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VITO ACCONCI
A large part of Vito Acconci’s work is based on space occupation. In the
70’s he started to explore the exhibition space, creating installations with
slides that dealt with the spectator presence, as in Where are We Now (1976).
In the 80’s, his research changed to domestic and public spaces, of social
interaction.
He created new habitation and urban construction models from the mobile home
mythology _ in works as House of Cars (1983) and Mobile Linear City (1991). His
projects of parks, playgrounds and anti-monuments, as Park in the Water (1998),
evidence a political vision of public art and indicate a will to transform public
space into a place that functions as a forum. So his projects for exhibition rooms,
bookstores and halls, as the ones produced at Kassel’s Documenta (1997) and
in Haia, Holland (1998).
The project of Acconci for Largo do Glicério consists essentially in a
reappropriation of an abandoned urban space. But this is not simply an empty territory:
disrupted by the implantation of large road structures and institutional buildings,
it is already partially occupied by a homeless population. The proposal consists,
therefore, in creating an urban-architectural device for this informal occupation.
Centered, at principle, in the empty skeleton of a building, made to host a municipal
transit control unit.
The project presents three basic conceptual sources: it looks for, in first
place, to avoid the conventional splitting between architecture (the build) and
urban space. The extension of "the village" beyond the built structure
and the incorporation of urban equipment (the lampposts), endowed with new structural
function, suppress the distinction between architecture and city. It contests
the principle of the façade. The architectural structure resultant, "the
village", seems to expands in all directions on the urban space, appropriating
the neighboring elements. A generalized indistinction is created between what
is reserved to particular use and what is properly urban equipment, of public
use. The full accessibility and transparency of the suspended structures, without
any sealing, only accent this indifferentiation.
In second place, the project also suppresses, in the architectural structures,
the elements that conventionally constitute the one-family habitation. Instead
of masking the users condition, people living in the streets, creating a privacy
of that they don’t have, Acconci evidences their public exposition. The bathrooms
not only have semitransparent fiber walls but also project themselves outside
the building, as if turning public the functions occulted in conventional housings.
Intentionally just juxtaposed to the built structure, keeping its evident inadequation,
the equipment sends to the provisory occupation by individuals in transit
This transparency opposes to the compartmentalization and confinement that dominate
the domestic space, reorienting movement and vision. A structural reconfiguration
that modifies the experience and the perception of the constructed space, as Acconci
already proposed in the Bad Dream House (1984) series. A rotation of the architectural
convention, allowing that the internal elements of the construction expand outside,
what is announced in Houses Up the Wall (1985).
It is not only the suppression of the façade, the basis of the distinction
between public and private, as already we could see in Dan Graham’s projects.
Here the program of "the village" tries to subvert these principles.
Bathrooms, devices for washing clothes, places of leisure and meal, are equally
collective and opened. The whole area changes into a meeting place: the public
space, for Acconci, is a site that must operate as a forum.
The development of intrusions in public space, in order to reconstitute them
as places, base of Acconci’s strategy for art in the urban space, finds in
the informal occupation of the homeless an ideal field. A bigger urban density
can be promoted from the existing occupation, instead of a large self-contained
structure, as the ones that characterize the current space restructuring process
in megacities. He proposes configurations that operate precisely the street experience
of this homeless population. In which way, given the dimensions of the homeless
population problem, can architecture find devices that _ in the context of its
displacement and mobility _ give shelter, hygiene and socialization conditions
to it?
These interstitial spaces _ islands formed by expressways, blind façades
and areas excluded by urban restructuring _ exist at the margins of the hierarchy
of uses established by social domination. They make possible projects that oppose
to the urban space structuring, through dynamic and moving configurations and
uses. It is not by chance that the self-sufficiency requirement is another source
of the project. The proposal to collect rainwater to feed the village is not related
to the any intended precariousness. The intention is to convert into architectural
form and program the conditions of life in the streets, questioning at the same
time the traditional habitation canons. To create a decidedly urban space of social
interchanges.
The zone is a territory refractory to closed architectural forms. The intervention
of Acconci does not search to impose a rigid built structure to the area, as in
general do urban redevelopment projects promoted by real estate interests, necessarily
exclusive because they completely suppress the existing modes of occupation and
use of the ground. It tries, in contrast, to integrate constructive procedures
and precarious and transitive existential practices.
A proposal that corresponds to the inform and unstable character of these situations.
To engender mutant configurations, that keep a programmatical indetermination,
allowing to alterations and changes. Fields that accommodate processes, without
consolidating in definitive forms. A strategy based on the spatial fragmentation
and flexibility of the region, in a weak and continuous reconfiguration of its
elements, proper to the terrain vague.
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