09/05/2024
ON TRANSITION: ARCHITECTURE WITHOUT INTERIOR:
Architecture itself has been defined, practiced and valued mainly by the position, performance and the role of architecture elements in separating inside from outside, putting most of its efforts to build a comfortable but fixed interior, usually supported by machines and with high energy consumption.
Interior space, and even architecture, can be solely understood as no more than an autonomous technological bubble built to provide comfort at any price, disconnected from the city and nature, time and climate. It is challenging to respond or adapt to climate change or social needs under such tight frame as new programs emerge and more pressure is put on the built environment. If architecture is built with the same elements, forms, and shapes, and nearly the same materials across the globe, where do the differences lie?
What happens to space and architecture when there is no longer a fundamental need to configure an interior? What happens when the common principles of architecture, such as separating inside from outside, are no longer necessary due to its tropical location? Does it create another idea of space, and with it a different set of values and freedom?
This year is the 60th anniversary of Cedric Price´s Fun Palace. A project that came into the scene as fresh air, impressing and influencing many generations of architects. An unbuilt dream, a partial reality, or just utopia, Fun Palace remains in the history and the present of architecture as an adaptable spatial system under a mechanical and technical roof, an open-ended architecture, a self-ruled social organization, open to the public and organized by their will. Fun Palace created a new type, never built fully but spread over the last six decades and permeating and influencing all kinds of social infrastructures, from Centre Pompidou to contemporary social condensers.
