónicos? La inversión pública en Ciudad Juárez es una de las pocas oportunidades para apalancar la situación actual como una catapulta para un tejido urbano mejor integrado. Hacer lo anterior va más allá de actuar exactamente donde sucedió el hecho. Habría que pensar en términos urbanísticos por qué sucedió ahí, cómo, cuándo, y no tanto dónde. Esto último lo puede hacer cualquiera.

Un análisis de mapeo del desarrollo urbano histórico de la ciudad revela como las áreas de altos ingresos contra las de bajos ingresos, las formales contra las informales, han sido tradicionalmente opuestas. Sin embargo, al paso de los años, con patrones de desarrollo urbano fragmentados, lo que hay hoy en Juárez no es un lado pobre y otro rico; por el contrario, hay una serie de relaciones coincidentales o resultantes del modelo de desarrollo carente de suficiente planeación. Estas relaciones incluyen: ricos al lado de pobres y viceversa, ricos rodeados de pobres y viceversa. Esta es una oportunidad para Juárez. Una alternativa para la recomposición de los tejidos urbanos y los sociales. Muchas de las áreas de bajos ingresos han sido golpeadas fuertemente por el crimen. Derivado de las condiciones sociales que obligan a la población a ocuparse en la ilegalidad o de la inaccesibilidad determinada por la carencia de infraestructura. Las múltiples intersecciones, más bien colisiones, de las retículas urbanas aumentan el difícil acceso. Desafortunadamente algunas de las inversiones en infraestructura social están siendo ubicadas en estas zonas sin resolver el problema de desintegración espacial. Algunas de estas inversiones se ubican como elementos centrales de enclaves que pueden perpetuar las condiciones espaciales que permiten, por ejemplo, que jóvenes jugando fútbol rápido sean emboscados en un centro comunitario (caso de la colonia Francisco I. Madero). Como se comentó, algunas de estas inversiones se emplean casi como mausoleos justo en el fraccionamiento de difícil acceso dónde se encuentra un único grupo social (caso de Salvarcar). La oportunidad perdida en estos casos fue el emplear a la inversión en infraestructura social como elemento de puente social, en lugar de centro social.

¿Dónde hacer infraestructura social pues?

De nuevo actuando en contra de la práctica de hacerlo en acciones puntuales donde hay crimen es el hecho de que no existe un, completo, mapa público de la violencia en Ciudad Juárez. Saludable costumbre en muchas otras ciudades en países desarrollados, en Juárez no aparece esta pieza fundamental de información. Vale la pena pensar por qué y a qué intereses podría afectar de existir de manera pública. Quizás el esfuerzo más importante desarrollado recientemente es el de las “Crónicas de Héroes”, proyecto construido por el Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). El mapa accesible por internet revela, no sorprendentemente, una concentración del crimen en la zona central de la ciudad. Esto puede explicarse por ser esta la zona de principal actividad pública, pero también es contradictorio con las ubicaciones conocidas de crímenes de alto impacto en barrios periféricos, así como los recientes casos en bares. También podría explicarse por el hecho de que estas periferias no tienen tan alto acceso al internet como las zonas centrales, limitando en consecuencia su capacidad de información y de reporte de comportamientos heroicos.

Sobre lo que sí hay información en la ciudad, y bastante, es sobre las condiciones sociales. El IMIP, el INEGI, por contar a los más visibles, han producido mapas de la ciudad que muestran estratos sociales y en consecuencia territorios. Empleo el término territorio en el sentido casi castrense, de control. En el sentido de definición de fronteras y vaya que a Juárez la hemos construido como una cacofónica sinfonía de fronteras. No es difícil concluir que ante la definición de fronteras se simplifica la definición de territorios, de controles, y ante los vacíos siempre hay alguien próximo a ocuparlos.

En vista de esta relación entre crimen, infraestructura, acceso, ubicación, y falta de información parece que la mejor estrategia es una que de-construya o reconfigure la territorialidad de la ciudad. Una estrategia anti-territorial para la organización de la inversión pública y el espacio público. En lugar de construir centros de barrio un cambio hacia la construcción de puentes sociales entre comunidades divididas y entre grupos sociales. No deja de ser representativo que el elemento de puente sea tan significativo para Ciudad Juárez en su realidad de ciudad binacional en conjunto con El Paso, Texas. Y no me refiero, literalmente, a puentes estrechos y dedicados solo a una cosa. Me refiero a la capacidad de juntar, de integrar, de contener, y de ofrecer.

Hay ejemplos de espacios públicos que son puentes construidos en los últimos años. Uno de ellos es el parque “central” Hermanos Escobar, dividido por el tramo urbano de la carretera federal 45. Haciendo puente entre el corredor industrial del ferrocarril con barrios populares al este del mismo. Construido en su forma actual en los noventas, el parque está dividido en dos mitades y marca el paisaje con un prominente puente peatonal que desafortunadamente ha sido presa de la publicidad, legal e ilegal. Si bien los bordes del parque son críticos para su conectividad real y estos no tienen las condiciones ideales, la ubicación es idónea para la exploración del concepto de de-construcción de la territorialidad.

Otro concepto adicional al puente social es el de la polivalencia o indeterminación espacial del espacio público. El centro comunitario de la colonia Francisco I. Madero revela un espacio congestionado de programas definidos y poco flexibles y una ausencia casi residual de espacios indeterminados y en consecuencia completamente públicos: aquellos donde se puede hacer lo que sea con la libertad necesaria. Para lograr esto se necesita, sin embargo, suficiente espacio. Desafortunadamente la costumbre gubernamental es, con mucha frecuencia, arrojar programas espaciales predefinidos (canchas, unidades deportivas, centros de diversas índoles) y por naturaleza constreñidos al problema. El hecho de que la vistosidad de estas obras la otorga el usuario ciudadano y lo vivo (plantas, árboles, agua, animales, pájaros) y no tanto lo físico y permanente explica en parte el desdén con que las autoridades entienden al espacio público.

La indeterminación espacial y/o polivalencia es solo la continuidad a menor escala de la estrategia propuesta de de-construcción territorial.

