Aes­thet­ics of Resistance

Fatal Attractions

In April of 1970, at 80 Woost­er Street in Man­hat­tan, a man began walk­ing on the side of a build­ing, per­fect­ly erect and per­fect­ly per­pen­dic­u­lar to its sur­face [ 1 ]. His appar­ent­ly non­cha­lant walk ren­dered near­ly nat­ur­al a move­ment that in actu­al­i­ty rad­i­cal­ly altered his body’s rela­tion­ship with grav­i­ty. The nat­u­ral­ness of a move­ment oth­er­wise tak­en for grant­ed under nor­mal con­di­tions was exalt­ed in the para­dox­i­cal sit­u­a­tion enact­ed before the eyes of a group of spec­ta­tors involved in spite of them­selves in a desta­bi­liz­ing performance.

In con­ceiv­ing the per­for­mance of Man Walk­ing Down the Side of a Build­ing (1970), Trisha Brown aimed to inter­pret a nat­ur­al force like grav­i­ty, usu­al­ly tak­en for grant­ed in its man­i­fes­ta­tions, via a medi­at­ic chal­lenge through the human body and its move­ment. How­ev­er, it was not a cus­tom­ary chal­lenge like climb­ing, but a move­ment that simul­ta­ne­ous­ly indulged and coun­tered the inescapable ver­ti­cal direc­tion of a body that would nor­mal­ly have been in free fall under those con­di­tions. The dis­sim­u­la­tion of the effort of resis­tance by Brown’s dancer became desta­bi­liz­ing from the observers’ equal­ly unnat­ur­al per­spec­tive with respect to the action tak­ing place over their heads. The con­ven­tion­al and func­tion­al ori­en­ta­tion of their bod­ies in the world was cast into doubt, open­ing up unusu­al forms of expe­ri­ence that required rethink­ing cer­tain dynam­ics of move­ment, like those typ­i­cal of a ges­ture as nat­ur­al as that of walk­ing. The per­cep­tion of the performer’s mus­cu­lar effort in rela­tion to grav­i­ty, fear-induced ten­sion, the poten­tial of phys­i­cal strength and the force of resis­tance enact­ed through that sit­u­a­tion ampli­fied the spec­ta­tors’ under­stand­ing of the mechan­ics – and there­fore the lim­i­ta­tions – of their own bodies.

Thir­ty years after the Woost­er Street per­for­mance, British artist Antony Gorm­ley appeared to have wished to pay her homage with the sculp­ture series Edge II (2000), in which his ​‘Gorm­lems’ — as W.J. T. Mitchell liked to call them — look down upon us from atop the walls of Oslo’s Astrup Fearn­ley Muse­um [ 2 ] and Eton College’s Com­mon Lane House. This time deprived of move­ment, the human fig­ure behaves like an ​‘archi­tec­tur­al body’ and, chal­leng­ing the laws of grav­i­ty, appears to invite observers to look at the world from a dif­fer­ent perspective.

Resis­tance to grav­i­ty has shaped our bod­ies just as we, as a func­tion of its action, have giv­en shape to the built environment. 

The forms of archi­tec­ture are by their very nature the result of an act of resis­tance – a resis­tance dis­sim­u­lat­ed at one time and exalt­ed at another. 

“Resis­tance, ten­sion and excite­ment” are at the ori­gin of artis­tic pro­duc­tion, along with the ​“com­po­sure that cor­re­sponds to design and com­po­si­tion in the object,” as Dewey point­ed out.^[1] But art and archi­tec­ture share these assumptions.

Unlike the forms we find in nature, which are the result of a use­ful adap­ta­tion to their very sur­vival [ 3 ], those of archi­tec­ture have nev­er been lim­it­ed to the mere sur­vival of their inhab­i­tants. This is why con­struc­tions built by peo­ple embrace such cat­e­gories as arbi­trari­ness, dec­o­ra­tion, and for­mal exu­ber­ance [ 4 ]. Resis­tance in this case often becomes a per­for­mance, a chal­lenge against grav­i­ty and more. As takes place in Brown’s per­for­mance and in Gormley’s stat­ues, the forms of archi­tects are con­ceived to elic­it just as many actions and reac­tions from an oth­er­wise ​“dis­tract­ed” soci­ety at large, as Wal­ter Ben­jamin was already point­ing out at the start of the last cen­tu­ry^[2]. It is a soci­ety that archi­tec­ture address­es by pro­vid­ing not only shel­ter — spaces for liv­ing— but also a set of stim­uli that ques­tion the very con­cept of ​‘being in the world’. To these stim­uli — visu­al, tac­tile, and synaes­thet­ic — soci­ety in turn can respond with forms of resis­tance that are for the most part emo­tion­al rather than ratio­nal in nature. But when accept­ed and trans­formed into expe­ri­ences, these resis­tances become oppor­tu­ni­ties for eman­ci­pa­tion, because ​“strug­gle and con­flict may be them­selves enjoyed, although they are painful, when they are expe­ri­enced as means of devel­op­ing an expe­ri­ence.”^[3]

