Resumen de Instituciones evanescentes: consideraciones políticas sobre la arquitectura itinerante
Built architecture is generally conceived to be either ephemeral or permanent. However, there are architectures that are temporal without being ephemeral and permanent without remaining in place. Street markets, circuses and traveling theaters, portable or mobile structures, Archigram’s Ideas Circus and Instant City, Renzo Piano’s IBM Traveling Pavilion, as well as the most recent examples of traveling architectures—including the Chanel Mobile Art by Zaha Hadid and the BMW Guggenheim Lab by Atelier Bow-Wow—define a genealogy that challenges the famous Vitruvian virtues of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (durability, convenience, and beauty).
These structures, easily transportable and removable, open up new possibilities in understanding the relationship between architecture and land. Itinerant architectures and pop-up structures occupy public spaces without the need to follow the rules and regulations that generally apply to permanent constructions, and without the obligation to respond to the local socioeconomic and political conditions, establishing a sort of state of exception under a friendly and festive appearance.
This thesis analyzes the political implications and the possibilities of itinerant architecture—in particular those structures that take part in the configuration of public space—and the role of architects, institutions, and media in the construction of contemporary transnational territories.
Itinerancy is here considered in relation to contemporary circulatory regimes associated to the global movement of people, ideas, goods, capital, and information. Through different case studies, this thesis investigates how architecture responds to, and it is articulated around, these circulatory processes and the new conditions of belonging that are their direct result. It unveils how the institutions under consideration seek for durable and profitable effects through the use of temporary mobile structures: architectures that seem to vanish with his departure and, yet, leave a legacy of permanent transformation in the social, political and built environment.