También hay algunos ejemplos existentes de este tipo de espacios. La relativamente reciente renovada Plaza del Monumento a Juárez ha demostrado en su ocupación reciente las importantes capacidades y la responsabilidad espacial de lo público en una ciudad como Juárez. Este versátil espacio ha sido usado, entre otras cosas, tanto para bailes folklóricos, como para convertirse en pista de hielo temporal (con gran éxito al parecer), como para acoger a manifestantes pidiendo el fin de la violencia. En este último evento los escalones que le dan jerarquía al momento sirvieron como lienzo para la palabra justicia. El plan maestro del cual forma parte el proyecto de esta plaza la articula con el corredor del ferrocarril que la separa del centro de actividad más vital dentro de la zona antigua de Juárez. Con el escenario de una posible futura remoción del ferrocarril a la periferia oeste de la ciudad (la gobernadora de Nuevo México recién firmó una ley para promover la mudanza de los patios de la empresa ferrocarrilera principal a la periferia poniente de la ciudad binacional) el completar el plan maestro contribuiría a la conformación de todo un corredor potencialmente integrado por numerosos puentes sociales en la forma de espacio público desde el centro al extremo sur de la ciudad.

Así bien, la tesis propuesta en conjunto es: inversión en infraestructura como puente social y como cimiento polivalente para el público. Las oportunidades para esto ocurren entre zonas o distritos urbanos; no dentro de ellos. En Ciudad Juárez se pueden identificar las siguientes tipologías geográfico-sociales en un afán de proveer un sentido estratégico a esta propuesta:

• Puentes y corredores centrales: todas aquellas oportunidades ubicadas dentro del centro urbano, incluyendo el centro histórico y el PRONAF. Estas áreas tienen además una responsabilidad adicional para proveer de significado cívico a sus espacios y a la ciudad.
• Puentes y corredores en zonas informales: concentrados fundamentalmente en el poniente, a groso modo, entre el corredor industrial del ferrocarril y la Sierra de Juárez. Éstos ofrecen la oportunidad de continuar con los esfuerzos de planeación y obra pública enfocados a disminuir los asentamientos a lo largo de arroyos y zonas inundables así como la inclusión del concepto de infraestructuras de paisaje polivalentes donde tanto se efectúe el manejo de aguas pluviales como de lo público.
• El ya comentado corredor del ferrocarril en su forma de corredor central de Ciudad Juárez. La espina para el desarrollo urbano de la ciudad hasta los ochentas. Esta área continúa siendo un importante concentrador de empleo mezclado con amplios espacios vacíos en su longitud. Como se comentó también, ofrece la capacidad de vincular barrios al poniente con aquellos al oriente.
• Y el más numeroso de todos: los puentes y corredores de integración trans-territorial (que terminarán por fomentar la disolución esos territorios). Estos existen en toda la mancha urbana pero sobre todo se encuentran en la mitad oriental de la ciudad (tomando como línea divisoria al corredor del ferrocarril). Estos corredores establecen ubicaciones para los puentes donde la integración social entre distintos grupos sociales sucederá con mayor facilidad por su casi contigüidad física. Además tienen el valor adicional de que estas inversiones contribuirían también a la reparación o terminación de los tejidos urbanos tan fragmentados en esta zona de la ciudad. Como ventaja está que en estos corredores urbanos de infraestructura hay tanto centros de empleo, maquiladoras, como espacios vacíos. Muchos de estos últimos están destinados, o esperanzados, a usos industriales. Los fondos disponibles actualmente serán de las pocas oportunidades con las cuales se tengan recursos que hagan posible la compra de algunos de estos predios.

En fin, estos corredores donde se ubicarán los puentes sociales significan, contradictoriamente, la definición de territorios para de ahí pasar a la conexión y disolución entre ellos. Por su escala son distritos que no se definen por una barda o espacio vacío, como es el caso de los territorios actuales, sino que sus dilatadas fronteras extienden el concepto de puente social al convertirse en la ubicación ideal para corredores urbanos de comercio servicios, y, espacio público. Estos últimos entendidos como infraestructuras sociales tácticas ahora pero respondiendo a una visión a gran escala.

En condiciones extremas hay que buscar encontrar beneficios o potencial donde no se pensaría que lo pudiera haber. En una ciudad tan dividida como Juárez las prioridades y los criterios pueden ser la conformación de territorios más grandes que incluyan más grupos sociales. Aunque la ciudad abierta es la dirección adecuada, la (legal) lógica inmobiliaria y colectiva podría ser más sensible a una visión que continúe reconociendo que en las ciudades hay diferencias, pero de ahí, a que la lógica de inversión contribuya a la construcción de enclaves y guetos aislados hay una importante diferencia. El arquitecto José Castillo escribió recientemente en un editorial en la revista Domus que los arquitectos operando en Ciudad Juárez deben de ser críticos optimistas. Hay que sumarnos. Es sin duda más optimista el espacio dinámico de un puente o un corredor así como la condición espacial expectante de lo indeterminado y lo público, que un mausoleo estático, sobre-programado o mono-programado.

(La versión original en inglés de este texto fue presentada como una ponencia el congreso “Urban Nature” organizado por el Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) en Los Angeles, California, en el mes de marzo del 2011. Esta versión en Castellano fue publicada en la revista oficial de la Barra de Arquitectos de Chihuahua “Arquitectura Entre Líneas” en su ejemplar de los meses de Junio-Julio del 2011)

Good afternoon….

It has been a long, long, trip to come here,

 And I want to specially thank Arizona State University for this invitation to share the work we are doing in my studio in Chile.

You would be surprised to know that Arizona is as far from Chile …as Chile is from Arizona…

 Let me introduce you first… to some features of this extraordinary country.

 3.400 miles long north to south along the pacific coast and about 250 miles wide on average,

 That is the reason why we have a great variety of climates.

 The country is a strip of land, between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes mountains,

 Which are very high, up to 21.000 thousand feet.

 There are many active volcanoes all along these mountains. 

All this gives us the possibility of having the experience of many different forms of landscape…

 It is so much like that,

That one of our poets calls us (I mean call the Chilean culture…)

 That we were…. almost just pure geography…

 Chile is a bit like the west coast, only up side down…

 The north is the driest desert in the world, most of it 6.000 feet above sea level.