The Unit­ed States artist Matthew Bar­ney, bring­ing with him from his past as an ath­lete the idea that the mus­cle tis­sue of the human body is strength­ened when it encoun­ters resis­tance, devel­oped the notion of ​‘resis­tance as a cat­a­lyst for growth’, see­ing in it a nec­es­sary pre­req­ui­site for cre­ativ­i­ty. This led to the per­for­mance series Draw­ing Restraint 1–18 (from 1987), which pro­duced mate­ri­als in the form of draw­ings, pho­tographs, videos, and sculp­tures. Using inclined plat­forms, wires, and tram­po­lines, Bar­ney jumped towards the walls of a room, then towards the ceil­ing, and then remained sus­pend­ed in the void, thus gen­er­at­ing designs on the sur­faces that bore wit­ness to the effort of each indi­vid­ual ges­ture. In Draw­ing Restraint 6 (1989÷2004), Bar­ney, jump­ing for an entire day on a mini-tram­po­line set at a 15° angle and leav­ing a sin­gle mark on the ceil­ing with each leap [ 5 ], man­aged to pro­duce a draw­ing that allud­ed to a self-por­trait, but also to some­thing more. As Neville Wake­field point­ed out: ​“Reach­ing against the resis­tance of grav­i­ty and restraint, each mark rep­re­sent­ed the phys­i­cal effort of its mak­ing along with the cir­cles of exer­tion, exhaus­tion, and recov­ery that char­ac­ter­ize our very exis­tence as sen­sate beings.”^[4]

The image of Matthew Bar­ney strug­gling against grav­i­ty in his ver­ti­cal jumps and trac­ing vari­able tra­jec­to­ries in the air can seem­ing­ly be glimpsed in the non-lin­ear geom­e­try of Arcelor­Mit­tal Orbit (2010−2012), the 115-metre tow­er designed by Anish Kapoor for Queen Eliz­a­beth Olympic Park in Lon­don [ 6 ]. Here, the artist’s vision goes beyond the typ­i­cal par­a­digms of tow­ers, resort­ing to the image of a frozen move­ment that becomes dynam­ic again in the eyes of the pub­lic invit­ed to walk around and through the struc­ture. The hyper­trophic struc­ture designed by Cecil Bal­mond to give con­crete form to Kapoor’s artis­tic ges­ture coun­ters grav­i­ta­tion­al forces with­out dis­sim­u­lat­ing the ten­sions that are gen­er­at­ed. The ten­sions are instead enact­ed with the pur­pose of giv­ing life to a dis­man­tled, inten­tion­al­ly unsta­ble image, a shape that looms over vis­i­tors [ 7 ]. Whether defined as a ​“con­tort­ed tan­gle of loops,” as an ​“implod­ed roller­coast­er,” or as a ​“tor­tured scrunch of entrails, stretched and knot­ted into obliv­ion,”^[5] the tow­er con­ceived by Kapoor has become the late-com­ing mon­u­ment to the aes­thet­ics of decon­struc­tion: an aes­thet­ics that has seen the forms of archi­tec­ture pre­pared for the event and ​“placed into the inter­stices between order and dis­or­der, weight and light­ness, sta­bil­i­ty and insta­bil­i­ty, inti­ma­cy and inhos­pi­tal­i­ty, opac­i­ty and trans­paren­cy, sym­me­try and dis­sym­me­try har­mo­ny and dishar­mo­ny, pro­por­tion and dis­pro­por­tion, form and func­tion, super­flu­ous­ness and pur­pose, dec­o­ra­tion and struc­ture.”^[6] But it is pre­cise­ly in the very cir­cum­stances when one is at the mer­cy of oppo­sites – when we con­front the unusu­al, when the forms of art and archi­tec­ture, over­com­ing the reas­sur­ing con­ven­tions, defy our resis­tance by enact­ing ten­sions rather than seek­ing bal­ance – that our ​“sense of imme­di­ate liv­ing” is inten­si­fied.^[7]

