Trabajo

HETEROTOPIA: REFRAMING SPATIAL PRACTICES AND BOUNDARIES, c.1968-2008

Resumen

The thesis examines the disruption of ‘orthotopographic’ thought (in the right place) and the reverberation of ‘heterotopology’ (science of other places), from the 1960s onwards, in order to assess the role of the normative in architecture and urbanism. 

By examining trajectories of architectural knowledge in this specific period, it is suggested that the process by which architecture and urbanism transformed the utopian project into a diversity of ‘other’ — heterotopia — practices emphasised, paradoxically, the relevance of ‘type’ and typological variation. To this end, the research conducted for this dissertation explores the history of the term heterotopia stretching from the emergence of the term in biology and medicine in the late nineteenth century to its (re)appearance in cultural studies in architecture in the late twentieth century. A similar parallel research on the notion of type across the same extended period discusses the various formulations of type within the natural sciences, medicine and the social sciences, and subsequent appropriations in architecture and urbanism.

Two major research strategies are used: (1) a critical cross-reference analysis of processes and products within specific fields of knowledge and (2) case studies from architecture and urbanism in relation to their performance and the cultural and spatial practices that produced them. Special attention is dedicated to the international exhibitions Roma Interrota (Rome, 1978), 10 Immagini per Venezia (Venice, 1978-80) and International Bauausstellung Berlin (Berlin, 1979-87). These are studied to evaluate the renewed interest in ‘type’ and typological variation within ‘specific’ city formations, through the work of Aldo Rossi and John Hejduk, among others.

In particular, the dissertation excises the ordering process of typological resemblance from heterotopia, in favour of an understanding of ‘type’ as process — not as schema formulated a priori but deduced from a series of instances — within typological series. The series of architectural conditions thus unveiled challenges the process of resemblance usually ascribed to the notion of heterotopia, reinstating a latent process of similitude. Heterotopia then is approached not as a question of the ‘other’ (deferring a peripheral position), but as a (re)questioning of the ‘same’ (reinstating a central position) in the discussion on the city and territory.

In challenging the process of resemblance usually ascribed to the notions of heterotopia and type, the dissertation finally reinstates a latent process of similitude. If resemblance presupposes a primary reference that prescribes and identifies/classifies copies on the basis of the rigour of the mimetic relation to itself, in similitude, the primary reference is dislocated, things and images are side by side, ‘without any of them being able to claim the status of “model” for the rest’, shifting from a hierarchical relation to a typological series of simultaneously exclusive lateral relations.

The critical reassessment of the notion of heterotopia aims towards the rediscovery of this interstitial space within the city and the territory where the laws are suspended; a marginality internal to the system, in which one would be able to restructure physical and conceptual space, the space of the city and territory, political representations of space and urban ideology. .

Autor / es

EMANUEL JOSÉ ROCHA FERREIRA DE SOUSA