Abalos+Sentkiewicz AS+

Come racconta un noto episodio, una certosa italiana ispirò Le Corbusier nel suo Voyage d’Orient (1911) e diede origine al suo primo progetto di un grande palazzo residenziale, quasi pubblico, ma allo stesso tempo moderno e senza tempo, le Immeubles-villas (1922). Questo progetto è stato concepito con l’intenzione giovanile di risolvere i problemi abitativi della città moderna, ma gli ha permesso di costruire la sua prima installazione a Parigi: il padiglione dell’Esprit Noveau del 1924. Questo padiglione replica uno dei moduli abitativi del complesso e conteneva una grande esposizione pubblicitaria della Ville Contemporaine (La città contemporanea) di Le Corbusier con i relativi diorami esposti all’interno. Quando si guarda ad esperienze architettoniche che, nei casi più ambiziosi, sono “fuori dal tempo o lo trascendono”, è possibile osservare come all’interno delle culture e delle motivazioni nasce l’impulso a costruire al di fuori dell’unità esistenziale ed economica della famiglia. In questa indagine collettiva ciò che consideriamo latente e al contempo in continuo stato di eccitazione è proprio questo accumulo di una dimensione atemporale che, forse, rappresenta uno dei sedimenti più attraenti dell’architettura.

Image 1 – How will we live together?
What will our societies lack to overcome the inherited bourgeois models and lifestyle? What will we need to shape our frustrated aspirations of solidarity and autonomy, of spiritual life and pleasures, not necessarily reduced to the coarse palette of consumption advertised urbi et orbi by media? Barthes’ beautiful obsession with a life governed both by communities and by ‘idiorhythm’ – the capacity of each individual to carry his own rhythm within a community, to obey his own idiosyncrasy and not the rigid rules of the Cistercians or the Soviet communes –, is a proposal that should be taken seriously in societies like ours, in which leisure and work are almost the same. Aged societies and with enormous rates of lonely people, staring at their smartphones, with serious problems of anxiety and solitude despite the many invisible networks that surround and manipulate us precisely because we are alone and helpless... Palaces of Insurgency, of a life closer to the desires of communion and solitude, palaces for bodies and spirits in plenitude.

Image 2 – Sneak peek of the project
Communal Atemporal Palaces is an academic research based in two courses entitled How to Live Together? directed by Iñaki Ábalos at Harvard GSD in Boston and at the ETSAM in Madrid. Inspired by the homonymous course by Roland Barthes, as well as on the book of the same title that includes his lectures taught at the Collège de France between 1976 and 1977, these courses were focused on the idea of “Palace”, in the notion of “Timelessness” and in the concept of “Communes”, assembled in a single search that could be enunciated with a Nietzschean-inspired question: What is missing above all in our big cities? What is lacking in our societies?

GSD / Harvard Graduate School of Design
ETSAM / UPM
Spanish Government – Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda
Acción Cultural Española (AC/E

Direttore ricerca: Iñaki Ábalos
Coordinatori: Sofía Blanco Santos, Armida Fernández e José de Andrés Moncayo
Studenti: Open Studio ‘Subjects, Forms e Performances of the Contemporary Hybrid’ (GSD / Harvard University. Fall 2016); Ud. Ábalos / Máster Habilitante ‘How to Live Together? Nuevo Palacio Atemporal’ (ETSAM / UPM. Fall 2019 – Spring 2020)