These ten­sions were addressed by Raimund Abra­ham when he con­ceived his Sphere Project (1991). A large, met­al sphere had been designed by the Aus­tri­an archi­tect to appear perched in pre­car­i­ous equi­lib­ri­um at the out­er­most edge of a con­crete plat­form at the end of a podi­um to be placed on the Ter­rassen­plateau of Vienna’s Muse­um of Applied Art (Muse­um für ange­wandte Kun­st – MAK) [ 8 ]. The sphere was to have been held in place by a sin­gle steel cable anchored to a wall, whose vari­a­tions in ten­sion due to changes in tem­per­a­ture were to be off­set by spe­cial mech­a­nisms inside the sphere. Seen from below, the sphere would have appeared pre­car­i­ous­ly bal­anced; seen from the podi­um on the ter­race, it was to have giv­en the impres­sion of being about to plunge down­ward. If built, the instal­la­tion would have enact­ed a mechan­i­cal and com­po­si­tion­al game aimed at allud­ing to a con­di­tion of uncer­tain­ty of soci­ety as a whole. Lebbeus Woods wrote about the project: ​“Abraham’s sphere, and the uni­ty it pre­sup­pos­es, is only one ele­ment in an ensem­ble, the fragili­ty and tem­po­rari­ness of its posi­tion cor­re­sponds to the post-Enlight­en­ment con­di­tion of insta­bil­i­ty, uncer­tain­ty and inde­ter­mi­na­cy which mod­ern life presents and which rea­son alone can­not be cod­i­fied as a sta­tus quo, as – or in a fixed and deter­min­is­tic state.”^[8]

While archi­tec­ture is by its very nature the art of equi­lib­ri­um, of sta­bil­i­ty, its forms are not always con­ceived sole­ly to with­stand stress­es or to give reas­sur­ing shape to our hous­ing. In coun­ter­ing grav­i­ty and bound­ing space, archi­tec­ture also casts into plain view those invis­i­ble forces that it coun­ters, mak­ing them vis­i­ble. ​“Archi­tec­ture is the adap­ta­tion of forms to oppos­ing forces” accord­ing to John Ruskin’s pop­u­lar apho­rism. While Raimund Abraham’s sphere may in fact be con­sid­ered the archi­tec­tur­al coun­ter­part of Trisha Brown’s Man Walk­ing Down the Side of a Build­ing per­for­mance piece, on many occa­sions archi­tects have giv­en vis­i­bil­i­ty to these invis­i­ble forces by work­ing pre­cise­ly with those struc­tur­al ele­ments called into ques­tion in the pur­suit of Vit­ru­vian fir­mi­tas. But giv­en that achiev­ing equi­lib­ri­um and pro­por­tion in archi­tec­ture appears to soothe the sens­es and urge only pas­sive con­tem­pla­tion, at times we look to the ​‘cat­e­go­ry of the sub­lime’ rather than to that of the ​‘beau­ti­ful’, in order to dis­play ​“strength and fatigue” (to para­phrase Edmund Burke) through the use – and even the arti­fi­cial use – of dis­crep­an­cies and alter­ations of shapes and of the equi­lib­ria them­selves. There­fore, if the metope and the triglyph at Mantua’s Palaz­zo Tè (1524−1534) slide down­ward [ 9 ] by the effect of those same forces that trans­formed into a ruin the mag­nif­i­cence of the clas­si­cal archi­tec­ture observed by Giulio Romano, cen­turies lat­er, the ​‘rep­re­sen­ta­tion of insta­bil­i­ty’ takes the forms of a pil­lar sus­pend­ed in the air [ 10 ] at Peter Eisenman’s Wexn­er Cen­ter for the Arts (Colum­bus, Ohio, 1989). 