 Going south the country turns greener and greener with a central section very similar to California.

 Then the lakes district is similar to Washington State,

 and the fjords and islands like the west cost of Canada…(only much wilder) 

and then the Patagonia with low vegetation and cold climate.

 The fact that in Chile you are always seeing the mountains or the sea or both,

makes you have a very special experience about the presence of nature…

 In the life of us, Chileans, it is always there…

 We always have references and a sense of direction… because the mountain goes straight north to south…

 This can be, very helpful in life (to always   know where you are…)

 The fact that the country is bounded by the sea, the mountains and a desert

have kept the country isolated….

 giving us a sense of  being  far away from the rest of the world,

and  also of being different 

 These boundaries also explain the great variety of special plant material that is unique to this country…

 Some of these you will be seeing in my work.  

 The overwhelming presence of nature is portrayed by the high mountains, the volcanic eruptions that occur quite often, earth quakes are a common experience. I might say that this dramatic geography is the cause of a certain humility in the Chilean character

 Because of all that I have been inclined to do a work that basically pretends to value what belongs most… or is natural to the place.

I don’t want to impose my signature or my id….

 On the contrary I look very deeply in nature to find what is …what is in there, to work with…

 All this I do in different ways….

 Sometimes I found myself like a nurse…healing the wounds inflicted by man… Cumelen

 Other times we worked in recovering a piece of land in the middle of an oasis in the  Atacama desert… that was cultivated by Atacameños… centuries before the Spanish came..

 Other projects want to bring agricultural production into the landscape design work….Casablanca… where we design the plantation of olive trees, wine grapes, lavender, all for commercial purposes.

 Finally the projects on the coast line…where I try to …

 Uncover….what is in there.

Guide. people through a path…

 Allow people to get in nature,

 To have them totally immersed…

 To have the experience of nature…

 Well now we are going to review some of the projects :

 We will be started with one in the south…Cumelen….

 Josefa….

 Pite …..

 It is a discontinued walk where you have to find your own way…

 Where the construction is done only in the places where it was needed.

 If the rock wants you to walk on it you do not need to build a path…

 The fact that it is a discontinuous path makes you look for directions or signs in the landscape…

 and gives you the possibility to be in or out of the path …giving you different experiences in the landscape

 The contrast between nature and human intervention is really dramatic.

 Sometimes it is absolute clear where to walk and to go…where you are at….and sometimes you have to search for clues….

 Like  in life…

 The presence of the ocean wish is normally very rough (contrary to its name) is so overwhelming it gives you a sense of power and a temporality ….at the same time…

With guests coming from Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, and the United States, Landscapes of the Americas, SALA Fall 2009 lectures series exposes, from a variety of backgrounds, a fertility of techniques, concepts, and contexts as part of the contemporary reality of our global interdependent world and ultimately, the discipline of landscape architecture. Techniques and concepts which involve varied mapping departures -environmental, demographics, economy, culture, beauty, science, among others- to inform and in the service of the action of designing the landscape. The series offers a collection of contextual approaches which value site specificity while engaging and connecting abroad through blogging, traditional publication, competition, and activism. The series will enlighten the scope and reach of landscape architecture as a discipline which not only articulates with a multiplicity of professions, but also with a heterogeneous, contrasting, and stimulating growth and influence in different parts of our continent. Our guests are Felipe Correa (Harvard, Ecuador), David Tulloch (USA), Carol Franklin / Andropogon (USA), Teresa Moller (Chile), Luis Callejas / Paisajes Emergentes (Colombia), and Tom Oslund (USA).

Paisajes de las Américas:

Con invitados de Ecuador, Colombia, Chile, y los Estados Unidos, Paisajes de las Américas, el ciclo de conferencias de la Escuela de Arquitectura y Arquitectura de Paisaje de Arizona State University en Tempe, Arizona, expone una variedad de orígenes, una fertilidad de técnicas, conceptos, y contextos como parte de la realidad contemporánea de nuestro globalmente interdependiente planeta, y finalmente, la disciplina de la arquitectura de paisaje. Técnicas y conceptos que involucran diversos puntos de partida y mapeo: ambiental, demográfico, económico, cultural, estético, científico, entre otros- para informar y en el servicio del accionar del diseño del paisaje. El ciclo ofrece una colección de aproximaciones contextuales que valoran lo específico del sitio al tiempo que emplean y comunican abiertamente a través del blogging, publicación tradicional, competencias, y activismo. El ciclo iluminará el objetivo y alcance de la arquitectura de paisaje como una disciplina que no sólo articula una multiplicidad de profesiones, sino que también posee un heterogéneo, contrastante pero estimulante y creciente influencia y desarrollo en distintas partes de nuestro continente. Nuestros invitados son Felipe Correa (Harvard, Ecuador), David Tulloch (EEUU), Carol Franklin / Andropogon (EEUU), Teresa Moller (Chile), Luis Callejas / Paisajes Emergentes (Colombia), y Tom Oslund (EEUU).

The main objective of Mexican Territories is the exploration and understanding of Mexican inhabitation of territories through history departing from notable case studies of urbanism and architecture, focusing in the relationship and evolution between culture -society, economy, and politics- and the built environment. From hierarchical emblematic power structures to self-developed, self-produced, informal, emergent patterns. And from Pre-European inhabitation, to the Spanish Colony, the Independence, the Revolution, Modernity, and Contemporary Times, ending with an emphasis on the neighborhood between Mexico and the US and its effect on the physical landscape.

(SALA ASU, SPring 2009, Special Topics, LPH494)

By Gabriel Diaz-Montemayor 

The border region shared by Mexico and the United States establishes more than just a political line dividing the continent and its ecosystems. All along this area an irregular stripe contains a culture embedded in a nonlinear system of transversal cultures, regions, and ecosystems, shaped by the natural environment, politics, economy, and an isolation condition derived from distance of the hierarchical centers of both countries. Here, the border recognizes itself and no other, artificially materialized as a fence, or naturally existing in a river it often becomes invisible in the natural flows going back and forth, in drainage systems, in heavy massifs that overwhelm the fragility of the built symbolic division elements, and in human movements that replicate the landscape behaviour in the interactions along this region and in the bi-national city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, and El Paso, Texas[1].  

