Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner, Urban-Think Tank, ETH Zürich, Torre David Lars Müller Publishers, Zürich 2012 (pp. 416; € 45,00)
MVRDV, The Why Factory, The Vertical Village, NAi Publishers, Amsterdam 2012 (pp. 528; € 35,00)
Sometime today inside Torre David, the notorious unfinished skyscraper in Caracas, a family will be taking a trip to the dentist, picking up laundry, perhaps doing some shopping and maybe getting a haircut; and they will be using semi-legal electricity and water supplies. To do all this, they will not need to leave the building, as these functions occupy spaces in the once empty concrete territory of speculative office development.
This continuum of a type of normality, a community life in the density of humanity, is at the centre of an anthropological, sociological analysis of Torre David by Venezuelan practice Urban-Think Tank. Although their installation at the Venice Biennale won them the Golden Lion, there was consternation among the praise when, together with photographer Iwan Baan and critic Justin McGuirk, they recreated a restaurant from Torre David in the Arsenale as a living exhibit. Some accused the team of dabbling in misery tourism by showcasing a slice of vivid charisma found in the most desperate of circumstances. While others were incredulous about the sheer existence of the building and its informal community, in Venezuela the project sparked a wave of political embarrassment and fury.
Despairing at the systematic destruction of the historically low-rise, dense and informal urban fabric of Beijing, Shanghai and Seoul in favour of less effective and arguably less humane skyscrapers, the architects conceived the Vertical Village. Their solution is still a tower, but one in which a community is intended to thrive, and formulated with their idea to bring back "personal autonomy, diversity, flexibility and neighbourhood life to cities in Asia".
On the one hand, we have a skyscraper—Torre David—that has seen the creation of an informal community through economics, poverty and opportunity. On the other, we find architects who are proposing a carefully formulated vertical village as the next great urban solution.
On the one hand, we have a skyscraper that has seen the creation of an informal community, on the other, a vertical village carefully formulated as the next great urban solution
Beatrice Galilee (@_Beatrice)