On the occa­sion of the 12^th Venice Bien­nale of Archi­tec­ture, it was to be Antón Gar­cía-Abril to make the forces of resis­tance in action vis­i­ble in the instal­la­tion Bal­anc­ing Act (2010). By insert­ing a sec­ond struc­tur­al line, taut and unsta­ble as well as dis­so­nant with the orig­i­nal one of the Corderie dell’Arsenale, Gar­cía-Abril aimed to under­mine the per­cep­tion of the reas­sur­ing struc­tur­al lines of the six­teenth-cen­tu­ry lon­gi­tu­di­nal space. Two dou­ble T pre­fab­ri­cat­ed con­crete beams placed one on top of the oth­er, one of which bur­dened by a con­crete weight and coun­ter­bal­anced by a large spring placed at the oppo­site end [ 11 ], high­light­ed, in the Biennale’s spaces, the poten­tial aes­thet­ics of the con­cept of weight and resis­tance. Grav­i­ty, which for cen­turies has trans­mit­ted its load to the Arse­nale build­ing and been dis­trib­uted through the large mason­ry columns, found a way to com­bine and react with the new diag­o­nal struc­ture, gen­er­at­ing ​‘an intense fric­tion' that gave rise to a new, unset­tling read­ing of the involved space.

Oppositions

In cities, one may encounter on a dai­ly basis expres­sions of resilience by the pop­u­la­tion, man­i­fest­ed in the form of excep­tions to the urban fabric’s grad­u­al­ly trans­form­ing log­ic. A pop­u­lar exam­ple has become that of Edith Macefield’s small house in Seattle’s Bal­lard neigh­bour­hood. Besieged by a mod­ern com­mer­cial devel­op­ment in 2006, Edith’s lit­tle house, dat­ing to the 1950s, sur­vived even her death in 2008 thanks to the pop­u­lar­i­ty it enjoyed after it inspired Pixar’s pop­u­lar ani­mat­ed film Up (2009). And near the Belém Tow­er in Lis­bon, while cross­ing the pedes­tri­an bridge over Aveni­da da Índia, one may encounter a unique house that seems to have sunk into the pave­ment of a plaza. This is the house of Maria Matilde [ 12 ], which dates to the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Now for­got­ten by Lisbon’s toponymy and hav­ing been left with no street address, the house held out against the demo­li­tions in the mod­ern­iza­tion of the Reste­lo quar­ter, and now stands as mute tes­ti­mo­ny to the his­to­ry of the area and of a lifestyle, with its exte­ri­or plants and hang­ing laun­dry, that peo­ple nowa­days almost wish to con­ceal. Seen in this way, in its iso­la­tion, the house of Maria Matil­da seems ready to become one of Rachel Whiteread’s casts, with which the British artist ​‘pre­serves the every­day’ and ​‘gives author­i­ty to the for­got­ten things’. Even her famous House (1993−1994), the cast of a Lon­don ter­race house that was to be demol­ished [ 13 ], was seen as a ​“mon­u­ment to an unhealthy and claus­tro­pho­bic past” and sub­ject­ed to attacks by the Lon­don Coun­try Coun­cil.^[9]

In fact, in spite of their anonymi­ty, these forms of resilience seem almost intend­ed to affirm, by their sim­ple pres­ence, the noble ide­al — recent­ly evoked by Jean Nou­v­el in the mag­a­zine Domus — of an archi­tec­ture intend­ed as ​“resis­tance against the sys­tem, against phys­i­cal glob­al­i­sa­tion that does not respect the genius loci, the spir­it of places, the con­text, the dif­fer­ences between peo­ple.”^[10]

In Chi­na, the so-called ​‘Nail Hous­es’ have them­selves become sym­bols of resis­tance to and oppo­si­tion against the dev­as­tat­ing urban renew­al poli­cies fol­low­ing the Asian giant’s eco­nom­ic rev­o­lu­tion. In this case as well, these are small, anony­mous hous­es iso­lat­ed in the urban con­text, whose own­ers — con­sid­ered ​‘trou­ble­mak­ers’ — refused to aban­don them so as make way for the new, intru­sive con­struc­tions favoured by the government’s poli­cies. Called dingz­i­hu in Chi­nese, these Nail Hous­es, in addi­tion to being a sym­bol of oppo­si­tion, have at times also become the last trace of an urban mem­o­ry now inevitably lost and entrust­ed only to urban frag­ments or peri­od photographs. 