The contemporary cultural alienation of the urbanization patterns of Mexico are present from the scale of the single unit dwelling to the scale of the city. As socio-economical movements are forced northward into the United States, this bi-national city has become a depositary of cultural and economical contrasts. The second largest metropolitan area between both countries displays a contiguous urban relationship evenly distributed in their contact areas along the border. The city between the exhausted attractive paradigm of suburbia and the prevailing alienated pattern of the sought dream obstructed by the incompatible humanly natural informality of the poor enhanced with the formal detachment of the privileged. Between the well known formality of El Paso suburban development and its employment of arid materials in their attempts to landscape the prevalent infrastructural public networks and the informality of Ciudad Juarez and its alternative means for colonizing inhabitation of disenfranchised terrains, resides a field of opportunity to learn and act with the complex site specificity of this still young community formed by migration abroad. The melting pot for emergent inhabitation as a temporary unstably dynamic realm is found in its purest form in the informal outskirts of Ciudad Juarez. Where queuing multi-cultural population consciously unadvertedly manages to inhabit the landscape and whose constant attempt, trial, and error with the scarcest resources is almost officially disregarded as a possible analogy to inform the recognized realms of the formal bi-national variations for life in a harsh desert. 

The western end of Texas, the southeastern end of New Mexico, and central northern Chihuahua, receive the bi-national metropolis of more than two million formed by Ciudad Juárez (CJZ) (1,313,000 inhabitants[2]) in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, and El Paso (ELP) (598,590 inhabitants[3]) in the American state of Texas –and its conurbations in the western side of the metropolis on the state of New Mexico-, reacts to the line by an average of 60,000 thousand daily legal crossings through the bridges over the river, and through land in the only accessible to the metropolis crossing point between the New Mexico – Chihuahua border. The average urban gross densities of Mexican cities in the area is of 9,000 inhabitants per square mile[4]; while the average density of southern cities, more compact and in wetter climates, is as double as that (70 inhabitants/hectare). Meanwhile, US cities in the area –as ELP- have an average density of 3,500 inhabitants per square mile (13 inhabitants/hectare). The metropolis is located in the center of most disperse inhabitation of the North American continent. At the detail scale, however, an urban density map of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso would expose the 2.5 times denser south against a sparse north. 

The territorial re-colonization of the southern United States by population of a Hispanic origin is an obvious fact, but it does not depend only on a South – North directed flow. The other, from north to south occurs in the American cultural colonization of the urbanization patterns of the American Dream that have weakened and in some areas vanished the inhabitative traditions of Mexico. In today’s built environment of this south, urban form is shaped following versions of suburbanization patterns, in a permanent struggle for adaptation derived of economical differences that constrict infrastructures and properties.  Today, to the distracted visitor, a dreamed landscape of grassy meadows and tall and green trees, forced into Ciudad Juarez high income areas might be ordinary, an urban must. Just another example of suburbia developments that turn to be forced into narrower and smaller lots, in a futile –but locally effective- attempt to reenact the American dream. A landscape of European roofs for snow and water to capture a rainfall of less than 10 inches a year. Residences forcing steps into flat topographies with the outcome of a constant promotion of investment on introduced, non native, urban behaviour, and inhabitative practices. 

As the City sprawls into the dry landscape into the bent plane upward of the nearby mountains, so does the lack of educational and economical alternatives for their inhabitants. The delicate flows of the terrain into the Rio Grande divide the city in two halves, the west for informal self developed and built low income developments, and the east for formal high and low income subdivisions. In between them in the central area, the traditional downtown and surrounding traditional neighborhoods slowly erode as their inhabitants grow old, migrate, or find their place in the realm of intuitive unassisted vibrant human reverberation of slums. However, fueled by the fixed Mexican obsession of progress, this is the metropolis located within the nearby experience of the American dream is real to many due to geographical proximity and the gradual concentration of a population not born or belonging to pertaining generations on site. The American urban culture is strongly embedded in this area that is the only one with some capability to apply the dream, being the north the richest half of Mexico. 

The examination of the informal city in the Chihuahuan realm, and therefore by opposition the formal city, is an unfulfilled task for most of third world -or countries under development-  cities on earth. Here, the common concept of urban planning relates to a paradigm image of perfectly ordered zoning maps, circulatory structures, defining overall a general vision of the city, development direction, deliberate orientation and its forecasts. In a way, planning is a device for euphemistic detachment –or quimeric- from reality. As a mainly governmental responsibility, the solid colors and uniform surfaces successfully hide a much more complex truth. This is one of the numerous places in Mexican contemporary society where the contrast between the refined urban ordinances of urbanists and the third world realities collide making the mapped formal city unrecognizable on site. Today, most of the northern Mexico cities rely on individual car transportation systems that do not relate to unprofitable areas that belong to the extense informal realm, often making the contrast invisible to the privileged classes owning a car. Even though cheap junk cars imported –either legally of illegally- from the US are affordable to many, this similarity finds a way to be obscured by the cultural class detachment between the rich and the poor, the formal and the informal in a country positioned 103 out of 126 in an inequality scale recently developed by the UN. Poor circulate in their realm, and traditional downtown areas of Ciudad Juarez and El Paso. The rich circulate in the formal realm and commute to malls in the outskirts and conurbations of El Paso, closing the circle of economic interdependence. 

This informality is understood as a concept that relates to unregulated urban facts while on practice relates directly to urban density, fostering the highest indicators along with subsidized formal government housing. Outside the boundary of the planned –and taxed- development the informal just “happens”. Is manifested in the daily behavior and action of human inhabitation of their realms. The informal happens either in the private realm or in the public one. In the private realm, appears in the shape of gardens, color, additions or personalizations, incredibly inventive delimitation practices, and creative platform structural earthworks that on one hand offer a transparency suitable for solidarity and interaction, but on the other maintain a grave degree of physical vulnerability. The informal is part of culture and social expression affordable to the citizenship as it gives character to the city, found either in the beggar of the streets, in street clowns, in the fire-eater of the nocturnal red light, in street flea markets, in the walking candy man, and in diagonal paths marked by movement in the malleable terrains, vacant lots and natural vestiges.  

