(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

The discipline that emerged from the ruins of the failed modern utopia was forced into two distinct positions that negated architecture’s role as a transformative force in society. It could either detach itself from reality in search of “the inherent nature of the (architectural) object” , giving up, as Tafuri put it, “every dream of social function, every utopian residue”. Or, if it chose to engage with the real world, it had to remain uncritically submissive, seizing the opportunities that opened within capitalist societies, but deferring the judgment over their social dysfunction. Almost four decades later, the widespread use of digital tools, and social media, has transformed the way in which architecture is consumed and produced, but the intellectual influence of these two positions still looms large. On the one hand, the detached intricacy of self-absorbed geometries and spectacularized images; on the other, the bureaucratic efficiency of BIM techniques. Both of these dominant attitudes accept—implicitly or explicitly— the impossibility of architecture to transform our complex social and political milieu. In contrast with these positions, this paper argues that architecture is not only embedded in the processes of transformation of societies. But that such processes are not constructed from linear or coherent changes but through discrete and ambiguous moments of disruption. Moments in which reality upsets architecture’s prevailing values by introducing new images and languages that blur the limits between fiction and reality, as well as the opposition between modernity and tradition. In such moments, themes and subject groups that already exist in society but are deemed unworthy of attention within architecture’s mainstream, emerge into visibility turning esthetic practices into political ones, in what Jacques Rancière calls the re-distribution of the sensible.