In 2007, the British archi­tec­ture stu­dio Caru­so St John Archi­tects, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Ger­man artist Thomas Demand, drew inspi­ra­tion from one of these Nail Hous­es to enter a major pub­lic art com­pe­ti­tion for the city of Zürich [ 14 ]. That very year, the bat­tle waged by the own­er of a mod­est, two-storey brick home in Chongqing against the builders who had lit­er­al­ly left a void around it [ 15 ] became an Inter­net sen­sa­tion due to the extra­or­di­nary images that doc­u­ment­ed the events. In spite of Ms. Wu Ping’s well-com­pen­sat­ed sur­ren­der in April of 2007, the cit­i­zens of Chongqing still expressed their admi­ra­tion for her oppo­si­tion to the gov­ern­ment and to the devel­op­ers, bestow­ing upon her the nick­name ​'Stub­born Nail’. This was the inspi­ra­tion for Nagel­haus, the win­ning entry by Caru­so St John Archi­tects and Thomas Demand. The project inter­pret­ed the dif­fi­cult con­tex­tu­al con­di­tions of a for­mer indus­tri­al area under­go­ing dra­mat­ic trans­for­ma­tion near Esch­er Wyss Platz. It con­sist­ed of two mod­est pre­fab­ri­cat­ed tim­ber build­ings placed beneath a road viaduct, con­tain­ing a Chi­nese restau­rant, pub­lic toi­lets, and a kiosk. Their vol­umes, in rela­tion to the dif­fer­ent scale of the road infra­struc­ture loom­ing over it, were to give the impres­sion of hav­ing stood their pre­vi­ous­ly, appear­ing almost as ​‘archae­o­log­i­cal frag­ments.' With their milled tim­ber boards paint­ed inside and out, they aimed to pro­vide only an abstract and approx­i­mate image of the Chi­nese orig­i­nal, almost to demon­strate how their sources were only poor-res­o­lu­tion pho­tographs obtained from the Inter­net. The project would then have become the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a rep­re­sen­ta­tion — an oper­a­tion in full Thomas Demand style — laden with polit­i­cal and social impli­ca­tions. How­ev­er, as fate would have it, this kind of ​‘memo­r­i­al to the resis­tance’ of the sin­gle indi­vid­ual hold­ing out against the pow­ers that be found a dif­fer­ent type of resis­tance in Switzer­land: that of pub­lic opin­ion. Far-right polit­i­cal groups unin­clined to jus­ti­fy the high costs for build­ing the project (evi­dent­ly too con­cep­tu­al to be under­stood by a broad pub­lic) led the cit­i­zens of Zurich to put a stop to the initiative.

At the Com­mon Ground (2012) edi­tion of the Venice Bien­nale of Archi­tec­ture curat­ed by David Chip­per­field [ 16 ], Her­zog & de Meu­ron demon­strat­ed that the mak­ing of a pub­lic work is, in its essence, the result of patient medi­a­tion among con­flict­ing posi­tions. In sub­mit­ting the design of the Hamburg’s Elbphil­har­monie then under­way, the two Swiss archi­tects aimed above all to show how the enor­mous work site in HafenCi­ty had been grad­u­al­ly trans­formed from an emblem of civic pride into ​“a bat­tle­field” between three main play­ers: the client (the City of Ham­burg), the gen­er­al con­trac­tor and the architect/general plan­ner. «Ide­al­ly, the con­struc­tion site of every build­ing project is a plat­form of inter­ac­tion that engages these three main forces; in this case, it relent­less­ly exposed con­flict­ing inter­ests and require­ments. The sto­ry of the Elbphil­har­monie pro­vides, as an exam­ple, an insight into the extremes that mark the real­i­ty of plan­ning and build­ing today.”^[11]

In San­ti­a­go (Chile), the social con­flict that broke out in Octo­ber of 2019 with a series of demon­stra­tions — known as the Estal­li­do social — against cor­rup­tion and the high cost of liv­ing, found in the Gabriela Mis­tral Cul­tur­al Cen­ter (arch. Cris­t­ian Fer­nan­dez + Lat­er­al Arqui­tec­tura) an ide­al loca­tion for high­light­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tions of dis­con­tent [ 17 ]. On street lev­el, the main façade in pierced cop­per of the cul­tur­al cen­tre on Aveni­da Lib­er­ta­dor Bernar­do O’Higgins became, in the win­ter of 2019, a gallery of social protest in the form of a vast reper­toire of street art tech­niques: posters, tag­ging, sten­cils, stick­ers, instal­la­tions, and wheat­paste [ 18 ]. This spon­ta­neous­ly cre­at­ed gallery gave vis­i­bil­i­ty to the mis­treat­ment and abus­es of pow­er per­pe­trat­ed against the demon­stra­tors by the nation­al police and the army. From the streets and pub­lic squares where the demon­stra­tions took place, civ­il soci­ety had cho­sen an archi­tec­ture con­ceived as a social con­denser to gath­er the rep­re­sen­ta­tions of its own resis­tance. Like the tables dis­played by Her­zog & de Meu­ron at the Venice Bien­nale, which col­lect­ed and exhib­it­ed the news­pa­per arti­cles and images that had accom­pa­nied the events at their work site as they unfold­ed, in San­ti­a­go the façades of the Gabriela Mis­tral Cul­tur­al Cen­ter had been cho­sen to draw the atten­tion of pub­lic opin­ion not only to what took place dur­ing those weeks, but also to the var­i­ous forms of injus­tice that afflict­ed the ​‘social work site’ of a coun­try in transformation. 