The predominant informal realm relates to a kind of movement. To dynamics in the sense that it is not fixed, it is not stable. If compared, the formal realm stands statically. And, if conscious, as far as the city is concerned, the solemnity of the formal (approach or idea) is un-attractive, obsolete, and insubstantial, paling at the side of the sustaining pumping vitality of the human part of the city. In contrast with high income areas where the public realm is defined –by sidewalks and pavement- and completed –by the required percentage of parks that subdivisions have to provide- the low income areas historically developed in an informal pattern that followed in accidented and expressive surfaces and landforms the abstractly flat grids stretching from the traditional city centers to a topographic adaptation as a light and ductile mantle falling into the earth, without built definition of the public and the private –no built pavement or sidewalks- and without provision of public space since no ordinances are followed besides the logic extension of the known order of the open and connected city. Slums concentrate denser populations that form neighborhoods and communities closely related to their site by inhabitation.  The evolutionary ownership in practice can be even traced back by the fragmentation of original large lots into smaller sections for sons and daughters, and grandsons, becoming a revolving informal subdivision pattern that escapes cadrastral registration. These larger lots that developed without urban services of any kind now shelter generational inhabitation that gets expressed in the visible –the static- elements of the physical realm. 

In high income developments, the dream landscape is made by gated communities rejecting the urban, avoiding undesirable city life. Fractioning even more the natural landscapes of the urban peripheries with their surrounding walls. Houses at the center of the lot with perimetral green lawns in the US are substituted in Mexico by a packed two story house into a narrower width, with a front yard average restriction of 1/5 of the lot lenght, no lateral lawns, a 4 feet corridor in one side, and at the back the repeated obligation of the backyard which remains disarticulated from the unit wasting up to 30% of the lot’s area in favor of a proto-typical ideal devised to follow up the centralized building in the lot. The formal low income developments –including those developed by governmental assistential and or subsidized housing- respond analogically to the same pattern in their smaller scale of customary lots of 23 by 59 feet. This approach to dwelling –and therefore to the city- speaks about the degenerative processes of outdoor life in such a perception of the sought urban pattern. Where formerly the courtyard or “patio” acted as datum for organization and use of the dwelling, regulating high temperature with natural ventilation working inside out; the alienated foreign paradigm has settled and affected urban form.  

The formal nevertheless has failed from articulating the city, as the regulated subdivisions and developments pertaining to urban ordinances have managed to cluster a “system of detachment”, a series of unarticulated grids or geometries –with gated developments becoming the favorite pattern- that accomplish zoning percentages and requirements but forget any other urban aspiration besides, sometimes, filing and filling a technical report indicating a verifiable automobile capacity in the connection points with the rest of the city. All new developments have a requisite for open public space. But laws just require a percentage for these donation areas, not requiring these elements to be related to a hierarchical composition as part of an urban structure defined by parks and plazas. The relationship of dwellings to these spaces is on many occasions almost a coincidence of development. Designers worry about giving the highest number of lots, sacrificing the rationality and potential of donation spaces. Many of these neighborhood donation areas relate to property division walls or to sloped terrains, while many of the dwellings don’t enjoy an even proximity with their parks. 

The challenge of ordering the planning riddle existing in physical contrasts not only inside Ciudad Juarez but between both cities is slowly developing. However an effort has to be done to address the extensive informal slums that contain a social and cultural structure that if registered correctly would be of great value to orientate government or associated investment and interest with a great potential on teaching alternative inhabitative patterns in the public and private realms. Placing the money and action where it is really needed for a neighborhood –strengthening communities arisen by solidarity and interaction-  and not where it is needed for another extensive section of the city, normally of the commonly attended higher income areas. As the bi-national city sprawls in the desert and in an economy under development, it manages to survive at a high social cost derived from obstinate blindness toward adaptive conditions found in the multicultural disenfranchised realms. In a society where more than half of the population is below the poverty line, and vital resources are shrinking, the need to focus on new hierarchical urban concepts is mandatory, especially those regarding public space and the alternatives for improvement within low budgets and opposite urban developmental patterns. In time, the inhabitants of the desert will have to learn to look inwardly and recognize themselves as part of the integral human thrive to subsist in the endangered and fragile system that supports them into a paradigm shift in the domestic and public realm. 

Addressing, attending and learning from the citizen physical gestures of the integral urban realm –formal and informal- would considerably enrich the standarized common structures already considered in local planning. With a paradigm shift in the general vision of the city some of the missing layers could make, through analysis, emerge the alternative orders beneath the built that become analogical to the opposite formal urban realm informing all of the systems and structures enforcing the human factor in the bi-nationally economically ridden city.  A chronological and systematical observation, registration, and analysis of dwelling growth and inhabitation practices would be fundamental for the design of that social stratum housing, especially those in the fringe of the city or in its internal boundaries around “no man’s land” areas of derelict abandoned industrial areas or the natural accidents that remain unresolved inside the city. This could also inform the inhabitation of the last boundary of the city, the limit between the natural and the artificial or urban, and possibly even the inhabitation of the ultimate boundary in the shared fronteir.  

Attention in these forgotten areas will discover construction, gardening, color, delimitating (fencing), all of them ahead and outside ordinance practices. It could also reveal the unique social group structure with high political potential as both cities are a bi-national melting pot. Shift the formal impersonal concept of urban planning into a social activity, take the analysis and action in situ. Expose and extend proposals and analytical conclusions to the and from the unpaved street level. Make color in planning –or urban understanding- and materiality of public works not only a definition of use but of intensity and inventiveness of human interaction.  For the US and México, sharing and promoting bi-national technological advance as a tool to improve the built environment that is equally strategic and tactic in both sides of the border and a gradual conversion to regionalization of the mutual agenda could do better than the international debates on the difficult relationships between every country, especially in border communities like Ciudad Juárez – El Paso. Getting decision taking to ground level, to neighbor level, has the potential to tighten the permanent transversal flux, changing the obsessive attention granted to the machinistic realm into the human realm, and celebrate the urban, and act on life.

[3] US Census Bureau.

