Suchergebnisse

In his work State of Exception, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has recently studied the consequences of the exception becoming the rule. He explains a situation where the law requires the partial exclusion of the legal order so as to preserve its legitimate character. It forms the basis of the so-called "spaces in suspension", where the rule is the exception in the form of the suspension of the legal order, the anomie. In those spaces the act of government is located in a threshold area of ambiguity between general and particular spheres. The transference of Agamben's concept into architecture is possible. There are physical scenarios where the norm is not a security shield since it is accomplished and questioned at the same time. What type of architecture is responding to those spaces in suspension? Is there a critical attitude boosted by those kinds of architectural practices? The paper approaches the topic through a theoretical contextualization of the idea of the state of exception in architecture. This approach is based on the analysis of some case studies, which are considered as disruptive practices since they are proposing new ways of practising architecture. They utilize strategies such as new interpretations of the law (urban prosthesis, occupation of public spaces), the replacement of the authorities' duties (occupation of public buildings and empty plots) or the proposal of new teaching practices. Their analysis let the authors define a specific context in architectural practice, which reflects a new paradigm called "architecture in suspension". ; Peer reviewed

Finland lived, in the 1920s and 1930s, through an ephemeral time of peace and enthusiastic ideas in which it began to forge itself as a modern nation. Its borders still unstable, the country used its landscape as a social unifier and an element of national identity. Finland's incipient welfare state, institutionalised holidays and the democratised consumer goods encouraged a new leisure lifestyle in natural settings. This article studies the recreational housing programme that responded to that demand. The new typology, later called mökki in Finland, was developed during the rise of Nordic functionalism (funkkis in Finnish) – the revision of the romantic villa and the traditional rural housing model, together with the emergence of prefabrication techniques. Among the architectural competitions and drawing albums published on the subject, this article studies the competition run by the Enso-Gutzeit paper company in 1932. Other studies have analysed this competition from constructive, stylistic or historical perspectives. This paper provides a different view by explaining that the competition was a testing ground where one of modern Finnish architecture's distinctive features was forged: tuning into a constructed idea of nature. This fact is revealed through a graphical analysis of the competition's proposals, as well as through the incipient personal traits in the work of the promising, young Finnish architects who participated in the competition. ; publishedVersion ; Peer reviewed