While in San­ti­a­go it was above all the aes­thet­ic and artis­tic qual­i­ties [ 19 ] of these forms of protest, as they put them­selves on dis­play in an open-air exhi­bi­tion gallery, that reached the unin­formed tourist just hap­pen­ing by, in 2014 the ​‘prod­ucts’ of the protests found offi­cial place at a pres­ti­gious exhi­bi­tion venue. 

The ​‘pow­er­ful role of objects in move­ments for social change’ was exam­ined for the first time at the Dis­obe­di­ent Objects^[12] show at London’s Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um. This was a case not of cel­e­brat­ing pop­u­lar artis­tic expres­sions by street artists, but of demon­strat­ing how polit­i­cal activism is also capa­ble of nour­ish­ing design inge­nu­ity and cel­e­brat­ing col­lec­tive cre­ativ­i­ty by pro­duc­ing objects that ​‘defy stan­dard def­i­n­i­tions of art and design’. The forms of resis­tance thus took on the appear­ance of inge­nious objects assem­bled with com­mon mate­ri­als, use­ful for pro­pa­gan­da, for per­son­al defence, but also for vio­lent action: makeshift tear-gas masks; buck­et pam­phlet bombs; book bloc shields; lock-on devices; chang­ing designs for bar­ri­cades and block­ades; exper­i­men­tal activist-bicy­cles; etc. Every exhib­it­ed item was also accom­pa­nied by videos, fly­ers, and pho­tographs show­ing the geo­graph­ic and polit­i­cal con­text and the bat­tles for which they had been cre­at­ed – an iden­ti­ty at times already declared by their own tech­ni­cal and mor­pho­log­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics [ 20 ].

The show at the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um demon­strat­ed pre­cise­ly how the shape of objects is a ​‘trans­mis­si­ble rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the cor­re­spon­dence among acts of resis­tance’, a rep­re­sen­ta­tion capa­ble of keep­ing alive the mem­o­ry of peo­ples’ abil­i­ty to cre­ate but also to destroy and sub­vert. In the end, the frag­ments of the Berlin wall we find today scat­tered through­out the world, from Rich­mond, Vir­ginia to Paris, from Toron­to to Brus­sels, in the Vat­i­can Gar­dens or beside the uni­ver­si­ty library of Cot­tbus, remind us pre­cise­ly of this: ​‘resis­tance is a right’.

Self-Determinations

An expres­sion of the ​‘pos­i­tive free­dom of peo­ple’, self-deter­mi­na­tion is man­i­fest­ed through actions and objects that speak of the aspi­ra­tions of peo­ples and of their strength to trans­form the places they inhab­it. In spite of the com­mon­ly neg­a­tive def­i­n­i­tion com­mon­ly giv­en to the results of the spon­ta­neous trans­for­ma­tions result­ing from these aspi­ra­tions, the the­o­ret­i­cal research that has been done on fave­las, bar­rios, zhopad­pat­tis, kam­pungs, and the world’s periph­eries demon­strates the extreme live­li­ness and inter­est that these phe­nom­e­na show from the social, polit­i­cal, archi­tec­tur­al, and urban per­spec­tive. As anthro­pol­o­gist Vyayan­thi Rao, direc­tor of the Ter­reform Cen­ter for Advanced Urban Research in New York, has observed: ​“the slum appears over and over as a the­o­ret­i­cal­ly pro­duc­tive spa­tial ecol­o­gy.”^[13]