[4] In México the normal way to describe density is inhabitants per hectare, this would be 35 inhabitants per hectare.

Cities are about control. Control is about limits that can become physical or physiological. There are some limits that materialize as physical boundaries and others that are in fact a variant frontier but is thought so as something else obscured by function or meaning. Urbanists –or suburbanists- seem today to be a variant of the Blade Runner possessing the sense to designate human from not human, seeing clarity in disorder, forecasting catastrophe or welfare. Our environments are as blurred as the margin of error on retiring or executing a person[3]. In the end, the machines, become an “inhabited boundary” and actually live on it developing emotions, even love. Can our contemporary cities live to the point of becoming something else more that our living quarters? Isn’t already our notion of the city, or more precisely, the lack of the notion of city a symptom speaking of a new world much farther away than the new urbanism, the old urbanism, and the ubiquitous suburbanism? The city as an unanimated thing has acquired breath and pulse almost like having being dormant for centuries awaken by the sirens of nature’s exhaustion. The limit and control that the city itself represents and lately acutely demands is a new state derived from an unconscious attempt of humankind into a “more human than human city”.

The contemporary need for euphemistical limits -and therefore of control- reveals an adolescent society. In an ever evolving polarizing culture, limits and control are in fact much more enjoyable than before, just like a reckless teenager enjoys constant risks. The celebration of living in the edge is the symbol of the times. The enclosure of the individual’s world is frozen in the city as enabled by a behaviour analogical to foreplay in the edge of a precipice. However, unfortunately, as society became individualized, life in the fringes conversed into a simply private activity where the presence of the public/government gets easily ignored and equally undesired. In some way, the urban statement of Alex Marshall explaining the government as the operative system and the private as the software working atop it is analogical to the superb relationship of the individual itself to his peers, “everything gravitates around me”, not to say to society, something that automatically should include the public, therefore the government although this seems contradictory with the described independentist will of the individual. Contemporary times are messy but analogical, the city is the prototypical average individual. As an individual each one is unique and has the potential to mature. The adulthood of the city meaning a new relationship with its control devices –limits- is something yet to come… or to return.

“Growth Boundary… the most effective tool for urbanism in the last half-century…”[4].

The notion of control, and therefore limit, can be attached to the presence of any form or expression of government action. Either in the strategic vision of the city by zoning, ordering, or administering, and in the tactical reality of transportation systems and the whole series and networks created by its deformed composition of lines of every width and function: streets, avenues, alleys, sidewalks, electrical lines, sewage lines, gas lines, telephone lines, property lines. The city is composed of limits for every kind of reality, from the physical to the subjective, from the collective to the individual. However, one real limit, the boundary of the city is constantly neglected.

The variety of definition elements is such that even although not seen -on average- as limit(s) in the end they become part of the system of physical limits that creates the notion of a labyrinth like composition of the built. The establishment of limits respond to a matrix of complex information that easily traduces into an illegible construct, since most of the boundaries societies embrace are simple physical mono-functional facts. The urban realm as a conglomerate of frontiers often contradicts and detonates the perception of a limited everything in the city. To the point that some of the very elements that should be integrationist become the opposite in parks accused of favoring certain socio-economical levels, streets favoring specific areas and forgetting others, railways that put you on “the wrong side of the tracks”, etc.

City states of medieval times employed the surrounding walls that materialized the governmental and political system of the times for defensive purposes. In those days, the city, the gregarious concentration of individuals protected themselves from the outside country side that fostered the unknown in the open promenade of fields for approaching armies. Walls hid inside what today we remember in nostalgic praise: an intense urban life. Today, the struggle for coherence in a world suffocated by over expansion but relying on it as a free market economy policy has created an opposite effect in the sense of over-control. The walls of the past gasified and were inhaled by society. It is as today we have to defend ourselves from the enemy within. The individual is forced to establish mental boundaries for enclosure and containment of being against the globalized sense favoring affordable, possible, reachable consumption. Or, more accurately, having the frontier dream with the potential to tranquilize our main media of future apocalypse derived from the –so exposed- swollen wound that is today our urban realm.

The limit, the wall, contained space for transportation of military goods along its width and also enabled interconnection between the dilatations in the shape of defensive towers allowing for wider purposes or living quarters. These traditional “public limits” have been substituted in modern society by transportation systems making use of the liberated space, or, as a reminder of past societies to sweeten life and add to economic activities, as is the case of numerous European cities. The walled limit is today often parodied and offended. The fixity and simplicity of the partition and of the boundary is constantly overrun by economies or simply for the fun of doing so. In the case of urban development, the limit is an utopian concept. Especially in economies that base their industries and economy to the urbanization of “empty” land, to the point that the perception of the surrounding natural terrain of the cities is “vacant” land.

corona-limit-2.jpg

The Great Wall of China is attacked by an army of Mexican “Charros” in a Corona beer commercial advertisement[5].

The New Limit.

Today’s urban conditions reside ahead of the affordable technology that in a near or distant future would consolidate the new living endeavour of society. In reality, as a social construct, the city shouldn’t be thought as something relying on technology[6]. With the affordable urban tools of today, there are alternative ways for inhabitation waiting to be explored, and one of them is the notion of limit –including its content of control-. The inhabitation of an inland boundary detached from the abstract sense of the invisible lines of maps and drawings has still to exorcise the negative notion of imposed control that brinks and margins mean. The renewed experience of the limit, of the fringe, has the potential to redefine the individuality of surrounding and neighboring entities that today represent the main contradictory dualities of our mainstream thought: nature and urban, virgin and marred, empty and full, ground and figure, social and elitist.

“The edge of the city is a philosophical region, where city and natural landscape overlap, existing without choice or expectation”[7].

A new notion of limit, and therefore control, in the gregarious realms of urban environment could provide new ways to understand, or to finally taxonomize the city itself. If one limit is enhanced, promoted, and grown as the ultimate “b-ordering” fact, the limits within will loosen, and blur into more uniformly varied and enriched towns. The return to the wall, or to the figured wall is imminent as the concept of sudden collapse is more appropriate than the expected normal wear and tear we relatively enjoyed in the past centuries.

