Resumen de Prácticas documentales: proyecto y contingencia
Maria Dolores Bataller Alberola
Architecture has discussed questions about reality, honesty versus fiction and more recently about contingency, change, open project, or the participation of the inhabitants. All these concerns are collected in documentary art, especially cinema, as theoretical-practical corpus. Around the same point, it is possible to collect a useful corpus for architecture We know that some of the issues treated in the thesis —architecture as an agency, constructive sincerity, architecture and contingency, memory treatment, structural honesty, adaptive housing, flexible housing, work with the inhabitant, architecture without project, organic form, etc.— have already been treated by research, articles, books and PhD, even some of them are somehow exhausted. Therefore, the thesis will not be exhaustive in its description, but will refer to them from the relationship they establish with the central corpus.
If discussions about honesty, fiction or objectivity prevailed in the last century, in this present century the approach is more prosaic and processual: the contamination of the author and the project by others and contingency, establishing pacts with the real in a closer link to the concept of agency; issues lead to project process, customers, ability to include users, architecture opened to change. If 20th-century discourses are systematic, heroic, and radical, contemporary discourses are partial, small, and interventional.
Although the architecture of the past can be understood in terms of process or agency, it has not been explained in this way, except in diaries, autobiographies, footnotes, or anecdotes. This information has mainly disappeared or is inaccessible, because it was not believed to be important at the time.
The thesis is developed in two volumes: the first one propose a theoretical argument among contingency, agency and documentary film as corpus. This part is written chronologically as it was discovered in the course of the investigation. This volumen is the foundation, and its construction sustains the second part.
The second volume displays each of these practices around understanding architecture as an agency, using the documentary corpus as support. If the documentary discusses: the documentary value, the recording of raw real, the use of open screenplay, the use of devices to provoke the invasion of reality, the incorporation of others’ language, the cinematographic edition as a builder of sense; then we can ask the architecture about these same issues.
