This article by Pedro Gadanho was published in Homeland: News from Portugal, the project created for the national representative of Portugal to 2014 Venice Biennale.
No doubt, in large measures, the modernity of the 20th century was brought to his room by the media. Sure, toasters and carpets manufactured in series offered a sense of inner modernity favored by more and more accessible technologies. But newspapers, radio and television delivered the sense that it was immersed in the long revolution that is happening outside. Popular media drawing, Martha Rosler "House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home" series (1967-1972) gave this idea a poignant visual expression. If newspapers have many conflicts and tensions of the modern home, lifestyle magazines have completed the picture with seductive visions of how to make yourself and your environment become "modern."
Among this internal dialectic, architecture permeated the news when and where modernity and media allies to a particular direction of progress. In sophisticated modern cities, like early 20th century Vienna and Berlin, the architecture is part of the cultural discussion. With little distinction between the specialized media and daily newspapers, reflections on architecture by Siegfried Krakauer or Adolf Loos entered the domestic sphere with unexpected ease. In Paris, Le Corbusier would soon discover that he paid for being a polemicist, if not as a publicist. In America, building cities equaled building the nation, and, echoing the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, architects were all heroes of production than others. The architects and the buildings were often in the news, if not in the house friendly covers publications such as Time magazine.
In countries where modernity arrived late, too late architecture was a media reception. Although the architects were active in their circles, they reached beyond a discerning clientele only well later stages. In Portugal, it took a revolution for the architecture really hit the news. But when he did, he did it in style. So long fascist regime 40 years endured, modern architecture was referred with other cultural expressions on the outskirts of the cultural and political resistance. After the 1974 revolution and the EU, however, the country rejoiced at the idea of modernization, and so the architecture and its internationally recognized hero entered the field of everyday media. Whether by ideals of production or consumption, architecture returned to a much wider audience by newspapers such as Expresso , during the 1980s, and Público from 190s
The celebrity architects like Álvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura has certainly contributed to the increasing presence of Portuguese architecture in the local press. However, this was just the tip of the iceberg of a development that has enabled newspapers to finally assume their modern mission and play an important role in the dissemination of architecture and discussion. media presence undoubtedly echoes the rapid growth of a profession suddenly fashionable - as, after being stable for nearly a century, the number of registered architects multiplied from 5,000 in 190 to 25,000 in 2014. Yet the appearance of the architecture in newspapers also reiterated its field organization to notions of economic growth, progress and the troubled reconstruction of a national or cosmopolitan identity. The architecture was brought home in multiple expressions capable typical news media: the architect involved in the local controversy buildings in the context of social conflicts, cultural achievements in education issues, the protagonists well known to the new anonymous producers -Driven real estate market.
in 05, shortly after completing a study on the presence of architecture in a major Portuguese newspaper, I conclude that educational and celebratory moment had reached its peak. Although a deferred manner, the architecture's contribution to the envy of modernization had been properly absorbed. With the crisis of 08, however, things would change. Soon, the architecture would make the news because of arrested development, frozen projects and rising unemployment. Maybe it was time for architects to approach the media in innovative ways. As I suggested at the end of my research, architects should now make the news with the ability to extend their reach, and willingness to work with the power of opinion-making.
Today absorb modernity "looks too modern progressive ideals are made to disappear in a certain homogenization reality. As the rise of modern middle class is declared dead, a new dark age seems to dawn. Like other professionals in the new intellectual proletariat, architects should rely on their practical knowledge to put forward ideas on how to maintain or rebuild a ruined society. And, as pointed out by Jürgen Habermas, probably there is still no better place to contribute to the public sphere that in the papers. Especially now, architects should make the news and the public sphere more shapes. To paraphrase Picasso, as pure decision is inherently stupid; all cad monkey can do it. But mediation as a political sense, is what makes man a modern animal.
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