Widening the notion of a limit is physically something we are accustomed to –streets- but not in a sense in which the element can become and provide within it, on it, an interstitial potential to experiment the space by activity or by meaning. As our world is divided in the private and public realm, all through history of civilization the fixed notion of the limit belongs to a governmental therefore public responsibility. The ownership of these limits is then, public. However, the actual non-existence of the “Edge of the City” is a fact in most of the urban areas in our world. Either as a physical tangible thing or a geographical abstract line dividing incorporated land from the rural and natural environments the limit finds few references and remains still under powered to trigger a worldwide initiative for the application of such a strategic and complex tool.

Informing the New Limit(s).

The new limit could inform the definition not only from the society they would hold, but also in the natural physical space they would spare. In the untouched realm, the limits between the natural ecosystems are difficult to define. Naturally, the definitions of ecosystems behave as the tide of the sea. Coming in and out, these are composed of a large range and layers of information that have an inconsistent non-linear hierarchy. Sometimes a factor is more important than the other. Either for elevation, appearance of some vegetation species designed as markers, exposure to winds and solar rays. The limit is then, in nature, a widened space diluting the notion of boundary into another type of space, an alternative kind of interstitial almost seasonal space. The limit is not fixed.

Steven Holl proposed in his fringe projects physical boundaries composed of a rhythm of buildings containing multiple diverse programs in opposition to the average mono-functional building found today in the peripheries. The perception of the limit as a place to stay, much more than a dividing contrast but a position by itself from which to experience in between both poles. The dynamic of this limit is then a variety of activities. The unfixed character is gregariously human and formally its materialized in writhing volumes.

The future utopian edge of the city of Phoenix as envisioned by Steven Holl[8].

Conversely, Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary is one of the few notable and –most importantly- operative examples available today. It is an example of a territorial boundary and not a physical like Holl’s proposal. However, the UGB contains a multiple physical character as its conformed by stretches of rivers, streets, and invisible lines. The result of such a composition is an amorphic shape appearing to be a still frame of the “contortionist city”. Limits have changed from the absurd continuity of the Great Wall of China to an heterogeneous collage. Conceptually, the overlaying of the basic fixed compositions of the past, the programmatic diversity of the fringe, and the complex geometry of the city results in a fringe territory where opportunity develops as a cleared field.

These examples of dilated/expanded/diverse/composed limits of different nature shall include the practice of sharing and sparing: a difficult task –and possibly contradictory- for our human nature and our approach the strict concept of control or limit. But, as a whole, these can reveal a new notion of boundary and a hopeful new notion of order.

New boundaries will establish new relationships. If processed and explored, a newborn limit typology could define new areas and have the potential to make places. Places that hadn’t existed before. The new limit will challenge the remaining structural conventions: shifting the public –governmental- notion of the limit to a private or shared status and responsibility: redefining ownership. Serving the whole, the urban and the natural, by adapting the fixity of the mono-functional built realm and the diverse, life-cycle, seasonal ecologies of nature, society, and cities. Embracing the limit as the analogical field where opposites touch. An interstitial space that as the word itself stands in action. Enhancing the limit as a layered order. Converting the limit into a dynamic, multipurpose, space where leisure and function flower as the maintained garden of citizenship. The Sex of the City gestates a new control as the soul of city.

[1] Except for the media that lately has shifted to voyeurism when in between the pages of a fashion magazine you are able to find a photographic article of the lively slums of a country far away.
[2] Marshall, Alex. “How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and The Roads not Taken”. University of Texas Press. Austin, TX. 2000.
[3] Citing the store behind “Blade Runner” written by Philip K. Dick and immortalized in the cult film by Ridley Scott.
[4] Marshall, Alex. Ibidem.
[5] Still frame taken from Youtube.
[6] Specially if the “great” cities of the XXI Century are located in the “under developed” world.
[7] Holl, Steven. “Edge of the City”. Pamphlet Architecture 13. Princetown Architectural Press. New York. 1991.
[8] Image taken from: Holl, Steven. “Edge of the City”. Pamphlet Architecture 13. Princetown Architectural Press. New York. 1991.

“Allá todo es demasiado perfecto” (Over there everything is too perfect).
Lucy describing New York City to Mary in “Mary Full of Grace”.

Sin City, Dark City, Gothic City, versus the bucolic, pastoral, rustic shire and the orderly fixity and timelessness of the rural: a tireless place to explore humanness. In opposition, the perfection of the urban, its straight lines its merciless reflection, its even surfaces are far too suspicious. The improvisation and coarse texture supporting contrast and light of the rural should be embraced or at the least remembered. The relationship between the individual/collective is indissoluble from the environments that endorse character, culture, and moral values. And these are, in their gregarious nature, urban. But the basic abilities to socialize are in their personal nature, rural. As solidarity and virtue come from the rural, a concept each time more confused and blurred with: Family.

The pagan city and the sanctified rural realms are represented in the moral values that migrant populations from farmland landscapes carry with themselves into the hopelessness of the urban. A moral taken to be lost or disrespected either by choice or simply forced by the new environment. In the case of “Mary Full of Grace” (María llena eres de gracia) the employment of a sentence extracted from a widespread and recognized catholic oration is symbolically –and blasphemously for its religious doctrine- used in a series of evocative passages during the adventure taken by Mary’s choice to deliver a processed illegal product to another country and another corrupt urban realm. Pregnant Mary is taken to the city in the back of a motorcycle, just as if riding on top of a donkey to Bethlehem, but accompanied by an ephemeral Joseph, an urban scoundrel dedicated to collect and pervert souls from the virginal fields. Mary abandons a tight feminine family nucleus: the mother, the grandmother, and single mother sister. There is no reference of men in the family that should explain the generations inhabiting the compact dwelling. Where are these men? Mary swallows cocaine pellets as if having the ritual communion of Jesus Christ body. A priest like hand handles her one of the dozens of white capsules. Mary is naïve as she should be. After all she hasn’t seen much in her small town lost in the mountainous surroundings of Bogotá. However, Mary finds a just man, a solidary woman, and a cultural enclave where she can be, maintain culture, pay for a gynecologist in her own language, and thrive.

