This Thursday, the 1st of March 2012, a Sevillian art gallery El Fotomata will launch an exhibition by Fernando Alda “The poetry of a skeleton”, under the patronage by Gabriel Campuzano. We are honoured to invite you to the opening of the exhibition and to visit it at later stage, as it will be open until the 27th of April 2012.

Below you can find the presentation letter.

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By Juan Domingo Santos

Something happened during the past years that ended up in destabilizing our relationship with the city and the cityscape. We have lived some time, from which it seemed that we would never wake up. A time when we witnessed an indecent waste and missuse, a merciless abuse of the power, we were made believe that everything is possible in exchange to nothing, time of an outrageous and limitless speculation, which concequences are still far from being measurable. Step by step, unnoticed, a wave of bad taste and corruption invaded us, and it is finishing off our landscapes and the memory of a place. Cancerous urban surroundings and never ending stripping of the identity, horrible housing estates abandoned in the countryside, intustrial zones and shopping centres in the middle of nowhere, the skyscrapers and residential establishments deserted due to overconstruction, crossing the limits of the sustainable and necessary, unexplainable buildings, out of scale and size next to La Vega… We have burried the cityscape of Granada, opening the door to a disproportionately ugly and unimaginetive city. Buy, sell, permute, requalify land or exchange units of urban use have been the usual procedures for constructing our city, without addressing a project that would protect the historical and landscape values of the place. We live in the era of ugliness and bewilderment, the era of urban planning agreements without money, a time of false promisses.

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Marta Pelegrín Rodríguez and Fernando Pérez Blanco present their research and solutions for the urban obsolescence problem. To see the complete document please address the following link. This work is a continuation of a project created at an architectural workshop within the Foro barriadas, nuevos centros urbanos, organized by the Consejería de Vivienda y Ordenación del Territorio de la Junta de Andalucía (Department of Housing and Planning at the Junta de Andalucía) in 2006. At that occasion MEDIOMUNDO Arquitectos collaborated with Kauh Arquitectos (Juan Antonio Sánchez Muñoz and Vincent Morales Garoffolo), Fabio Orizia Pérez and Elías Pérez Lema. In 2011 Catherine Duncalfe and Philip Etchells joined the team.

Spain has a higher percentage of empty housing than any other country in the European Union. A quarter of these are located in Andalusia where they make up between 15 – 18 % of all housing in the region. Several initiatives have attempted to ameliorae the problem to little effect.

From 2006 we incorporated into the debate the need to reflect on and work with these empty spaces. In order to do so we began with the premise that this positive emptiness is not simply a symptom of exclusion, poor quality construction and speculation. We assigned them a potentially positive value as models, typologies and especially as possible sources of architectural revival.

To help solve the housing problem we proposed pinpointing and presenting these empty spaces as a way to potentially fulfil the demands and needs of their surroundings by rethinking their purpose.

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The article by Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, dated Sunday 29th of January 2012, talks about the tendency or need for transformation, extension and reparation of the architecture as an alternative to the new construction. The saturation of the market by the empty properties reinforced by the economical difficulties obliges to reinvent, recycle and take care of what we have. As an example of a mixture of restauration, remodeling and extension, the journalist presents Alameda Theatre in Tarifa (Cadiz, Spain). The project by Julia González and Miguel Bretones is a complex case, executed with a help of an archeologist and urban planner. “It constructs a bridge between the past and the future” without leaving the funcional needs unresolved, which  “constitutes today the most complete architecture”.

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