ONE OBSTRUCTION
One Obstruction is an ongoing collaborative project, who’s basic aim is to explore alternatives to the tools most frequently employed to represent, display and to disseminate architecture. We have tried to achieve this through a number of vastly different audio-visual depictions of one specific house
ONE OBSTRUCTION
One Obstruction es un proyecto colaborativo en curso que propone explorar alternativas a las herramientas tradicionalmente usadas para representar, mostrar y distribuir arquitectura. Por medio de una serie de diferentes aproximaciones audiovisuales que registran una misma casa.
In 1967 poet and film director Jørgen Leth premiered The Perfect Human, a cult film which portrayed the daily rituals of an ordinary couple. Four decades later Lars Von Trier commissioned Leth to remake The Perfect Human once again, however this time in five separate versions taking into account five constraints (obstructions) which von Trier supplied. Each of these obstructions was conceptualised as being an impossible task meant to be eluded by means of original ideas from within the discipline of directing itself. The result of this process is Von Trier’s famous documentary film The Five Obstructions.
Using The Five Obstructions as reference –specifically through an analogy of the challenges imposed to Jørgen Leth– Rodrigo Valenzuela Jerez/(E)StudioFutur@ asked a selected coterie of artists, photographers and documentary makers to depict a house imposing only one obstruction: not to represent architecture as a fetishized fixed reality. Between 2017-2020 the group of artists documented the house during its various stages. From its construction and initial occupation to the dynamics of use by the family under quarantine.
Through the lenses of Bruno Salas, Sebastián Mejía, Diego Grass, Macarena Alvarez and Luis Ignacio Correa, BC House can be viewed as a vehicle through which to experiment with the observation of use, program, furniture, the ordinary, people, change, movement, performance, as well as everything else that is inexorably related to architecture. At the same time One Obstruction aims to begin an open conversation around the notion of how best to represent the full scope of architecture.
En 1967 el poeta y director de cine Jørgen Leth estrenó The Perfect Human, una película de culto que retrata los rituales diarios de una pareja ordinaria. Cuatro décadas más tarde el también cineasta Lars Von Trier encarga a Leth a re-filmar The Perfect Human cinco veces cada vez con una obstrucción distinta, cada obstrucción pensada como una tarea imposible que debía ser eludida a través de nuevas perspectivas desde la propia disciplina. El resultado de este proceso es el famoso documental de Lars Von Trier, The Five Obstructions.
Utilizando The Five Obstructions como referencia – específicamente haciendo una analogía del reto impuesto a Jørgen Leth– Rodrigo Valenzuela Jerez/(E)StudioFutur@ encarga a un grupo de artistas audiovisuales, retratar una casa considerando una sola obstrucción: no fetichizar la arquitectura como una realidad fija o idealizada. Entre 2017 y 2020 el grupo documentó la casa en sus diferentes etapas: construcción, mudanza y posterior uso durante las cuarentenas
A través de las miradas de Bruno Salas, Sebastian Mejía, Diego Grass, Macarena Alvarez y Luis Ignacio Correa, la casa BC –diseñada por el arquitecto Rodrigo Valenzuela Jerez– se convierte en un campo de experimentación y observación de los usos, programas, mobiliarios, las personas, los objetos, el paso del tiempo, el cambio y todo aquello que está inexorablemente relacionado con la arquitectura. Al mismo tiempo, One-Obstruction propone una conversación disciplinar abierta sobre cómo representar la arquitectura incorporando nuevas capas de complejidad.
The House
BC house was built in 2017 in Santiago, Chile. It can roughly be described as a metal shed with a series of capsule-like modules situated inside. Indeterminate spaces flow between the capsules. There is no predetermined space for the family’s living room, nor the master bedroom nor the domestic staff bedroom. In the same vein, there are also no clearly delineated spaces meant to serve specifically as either the office nor as the children’s playroom. On the contrary, the users of this space are compelled to act as ‘executors or even as performers’ who thus ‘interpret’ the different spaces and rearrange them according to their varying specific needs. In essence, the idea is that the inhabitants become active participants within the very fabric of the architecture itself. Liberated from rigidly humdrum domestic programs in favour of a flowing ever evolving form of interactive ambiguity.
BC house`s specific characteristics turn it into a fertile domain of research to reimagine new forms of domestic architecture’s representation.