In the recently inaugurated City of God the boundlessness of the rural realm is present in the not yet divided still shared backyards that become the hide and kill field for the juvenile offenders corrupted by segregation, by separation from the vitality of the main economic area and activity of the city. The City of God is neglected from its origin detached and behind the mountains. Children take refuge in the nearby swamps to bathe and discuss the future; thieves find cover in the shady tree canopy. The glow of the City of God is not visible from the central city, no one cares. The opposite is the norm: the gathering of thousands of lights reveal at night a distant realm. The passage from the city to the contradictorily ordered but slummy ghetto is flavored by darkness. There can’t be anything sacred from the City of God; except for opportunities that can emerge from the most unlikely coincidences. Traditional family structures are substituted by friendship and complicity in the shape of gangs of all ages. The know-how of the family resides in the basic tie of one to another. The two gang leaders are a couple as the young photographer with his unknown –and useless except for its company for the purposes of the film- following friend.

The feel of the peasant village with an anomalous violin virtuoso is found in the city in a contrasted courtyard where debate can still be fostered by such primitive combustibles as domestic coal. A visible patio from an apartment building menacing the idyllic privacy of its compact fabric violated by a cosmopolitan woman armed with binoculars and a cell phone. From the cold, superb, westernized newness of the fame-seeker professor’s apartment; to the warmth of the traditional –oriental- dwelling inhabited by cats and books. The story of father and son confronting as basic elementary unity the prime environment for the definition of the new and alternative social structures.

The city, the place for the constant demolition of values. The city, however, the place where there is always the opportunity for relief, for safety. The violent and dramatic city offers permanent sanctuary and choices. Alternatives offered to every variant of built physical realms and to every willing abstract soul. The city, the place for the reconstruction and renovation of moral: the apparent but false redefinition of good and bad.

A concept that might be difficult to grasp: is the city as a moving, living, and dynamic thing. A fact that for beautifying purposes is very well developed either in the film or written narratives. But that in its mathematical form, the economical expression is something that, if understood and found, becomes very valuable data in the hands of those who can employ it for the direction of the invisible campaign(s) of the city: its eternal transformation. In that sense, the contemporary citizen is much more into the melodrama of the city and not into the rational equation that structures the commercialized soap opera of our environments. The urbanite is unaware of alternatives as they merge into the only concept of capsule to capsule, from indoor to indoor, home/work/leisure with scales in the “room with a view”[3] the everyday ubiquitous automobile. The contemporary city becomes a monotonous channel (old TV concept substituted by “network”, or any initials) waiting (knowing) to be discarded by the private car represented in the remote control of our televisions or liquid metal flat screens. From the compact/economy of the knob to a full sized coarse militarized SUV in an arm-like tight plastic brick. From interaction and collective decision taking to the “I have the power, the remote control is in my hands” or “we need more televisions”. A city where not any of its stages –channels- succeeds to complete any story by itself. A composition of fragments that was only appealing to the 80’s “Generation X” inaugurating channel hopping from the bed, but that for contemporary society is the symbol of boredom, of cheap food, and of future diabetes. Choice by the means of a switch. On / off. No in between, no interstice, no progression, and no romance. If the alienated observer is the still-to-be-defined version of citizenship, and the electric screen is the moving/transporting capsule, What about the couch? What about the bed? Those pieces of furniture that represent the architecture of the city.

The leisure/comfort architecture of the viewing place has detached today from the mono-functional image of specific humble tasks so dignified by the first reclinable leathered strategically-located-in-the-room couch of our grandparents (with generous arm rests and legs lifted and supported in the single motion of reclining backwards). Not to mention the substitution of the much older wooden equally strategically-located-in-the-porch rocking chair. “Functional only” chairs have become “classics” belonging to modern times or antiques, not these times. The ordinary resting place of today is a deformed mass of pillows, sheets, fabrics, colors, patterns, and objects often lost in the sea of folds and layers representational of comfort (the common place for losing the remote control in the depth of the 3 person couch or futon). The resting place often acts as bed, table, and chair, dependent of its polyvalent but vague definition. People apparently “suddenly” fall asleep in front of the mirror, sorry, television of the shadowed intimacy of space. Long gone are beds resembling, in their ceremonial and elevated platforms and in their framed, veiled, and accentuated three dimensional space, the only function of plain relief and fertile loving.

Architects/designers of today’s “urban” architecture explain projects as reacting, revealing, and mostly signaling, numerous hidden forces of their contexts / realms in their proposals that relate to –and materialize- a messy composition or overlaying of pillows and textiles that end up –most of times- being a stranger in town. Formally, the two trends of design derive from the analogy of comfort symbols, either from the volumetric/shape image of polyvalent function or from the patterned skins that cover these and that today sustain the edgiest “hip” architectures. Anyway, the one to blame, the easy exit –justification to some- is the complexity of the city[4]. Or could we suspect is the immature/impressionable design approach to the basic unit of the city which could be, as the mono-functional chairs, tables, and beds, instead of an anthropomorphic/mono-functional/humanlike composition of buildings, an itinerant informal fair fascinated with deformity. The strategic architectural pieces of contemporary city seem to recall the fantastic times of hobbits, dwarves, and elfs, while the humans remain as simple mortals[5].
One film example of the trendy textile iconography in cinema: “The Science of Sleep” (2006) by Michael Gondry. And, the latest example of architectural textile iconography (both outdoors and indoors. But in this case the image is an indoor small auditorium), The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum (2007) by Neutelings Riedijk Architects.

[1] Marshall, Alex. “How Cities Work”. University of Texas Press. USA. 2000.
[2] In the case of “Three Days of the Condor” the textile expression is taken to extremes in Robert Redford’s light blue denim jeans that appear to be the only ones in the crowded and dense New York City settings, for the sake of the box office advantage of Redford’s sex appeal.
[3] As coined in “Mobility: A Room with a View”. First International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam. NAI Publishers. 2003.
[4] All of those “signature” buildings that I do not know if the “signature” thing comes from the name of the firm or architect, or from the messy written riddle we often use to officialize/legitimize documents in our society.
[5] Just to keep a referent to recent cinematographical events in the saga of “The Lord of the Rings” by Peter Jackson (Director) and J.R.R. Tolkien (writer).