The Argen­tine Car­los Basu­al­do, cura­tor of the sec­tion enti­tled The Struc­ture of Sur­vival at the 50^th Venice Bien­nale (2003), had col­lect­ed the inter­pre­ta­tions pro­vid­ed by more than 25 inter­na­tion­al artists for the cur­rent sit­u­a­tions in fave­las and shan­ty­towns. Defin­ing shan­ty­towns as ​“spaces of resis­tance,” Basu­al­do saw in these places a pro­duc­tion of orig­i­nal forms of social­i­ty, of alter­na­tive economies, and of ​“var­i­ous forms of aes­thet­ic strength.”^[14] In these places of the unpre­dictabil­i­ty and nego­ti­a­tion result­ing from cri­sis sit­u­a­tions, the aes­thet­ic act was seen as the ​“moment of assert­ing the person’s auton­o­my with respect to a pos­si­ble world, while liv­ing through and over­com­ing cri­sis.”^[15]

Only when walk­ing the streets of the infor­mal city can one com­pre­hend how the uncon­trolled devel­op­ment of these places is not just an act of neces­si­ty con­nect­ed to hous­ing, but also con­tains forms of affir­ma­tion pass­ing by way of forms of vis­i­bil­i­ty [ 21 ]. In Bogotá, paint shops have become the new cathe­drals of the infor­mal city. Amid dwellings in con­tin­u­ous trans­for­ma­tion, with their trun­cat­ed con­crete pil­lars and open rebar ready to accom­mo­date new floors, the use of colour and of now cod­ed geo­met­ric motifs in the façades is not only dec­o­ra­tion but recounts a pro­gres­sive eman­ci­pa­tion, both eco­nom­ic and social, of the fam­i­ly unit while it takes place [ 22 ]. Colour restores iden­ti­ty and rec­og­niz­abil­i­ty in an oth­er­wise homolo­gat­ing con­text. Recov­er­ing iden­ti­ty is a neces­si­ty vir­tu­al­ly ignored by the Bogotá admin­is­tra­tion, which con­tin­ues to offer new row hous­ing and blocks of mul­ti-storey hous­es with bal­cony access with­out under­stand­ing the social dynam­ics and the aspi­ra­tions of the pop­u­la­tion that will have to inhab­it them. The fences pro­tect­ing the prop­er­ties, as a form of resis­tance among equals, whether in Bogotá, Cara­cas, or Guatemala City, become forms of iden­ti­ty and aes­thet­ic expres­sions [ 23 ]. It is no coin­ci­dence that the Sloven­ian archi­tect Mar­jet­i­ca Potrč, for her archi­tec­tur­al case stud­ies shown at art gal­leries around the world, takes her inspi­ra­tion from the spon­ta­neous set­tle­ments in South Africa, Colom­bia, Brazil, and many oth­er places, to recount the dif­fi­cult con­di­tions (envi­ron­men­tal, social, eco­nom­ic, polit­i­cal, etc.) that gave shape to their exis­tence, while at the same time high­light­ing the cre­ativ­i­ty of resis­tance in its var­i­ous man­i­fes­ta­tions [ 24 ]. In Mar­jet­i­ca Potrč’s well-trained eyes, as in the eyes of any archi­tect will­ing to pay atten­tion to the sug­ges­tions pro­vid­ed by both con­sol­i­dat­ed and expand­ing cities, the population’s needs and aspi­ra­tions emerge in the urban fab­ric with sim­i­lar man­i­fes­ta­tions, albeit in very dif­fer­ent social con­texts. There are telling con­nec­tions that tie Potrč’s archi­tec­tur­al case stud­ies, inspired by the per­son­al and inge­nious hous­ing solu­tions of South Amer­i­can urban agglom­er­ates, to her designs that look to the Balkan pop­u­la­tions and to their way of oppos­ing the inher­i­tance of Sovi­et-style mod­ernist utopias – and these utopias’ dream of the anony­mous indi­vid­ual in the metrop­o­lis [ 25 ]. Both cas­es show the rejec­tion of anonymi­ty while cel­e­brat­ing impro­vi­sa­tion and adap­ta­tion as cat­e­gories of an organ­ic hous­ing more respon­sive to the chang­ing needs of individuals. 

Yona Fried­man, in his praise for irreg­u­lar struc­tures, high­light­ed not only the for­mal rich­ness that derives from them, but also their ​“excep­tion­al tol­er­ance for impre­ci­sion” that makes them acces­si­ble even to non-pro­fes­sion­al builders, with impor­tant social con­se­quences: ​“Irreg­u­lar struc­tures not only admit impro­vi­sa­tion, they also admit that each per­son can make improve­ments to them.”^[16]

How­ev­er, the reg­u­lar struc­ture of a sky­scraper can also become a man­i­festo of resis­tance and self-deter­mi­na­tion in the absence of ade­quate respons­es by pub­lic insti­tu­tions. The Torre de David (or Cen­tro Financiero Con­fi­nan­zas) in Cara­cas has become an emblem­at­ic case of adap­ta­tion and self-reg­u­la­tion of the com­mu­ni­ty of squat­ters inside a stiff, mod­u­lar struc­ture appar­ent­ly extra­ne­ous to the organ­ic com­plex­i­ty of infor­mal set­tle­ments. The 45-storey sky­scraper in down­town Cara­cas, nev­er fin­ished and left in a state of aban­don­ment in the ear­ly 1990s, has become a het­erotroph, an infor­mal ver­ti­cal set­tle­ment, an ambigu­ous space, fol­low­ing its occu­pa­tion by 200 home­less fam­i­lies in Octo­ber of 2007 [ 26 ]. Over the years, the num­ber of fam­i­lies grew to 750, and the inhab­i­tants, with great resource­ful­ness, began to fill and con­form the spaces based on their needs, and to an extent pro­por­tion­al to their abil­i­ty to obtain mate­ri­als, and there­fore to their own eco­nom­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties. This com­mu­ni­ty, orga­nized into a coop­er­a­tive that self-reg­u­lates the tower’s life and its rela­tions with the out­side in the same man­ner as a con­do­mini­um on Park Avenue in New York, has been the sub­ject of social, anthro­po­log­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, urban, and archi­tec­tur­al stud­ies. Nev­er­the­less, the aes­thet­ic impact of the pho­tographs of the Torre de David by the Dutch pho­tog­ra­ph­er Iwan Baan were essen­tial to mak­ing this real­i­ty known to the world at large, and for bring­ing it into gal­leries and into the most pres­ti­gious inter­na­tion­al art exhi­bi­tions. One of the most well-known pho­tos, the one depict­ing a por­tion of the tower’s exte­ri­or face with the storeys plugged var­i­ous­ly with bricks and cur­tains, does not offer an image that is, in sub­stance, so alien in its for­mal het­ero­gene­ity. Even in the com­plete­ness of the hous­ing in our cities, where room is left for self-deter­mi­na­tion there is no lack of indi­vid­u­al­ism man­i­fest­ed by occu­py­ing and mod­i­fy­ing exte­ri­or spaces as well. Log­gias enclosed in var­i­ous ways, the build­ing of glassed-in veran­das and win­ter gar­dens, win­dow cov­er­ings, satel­lite dish­es and air con­di­tion­ers: every­thing con­tributes towards recount­ing an inad­e­qua­cy of the archi­tec­tur­al response to people’s need to help give shape to their own homes [ 27 ]. An act of resis­tance, then, is the non-con­formism shown by archi­tects like Yona Fried­man (1923−2020), Lucien Kroll (1927−2022), and Ralph Ersk­ine (1914−2015), with their design phi­los­o­phy based upon par­tic­i­pa­to­ry cri­te­ria. Ini­tia­tives like Lima’s exper­i­men­tal hous­ing project (PREVI) in the 1960s – with its metabolist approach and its nat­ur­al inher­i­tance rep­re­sent­ed in the more recent Incre­men­tal Hous­ing Projects by the Ele­men­tal Chile stu­dio led by Ale­jan­dro Arave­na – were equal­ly non-conformist.

The forms of self-deter­mi­na­tion that give shape to the large urban agglom­er­a­tions are to be con­sid­ered as expres­sions of resis­tance by the indi­vid­ual who wish­es to be the causal agent in his or her own life and in the cre­ation of his or her own liv­ing envi­ron­ment. ​“The inhab­i­tant still pos­sess­es a trea­sure lost by archi­tects: a cul­ture of scale and of domes­tic com­plex­i­ty, a bon­homie that makes land­scapes live­able,”^[17] said Lucien Kroll. ​“In essence, you should nev­er design a façade ​‘like an archi­tect.’ One must obsti­nate­ly seek the ​‘ges­ture of the inhab­i­tant’ and safe­guard his or her com­plex­i­ty.”^[18]